The sales gap between China and the U.S. may be enlarged in 2010 in view of the data in January and February. China's auto sales in 2009 had 3.4 million cars more than that of the U.S. In the first two months, China's total vehicle sales reached 2.87 million, almost twice that of the U.S. with sales of 1.48 million.

On vehicles exhaust emissions, models with the exhaust emissions below 1.6L dominated the market. In 2009, with the guide of the halved purchasing tax policy, models below 1.6L exhaust emissions increased by 8 percentage points compared with 2008, reaching 70 percent. Such models made a good performance in January and February this year with its market share surging to 72 percent.

Although the margin of preference on purchasing tax in 2010 reduced by 2.5 percentage points, such model remained in short supply in the first two months. With the recent capacity restructuring at enterprises, the tight situation on supply and demand of such models will soon be eased, Dong expected.

In February, passenger cars' sales reached 477,400 accounting for 50.63 percent of the total sold. The rest market share was from Japan, Germany, the United States, France, South Korea and other countries' brands. Since winning half of the domestic market shares last year, domestic brands have maintaining this momentum.

Japanese cars found it difficult to maintain current market shares in China due to sales of domestic brands in China growing, said Xiong Chuanlin, deputy secretary-general of the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers March 8. Currently, Japanese cars are just behind the domestic brand vehicles in second place, accounting for 19.8 percent of the passenger-car market.

According to the sales situation in February, Xiong estimated that China's auto sales would maintain growth of 10 percent to 15 percent before 2015, and might beat 16.5 million units in 2010.