Tesla doesn't need to sell cars in China to succeed there
When Elon Musk broke ground on Tesla Inc.'s Gigafactory in Shanghai earlier this month, he wasn't just thinking about how many Teslas he'll sell in China. He was thinking about how many he might be able to share.
Musk isn't alone. Global automobile manufactures are scrambling to develop services that will allow Chinese car owners to rent out their vehicles when they're not driving them. According to one recent analysis, such services could hire out as many as 2 million cars in 2020, up from roughly 100, 000 in 2017.
The real revolution will arrive in a few years, when self-driving cars hit China's roads. At that point, transportation will become truly on-demand: A renter will merely need to notify a car of his or he location, and the vehicle will race over.
This isn't science fiction. In 2016, Elon Musk wrote that once regulators approved self-driing