Driving in China as a Tourist

38 points by appwiz 61 days ago | 10 comments

iancarroll 61 days ago |

Surprised to see this here but happy to answer any questions! Driving across China and getting to use the latest EVs has been quite fun and I hope to do it even more in the future.

ralferoo 61 days ago | |

Glad I saw this - I wasn't aware tourists were allowed to rent vehicles at all. I knew you needed a Chinese licence, but hadn't heard that there was now a tourist licence and as far as I knew you could only do the regular test if you had a working or family visa.

iancarroll 61 days ago | | |

In Shenzhen, they told me that I can take the full test on any visa if my permitted length of stay is 90 days or more. Supposedly the US embassies now issue 90 day visas for Americans, so I am hoping to try that route soon as I have already been through two temporary licenses...

gbraad 61 days ago | | |

Usually it would not make a lot of sense. Long distance driving is OK, but within the city a car is often a burden, especially as a tourist as rush hour and parking are problematic. 1st tier cities have good public transport, which often gets priority anyway during rush hour. And yes, got my license while having a Z-visa many moons ago.

Note: Beijing and Shanghai are older and have less parking within the inner city, as Shenzhen is more a planned city (in the 80s it was mostly still farming land), so they have parking garages, etc.

yanhangyhy 61 days ago |

> If you do not have a social credit score, you will have to prepay a small deposit of 80¥.

oh gosh.. it's not a soical credit score... it's a credit score belong to wechat pay or alipay..... if you have a good score, when you use them, you dont need to pay the deposit for things like renting a bike/powerbank.

for example my alipay score is 824 and my wechat pay score is 677. both are very good.

LandenLove 61 days ago |

That was an interesting read! I've been driving in Japan for the last 3 years. Mostly rural, so it's pretty chill. But city driving can be stressful and chaotic. I don't think my heart could take driving in Chinese cities. As the author wrote, having mopeds everywhere would be stressful.

I didn't know that the IDP does not work with China. I needed an IDP to drive in Japan for my first year. After the first year, I got a Japanese driver's license.

Also, it was funny how many times the author mentioned WeChat. You really do use it everywhere in China!

TFNA 61 days ago |

When I was in Almaty and Bishkek some years back, the overlander haunts occasionally saw the arrival of frantic motorcyclists who learned only then that they couldn’t continue on into China, they would have to ship the bike to Southeast Asia. Glad to see that it is now easier for foreigners to drive in China.

Bimos 61 days ago |

> If you do not have a social credit score, you will have to prepay a small deposit of 80¥.

It is acceptable if you guys are meaning that thing when mentioning "social credit score"..

Bimos 61 days ago | |

They came up with a Chinese name for you :)

柯亦安 Ke Yi'an. The given name "亦安" roughly means "also safe", it is a beautiful name.

8bitsrule 61 days ago |

Very well done, & interesting, thanks!