Stop buying foreign luxury sedans! An auto industry expert told the Chinese people Saturday, worrying about a blind, extravagant trend in car purchasing and ignorance to more economical, homegrown brands.

Many Chinese people are considering cars as a symbolic of their social status and vying for buying luxury, especially foreign-made sedans, said Guo Konghui, honorary dean of the Automobile Engineering College ofJilinUniversity, at a forum at an on-going international auto fair held in the northeastern Chinese city of Changchun, a major base of China's auto industry.

"A lot of foreign friends of mine have told me that they don't understand how China, as a developing country, could become the largest consumer of the Benz luxury sedans?" said Guo, who is also an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering.

Many foreign automakers did not even consider about transporting their sedans back to their own countries when they held exhibitions of luxury cars in China, because the sedans were usually sold out, he said.

Guo urged the Chinese people to stop the luxury trend and encouraged them to buy more low-emission, environment-friendly cars, especially domestic brands, in a bid to build an energy-saving society.

For many years, Chinese brands were regarded as low-end, substandard products as many were unreliable. But over the past year, local brands started moving into the more lucrative high-end sedan market, industry analysts have said.

China's consumption of energy has soared as the economy has grown, and the country is under great pressure and facing many challenges to achieve its goal of cutting by 20 percent the amount of energy it uses to produce a unit ofGDP.

Shortages of coal, electric power, petroleum and shipping capacity are big challenges that China faces in its development.