Chinese automakers such as Great Wall Motor Co. and Chery Automobile Co. now export vehicles to nearly every foreign country, mostly in emerging markets.

Great Wall exports vehicles to Australia and Italy, and soon will ship vehicles to Sweden. Meanwhile, Shanghai Automotive Industry Corp. (SAIC) has begun selling its Roewe 550 compact sedan in Israel.

Does this mean Chinese automakers are ready to sell large volumes of vehicles in Europe and the United States? The answer is no.

At the Beijing auto show in April last year, Great Wall's export chief Xing Wenlin told me that by entering a few European countries, his company intended to test its readiness for mature markets.

But he admitted his company still has no timeframe for entering the United States.

What about other Chinese automakers? Are they anywhere closer to getting into the U.S. than Great Wall?

The only company that comes into my mind is BYD. But BYD has repeatedly moved back the date it has set for shipping cars to the United States.

So, what has made the U.S. the most difficult market for Chinese brands to crack? The U.S. has the world's most stringent standards on vehicle safety, and safety happens to be the weakest point of Chinese automakers.

This week, Zhejiang Geely Holding Group made a big splash out of the fact that its new Emgrand EC7 midsize car received five stars, the highest crash test score, under the domestic China-New Car Assessment Program (C-NCAP).

Models developed by international companies can easily win a five-star rating from C-NCAP. But the Emgrand EC7 is only the fifth domestic Chinese model to do so.

This illustrates the generally poor quality of vehicles developed by domestic Chinese automakers. And it shows that Chinese brands have a long way to go before they'll be ready to enter the mature markets in any big way.