I was being sarcastic. China commodity demand is the current reincarnation of the internet/tech boom. Almost the same plot, different characters. The media overhypes the potential and the public buys on the belief that this will be the market that grows to the sky. For everyone in China to be able to afford a car everyone in China must be capable of doing the same value added tasks as workers in US and EU, other wise gloabla labour arbitrage will keep those jobs in US and EU. If they did they would collapse the EU and US labour markets and thus have no market to sell to. Maybe one day everyone in China will ahve a car but it won't be as quickly as people seem to think. China will be a major demand factor but generally the trend is to extrapolate high early growth too far into the future. E.g the rapid rise in wages for the professional and middle class known as the income shift effect is extrapolated to a whole [low educated] population. Also much of China's industrial growth to date has been structural relocation by foreign multinationals - there will be a cap as the rate determiining step will be the rate at which Chinese workers can upgrade and become capable of higher valued added work. Subsrtitution is also a factor if any one commodity becomes too expensive. Estimating emerging market demand is very tricky - it is easy to massively under or overshootdue to income distribution vs per capitra GDP and innacurate data. Mercedes usually sell more cars than most would expect and upmarket apparel stores usually open too many outlets. Also it is rarely a smooth upwrad march - just look at the boom and bust in US history. At the individual product level you invariably get boom and bust as too much capacity is added in respones to previous bottelenecks. e.g China steel, aluminium, now cement, who knows, probably copper smelting next. Often it is processing or refining that is the bottleneck rather than shortage of raw material/ore.