- The cars in general are pretty new (people are heavily in debt to finance their cars and iPhones). In the big cities you never see the typical eastern european thing where someone put their foot down on the gas and a plum of exhaust comes out. Every car seems to run clean. Taxis are old, but they run on natural gas.
- All scooters are electrics. This is actually amazing to see for the first time b/c you never hear about it in the west. But 99% of the scooters are electric and silent. It's amazing. And we're talking about like half the traffic is on scooters. So this is big!. Funny enough I wouldn't even know where to buy one in the west.
- the reality is that the pollution is almost entirely from the factories and powerplants. It really looks different from what you see from cars. It's like a haze.. sorta like fog, but more gray. But it's very uniform and everywhere. Electric power is very very cheap in China. They're scared of the price ever going up b/c it's take a toll on manufacturing.