The Latest Breaking News from the Shanghai Auto Show

This week in Shanghai, close to one million people are expected to visit China's biggest automotive exposition. They'll be able to poke around in thousands of new cars as more than 1,000 different companies show off their latest models and updated technologies. They'll see the latest and greatest from China's…

Here's something I figured out pretty quickly at the Shanghai Auto Show this past week: You can tell a lot from which cars and which brands the crowds are interested in.

When automotive executives in the United States and Europe talk about electric vehicles, they usually talk about tomorrow: the need to prepare for some vaguely defined "future" where their customers are largely moving beyond gasoline. But in China, that's not the future at all. It's the present.

China EV sales for April follow the Shanghai Auto Show and a price war in the world's largest and fastest-growing EV market.