Driving in China as a Tourist

appwiz 36 points 9 comments July 05, 2026
ian.sh · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (5 comments)

iancarroll

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.

8bitsrule

Very well done, & interesting, thanks!

TFNA

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.

LandenLove

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!

Bimos

> 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"..

Semantic search powered by Rivestack pgvector
14,015 stories · 131,331 chunks indexed