CHINA'S unstoppable love affair with cars will lead to a formidable 30 million vehicles being sold each year by 2020, making it overwhelmingly the largest car market in the world, new forecasts reveal.

The country's current car sales of 17 million a year will leap 73 percent in the next eight years as swaths of first-time drivers take to the roads, data from IHS Global Insight, a European research firm, shows.

James Chao, IHS's Automotive Consulting Director, said the pace of growth of the automotive market in China in the next decade would be "truly breathtaking."

"China's ratio of cars to people is still far behind mature markets like Japan, the US and Western Europe," he said. "For example, the density of vehicles in the Western region of China is especially low but incomes are expected to rise because of the government's investment initiatives."

By the end of this year China's mainland is expected to sell more cars than all of Europe put together: an expected 19.21 million vehicles, compared with Europe's forecast for 18.15 million.

However, IHS's figures contrast with a weak start to the year for China's automotive sector, in which sales fell 6 percent in January and February according to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers. The association still expects auto sales to rise between 8 percent and 10 percent this year, but admitted that the feeble start presented cause for concern.

According to IHS's projections, India, which today sells just under 3 million cars a year, will become the second biggest car market in the Asia Pacific region, but will sell only a fifth of the China figure by 2020.

Despite having a far more developed automotive sector, Japan is expected to remain in third place worldwide with its car sales only forecast to rise 5 percent to 4.35 million a year. South Korea and Indonesia are expected to remain in fourth and fifth place respectively, IHS said.