Statistics from Beijing's auto market show that 700 to 800 automobiles were sold each day since late April, when the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) disease started to hit the Chinese capital.

In Shenzhen city of south China's Guangdong province, where the SARS epidemic struck at an earlier stage, sales of automobiles registered a record high of 13,000 in March, in comparison with the monthly record of 9,000 in the previous year.

The domestic market for private cars, in particular, experienced a boost starting this year as figures show that from January to April, the output reached a total of 560,000 cars, up 113 percent year-on-year, while sales reached 540,000, up 88 percent.

Experts here hold that the climbing sales in the first four months is largely a continuation of the previous year's market trend, and the epidemic situation in Beijing, Guangdong and other places also helped to push up the figure.

With automobiles entering the lives of a growing number of ordinary Chinese families, the Western car culture, represented by drive-in cinemas and eateries, is also being experienced by more and more people in China.

In the country's only drive-in cinema, the Fenghua Garden Cinema in Beijing, customers have increased almost threefold recently.

The drive-in Kentucky Fried Chicken in the Asian Games Village, in the meantime, received one customer per minute during both lunch and dinner periods.

However, statistics indicate that also influenced by the SARS epidemic, both the production and sales of passenger cars and trucks witnessed declines in April.

Experts here attributed this development mainly to the epidemic 's impact on the entire transport business and warned that such a slowdown may worsen as the full impact of SARS is felt.