CAR Inc.

CAR Inc. (神州优车/神州租车) is a Chinese car rental company chaired by CEO Lu Zhengyao, best known as a classic case of winning a category before it existed in consumers' minds. Per a FreeS Fund recap, in 2010 — when China's rental market was still nascent — CAR ran third with just 600 cars, half the size of market leader eHi's 1,200; Lu then coined the slogan "要租车，找神州" ("to rent a car, go with Shenzhou") and spent an 80-million-yuan budget saturating three scenarios where renters would appear: apartment buildings, office towers, and airports. By its 2014 IPO, it had grown to over 91,000 vehicles — 1.5 times the combined fleets of the #2 through #10 players . That campaign is cited as the textbook example of a company equating its brand with an entire category early on.

Related coverage: elsewhere's corpus also touches adjacent automotive players — Tuhu Car, an aftermarket maintenance platform — but these are separate companies, not CAR itself.