CARS WITH CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS: Small cars, like Brilliance's Cross pictured, now make up some 70 percent of Chinese vehicle purchases thanks to government tax breaks on the fuel efficient autos. But their sheer number--the Chinese now own some 200 million vehicles--means ever-increasing oil dependence.
Image: © Elizabeth Dorn
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SHENYANG—Rows of new white minibuses marshal at the entrance to Brilliance Auto's sprawling complex on the outskirts of this industrial city of 4.2 million people in northeastern China. The complex includes assembly shops, dormitories and corporate headquarters, in addition to temporary parking for the company's products. In one cavernous, dimly lit shop, workers in tan overalls with blue highlights repeat over and over the same basic assembly task as a conveyor belt slowly but steadily carries the skeletons of future minibuses from station to station at the pace of the slowest worker. The air is filled with brief blasts of whirring power tools and the smell of ozone and rubber. Everywhere is the logo of Brilliance, a blocky knock-off of the oval symbol of the world's largest automaker Toyota.
The logo is perhaps an homage to the mammoth company whose partnership with Brilliance has helped it to shine, along with additional help from BMW. The Chinese state-owned enterprise now sells some 80,000 "JinBei" and "Granse" minibuses a year—after assimilating Toyota's "Hiace" and "Granvia" minibus models during a previous joint venture, or what the Chinese call technology "digestion."
"At the beginning, we had no ability to develop our own vehicles," says Wang Shiping, Brilliance's vice president of strategy, via a translator. "Now we just purchase engines from Toyota. We have two engine plants but it's the customer's choice: if they like Toyota engines we provide that. If they like domestic we have that."
Much like the U.S. or neighbors Japan and South Korea, China has made automobile manufacturing a focus of its development efforts—naming it a "national pillar industry" in 1994. Brilliance's parent company—Huachen—employs some 35,000 people. And much like Henry Ford introduced an economic model that worked for America—building cars that his workers could afford on the salaries he paid them—the Chinese public has responded, purchasing roughly 14 million vehicles in 2010 and lifting the global fortunes of automakers both domestic and foreign, such as GM, which, for the first time in 2009, sold more cars in China than in the U.S.
At the same time, China has invested heavily in infrastructure to make the country car-friendly: roads, bridges, tunnels—an orgy of construction that happens to double as a stimulus plan. A pristine four-lane toll highway leads out of this northeastern city, empty except for a few trucks and official convoys speeding past in their specially licensed black sedans. But within a few years, the lanes will be crowded with cars and the next cycle of road-building will begin. Beijing started its second ring road in the 1980s and completed its sixth—stretching 187 kilometers around the sprawling capital—in 2009.
Predictable results have followed: traffic jams that stretch for kilometers, sprawling suburbia and rising fuel prices. The vice mayor of Beijing was recently "exiled" to work in Xinjiang province after a debacle of some 30,000 vehicles being registered in a few weeks in December in anticipation of a curb on new auto registry. The Beijing municipal government duly laid out its plan on December 13 to combat the capital's roughly 4.8 million vehicles that have turned the city's roads into sinuous parking lots, including encouraging the use of the new subway system and restricting new vehicle registries to just 240,000 in total next year, roughly one-third of 2010's total. Plus, a haze covers the cities of China—a combination of the smoke of a million coal fires and all the vehicles' exhaust obscuring the skyline with smog's airlight, turning a Beijing sunrise from rosy to peach.
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27 Comments
Add CommentBy 2020, the world's population is expected to have tripled since I was born in 1950. Even with diminishing birthrates, the human population already far exceeds any ever that ever existed before in the history of the Earth. It has doubled in the past forty years. Two hundred years ago, for example, it's estimated that the world's population reached the astonishing level of one billion people for the first time. There will be more than seven billion people before the end of this decade.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEven if population growth flatlines in the future, the current baseline combined scientific advancement in medicine and the extension of modern heath services to those still unserved could potentially keep the population growing well into the future, if only sufficient resources were available.
The cheerful news for economic development is that most of that population does not yet enjoy the production of electricity, home appliances, electronic entertainment and transportation products regularly consumed by relatively small populations of the more developed nations.
The bad news for the environment is that the resources consumed and waste produced by the manufacture and use of those industrial products has not yet been incurred.
The overpopulation of the Earth has already been achieved. Even if sufficient quantities of potable water, agricultural products and seafood can be delivered to the current population for years to come, which is unlikely, any major infrastructure failure will potentially affect billions of people. Let's hope we can keep the world's population reasonably well fed, gainfully employed and satisfied with their life at least for a few more years...
