The Chinese are going crazy with knockoffs.
They even make a car that looks like a Rolls Royce!
http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2009...ype=blogs&_r=0

They do hummers, Ford F150's, Ferrari's and just about every popular car made.

http://jalopnik.com/5943850/the-ten-...-car-knockoffs

 

No patent protection, so in a free market , competition rules. Quality will always prevail. But as you say...the consumer has the choice.

 

That was damn funny...lol! Made me gut laugh...

 

I do love my chinese made, King Tour Pak from Mutazu. It was either the chinese made Harley Tour Pak or the Chinese made duplicate tour pak from Mutazu. Easy choice...

 

I was common on Okinawa Japan for servicemen to buy knock off Rolex watches. Although they didn't look bad from a distance all you had to do was look at the second hand as it ticked instead of swept and the gig was up.

The Chinese got a piece of the tail rotor that was left behind on the Bin Laden raid as well as the Russians. The Iranians got one of our Intel stealth drones that was shot down in there air space as well. Once anything worth copying goes abroad it's reverse engineered and a cheap copy is mass produced and Americans too concerned with price over quality suck it up.

 

Sunglasses are a common knockoff around here. I'm sure there's a lot more things but the sunglasses are most common

 

I'm in the hunting industry. We manufacture both in the US and overseas. For the last 4 years we only manufacture in the US. Patents and Trademarks are not protected overseas so its game on if they see an opportunity. The bad guys overseas have access to commercial design and production factories, they get lots of left over materials to utilize, etc. And I hate to say it, but being honest, the quality is as good or better overseas. But the real kicker is you can get large quantities of product for 1/3 of the price in half the time. We have been through the whole "buy US", but after 10 years of doing this first hand, that's all just talk, people do care if its made in the US, but they end up buying what's marketed better or what TV people are hyping, and just seem to look the other way on where it was made. I can say the quality of knock off stuff is usually just as good from what I've seen, they just cut out all the big profit middle men which is why knock products "appear" to be so much cheaper.

 

Just about all our products have been knocked off either by foreign companies or by Harley themselves. Nobody has copied our reverse yet, I guess they can't figure that one out. The good thing is over seas they can't get the good quality raw materials so most of what they knock off fails miserably. Sun glasses are pretty harmless when they fail, but when your transmission locks up at 70 mph hang on to your a**.

 

Innovation is not in their vocabulary.

 

Isn't there an old saying that "Imitation is the best form of flattery?" I guess it says something about American ingenuity and engineering if everybody in the world wants to copy it!