What does CN Auto HR stand for?

China Auto Hub & Reference. The domain was a Chinese automotive job board long before this site existed, and the name was kept because the subject is continuous with it.

Do you sell cars or take referrals from importers?

No. There are no listings, no lead forms and no importer relationships. A reference that sells the thing it describes cannot be believed about it.

Do you rank or review cars?

No. Crash ratings are quoted from the testing bodies with attribution, and sales figures from the bodies that publish them. There are no verdicts and no stars of our own.

How often does it change?

Entity pages are re-checked on a quarterly pass, statistics once a year, and anything else when a fact actually moves. Each change is logged with its source on the change log.

About this site

CN Auto HR — China Auto Hub & Reference — is a reference for Chinese cars, the companies behind them, and the roads they come from.

What it answers

Who actually owns a badge, and since when. What a Chinese name means and how it is said. What a car is called at home, what it costs there, and which countries can buy it. Which Western-badged cars are built in China. What the characters on a licence plate mean.

These are questions the news never stops to answer, because a news story is about what changed this week and these are the facts underneath it. Wikipedia has some of them in prose; nobody had assembled the ownership chains, the Chinese names, the model crosswalks, the per-country availability and the roads layer into one place with the sources attached.

What it will not do

It is not news: there is no article stream and no feed. The change log and the market status pages are the only dated surfaces.

It is not a marketplace. There are no listings, no import or export leads, and no sponsored pages. It does not review cars or rank brands: crash ratings come from the testing bodies and sales figures from the bodies that publish them, both with attribution.

It is not a site about China in general. The word "auto" in the name is the fence — plates, driving, prices, charging and the words on the road signs are in, and everything else is out.

How it is written

Every entity page is hand-checked against a primary source before it ships and carries the day a person checked it. Where a figure could not be confirmed it is blank, with a note saying what was found, rather than rounded off a rumour. The methodology page sets out the rules in full, and the sources page lists every publisher the site rests on.

The name and the plate

The domain carried a Chinese automotive job board in the 2000s, and the letters were kept. The design is anchored in the one Chinese design object every reader has seen in a photograph and almost nobody can read: the licence plate. Its colours mean the same things here as on the road, which is why there is no dragon and no red-and-gold anywhere.

What is on the site

Groups	37
Brands	106
Models	149
Markets	30
Ownership holdings	309
Ownership pages	248
Is-it-Chinese answers	192
China-built badges	30
Chinese names explained	285
Province plate pages	33
Roads-of-China guides	8
Timeline events	60
Statistical series	7

Corrections

A page that cannot be re-checked is trimmed, not left standing. If a figure here is wrong, the useful thing to send is the document that says so: every correction that lands changes a record, and the record is what the pages render.

Where to start

The main sections.
Section	What is there
Who owns what	Ownership chains with the stake and the date at each step.
Brands	Every badge, its owner, its Chinese name and where it sells.
Models	The crosswalk between home and export names, ranges with their test cycle, prices with their date.
Markets	What is sold in each country, under what rules, with a dated log of changes.
Plates and roads	The plate characters and colours, and the guides to driving in China.
Tools	Four lookups over the same records the pages render.

About this site: questions people ask

What does CN Auto HR stand for?: China Auto Hub & Reference. The domain was a Chinese automotive job board long before this site existed, and the name was kept because the subject is continuous with it.
Do you sell cars or take referrals from importers?: No. There are no listings, no lead forms and no importer relationships. A reference that sells the thing it describes cannot be believed about it.
Do you rank or review cars?: No. Crash ratings are quoted from the testing bodies with attribution, and sales figures from the bodies that publish them. There are no verdicts and no stars of our own.
How often does it change?: Entity pages are re-checked on a quarterly pass, statistics once a year, and anything else when a fact actually moves. Each change is logged with its source on the change log.