Tag: vehicles

The ways and means of urban transportation have a certain inherent appeal.

Notable vehicles (Q1 2025)

Ever since arriving in Hangzhou in December 2022, I’ve been noticing stuff about cars here, and I’ve been meaning to share my observations.

Therefore, here are some facts about the automotive landscape in China (especially Hangzhou):

In addition to imported vehicles and vehicles produced in cooperation with foreign automakers, China has a lot of domestically produced car brands. I’d heard of them because I edited news articles for China Knowledge, an English-language news portal offering business, financial, and real-estate news about China. But to see all the different designs in person is dizzying. Never knew there could be so many different shapes of taillights. (LEDs have changed the world.)

There are “cars” on the road that are tiny, some with only three wheels. These glorified golf carts are mysteriously ubiquitous despite not being road legal. (Apparently, they have recently been officially banned in Beijing.)

Some courier vehicles have no driver. These may start to replace the much more numerous three-wheeled courier vehicles that do have drivers. (But who unloads them, I want to know??? Seems like you’ve still got a last-mile problem.)

There are many consumer model vehicles with AI self-driving features. “Already today, a quarter of all newly registered vehicles in the Chinese market are equipped with a Level 2 driving system for highway scenarios.”

There are often mechanical shelves for cars in underground parking garages to increase capacity. (They are super annoying to park in because you have to back in, and you have to do it very precisely, because there’s only about 6 inches of space on either side of the car. Miss and you damage your tire or rim—happened to Siqi twice.)

There are no vanity license plates, but sometimes the license plate kinda spells something by accident. My brain constantly wants the alphanumeric inscriptions to be real words; they’re usually not. Electric and hybrid cars have green/white license plates, whereas petrol cars have blue license plates. There are a lot of EVs in Hangzhou, maybe 20%-30%. (Here’s a 2022 report with some statistics.)

The highway infrastructure continually amazes me. It’s new, it’s massive, and from what I’ve seen, there’s no graffiti.

Intrigued? See below for 25 photos of vehicles and vehicle infrastructure.

Continue reading Notable vehicles (Q1 2025)

Lucky Joint Construction truck

The company is called “Lucky Joint Construction Private Limited”, and it appears to be a well-established construction company. Their website, which is decent, is located at www.luckyjoint.com.sg.

Clearly “joint” has different primary meanings for different people. I don’t think this business name would go over very well in the US.

Ice truck slogans

I’m fascinated by the commercial vehicles in Singapore, especially JM Ice trucks.

J.M. Ice: There’s always a better service!

This bizarre slogan is struggling mightily to convey the message, “Our service is always better!” but unfortunately suggests that “There’s always a better service than ours!”

Iceman: You ring, we bring.

Descriptive, concise, memorable. Could apply to anything being delivered, though.

Tuck Lee: Have ice will revel.

So pithy, clever and downright hip, it’s no wonder they trademarked it! You win, Tuck Lee.

No-boarding and No-alighting Zones

The intent of this phrase is to designate zones in which people are permitted neither to get in a taxi nor to get out of one.

However, I think “no-boarding and no-alighting” is a whopping long phrase to use as an adjective in front of the noun “zones”. It’s so cumbersome that my initial inclination was to read it as an elliptical formation designating two different kinds of zones:

[Be aware of the] no-boarding [zones] and [the] no-alighting zones.

This would be analogous to a sentence like:

If the medium-size shirt doesn’t fit, let me know; there are bigger [sizes] and smaller sizes available.

Obviously there are no sizes each of which is both “bigger and smaller”; the adjectives are separate, and there’s a noun implied but omitted after the first one.

I’m not even sure the intended reading of “no-boarding and no-alighting zones” is syntactically possible, unless you hyphenate the whole thing, which would be ugly and probably violate most style guidelines:

No-boarding-and-no-alighting Zones

Since there’s a set of illustrations below the text, I think probably I would write it as:

No boarding or alighting in these zones.

Or, even shorter:

Do not board or alight in these zones.