Beijing —  

A sleek SUV offers mechanical foot massages, a luxury minivan has rotating seats to help passengers hop into its third row – and a surprising proportion of models offer in-car karaoke with professional-grade speakers. Others have headlights that can project movies onto a wall to make anywhere a drive-in cinema. Here, intelligent driving features are ubiquitous, even in affordable models.

To many consumers peering in from the outside, the options in China – on display in Beijing this week at the world’s largest auto show – seem like a dream. But to some automakers and politicians around the world, they’re an existential threat.

Chinese carmakers are cranking out their offerings at a large scale and a comparatively low price. And there’s another major sell: while oil and gas costs skyrocket due to the Iran war, the vast majority of these cars are electric or hybrid.

The contrast with the US has never been as stark: Washington last year rolled back support for EVs in favor of gas guzzlers, and it has effectively barred Chinese cars from entering the market, citing a need to protect national security and local industry.

With US President Donald Trump expected in China in mid-May for talks with leader Xi Jinping, the country’s EV makers are also eyeing another frontier, watching whether growing global demand for EVs will help them pry open the door to the US market.

Regardless, the intended message from the 70-football-field-sized showcase is clear: China is relentlessly moving forward with the technology it believes will win the 21st century.

And China’s top carmakers – and Beijing – are betting big that the rest of the world will choose their vision of an electric future, rather than one still tied to the gas pump.

Rising gas prices are “a wake-up call for the people who never touch EV,” BYD executive Stella Li told CNN on the show’s sidelines, where she discussed the world’s largest EV maker’s ambitious expansion strategy. “When you jump to the electric car, you never walk back to switch to the gas vehicle.”