In 2010, seven managers from PSA Peugeot Citro?n and five from Chang’an Automobile met in Shenzhen, southern China, to lay the groundwork for a new car factory. Three years later, Capsa, a 50-50 joint venture between the French and Chinese companies, is in the final stages of preparing a 1m square metre plant for the September launch of Chinese-made premium cars under the DS brand. “Because we were beginning from a blank sheet, people wanted to make it as perfect as possible,” says Gilles Boussac, Capsa’s president, between meetings with his team of mostly Chinese managers. “So often in China, if you’re trying to rework or improve something, it takes years to achieve.”

But the people who built Capsa have not started from scratch. Their shared enterprise is based on three decades of global car companies’ experience working with Chinese partners.

International car executives are confident such ventures will continue to be the best way to reach Chinese customers, who now buy more than 20m new vehicles annually, making it the world’s largest automobile market. But their enthusiasm for these awkward corporate vehicles, with their unique management challenges, obscures the fact that the path of co-operation has been bumpy.