Perhaps the Chinese are wondering if the US is willing to give up an estimated 300 million automobiles, and start riding bicycles...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt seems we've been misinformed: the current population of the U.S. is estimated to be just over 300M that's men, women and children - not cars.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLikewise, the population of China is currently estimated to be 1.3 billion people and it's expected to be 1.3 billion at mid-century.
The subtitle states: "China could have one billion cars by mid-century..." A billion cars for a population of 1.3 billion would certainly require successful market penetration!
The article states:
"In 2010, the world holds some 1.2 billion cars, trucks, buses and motorcycles, including roughly 200 million in China. But with China potentially heading towards a billion vehicles alone in the next few decades..."
I can't dispute a current estimate of 1.2 billion cars, truck, buses, motorcycles, bicycles, roller skates, etc., but I don't think that there'll be 2 billion cars in China by mid-century...
By the way, Do you really think that Americans should feel so responsible for the entire world's co2 production, now being led by China, that we should donate all our automobiles (however many that is) to China?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm keeping mine, thanks!
WAR before its to late to win
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLet's just burn up the fossil fuels fast and get it over with so we can move on and put the effort into alternatives. Might as well accept the inevitable and kiss the low lying coastal areas of the earth good by.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWTF
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisUse our limited cheap fuel to build efficient cities and infrastructure.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCan this be done with out a state decree?
If there is enough steel to build one billion new cars for China, there is certainly no reason not to build the five million biomass pyrolysers needed to get rid of unwanted atmospheric CO2.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSee www.eprida.com to see how to get rid of unwanted CO2 economically now....
Cars are already obsolete: vulgar, inefficient, destroyers of the landscape, creators of obesity, killers by geopolitical disputes, CO2 emission and accidents. The dream of moving freely has become the freedom of going from one burger to the other. And everything looks just horribly polluted. It is a plague to get rid of.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe idea that dense settlements can use the car as a primary transportation mode to move lots of people is ridiculous. Ask any urban planner. They know that high volume people movement is not possible with the car. Yet, we plan urban land uses in car-dependent ways because of some misguided notion that the free market has ordained this the "choice" of the population. Unfortunately, it's a false choice because there are no realistic alternatives to use. What has our infatuation with the free market given us? A choice without a choice. Innovation within a mode type, but not across mode types integrated with settlement patterns to produce integrated multi-modal transportation/land use systems that minimize trips, minimize VMT, and use the appropriate mode for the type of trip, including production supply chains, products, end-use, fuel, and materials that at least have net zero impact if not a positive enhancing impact on the environment, the only regenerative life-support economy we have. When will we ever learn? Actually, creating smart, learning organizations and institutions is one of the keys to sustainability success! We better get on with it. It's not the car that's the problem; it's the persons designing settlement patterns around the car! Of course, full cost pricing of cars and car use would go a long way towards a market impetus for integrative, multi-modal transportation/settlement patterns.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOur environment and our natural resources won't sustain two billion more bicycles- forget about cars. If the Chinese are going to expand in terms of material possessions to that extent it is going to be at our loss. If they use more, then to balance it out, we have to use less. Masked in the environmentalist and conservationist movement is a redistribution of wealth. If this were unmasked and we were able to take a hard look at it most of us wouldn't go for it- including me.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI respect your opinion, but in fact the Chinese and others do not require our approval. In fact, it is we who are financing their new prosperity by purchasing the goods we are no long apparently interested in manufacturing for the competitive world marketplace. Don't be surprised when our purchasing power eventually dwindles. Real, productive work is so hard...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI respect your opinion, but in fact the Chinese and others do not require our approval. In fact, it is we who are financing their new prosperity by purchasing the goods we are no long apparently interested in manufacturing for the competitive world marketplace. Don't be surprised when our purchasing power eventually dwindles. Real, productive work is so hard...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt would seem to me quite arrogant of the west, having achieved the higher standard of living that it now has with all its environmental problems, to advise China and the East to forgo this standard of living. Also how would you enforce this advice on to people who would most likely tell you to go jump in the lake. If one thinks that they as human beings are likely to follow this advice when you don't anyway one is living in cloud cuckoo land.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes, it would be all-right but only if we use the same system that is used by a Flying Saucer and was used by Tesla for his Pierce Arrow Car in 1931.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTapping the energy needed out of the aether.
Nasa was not interested in the technology of Gravity Control, it would make all the rocket industries obsolete (Nasa stil owes me $50 million for that)
I would have included the free energy system too.
What war are you proposing and why should we endorse it?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisStill better than horse poop everywhere.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHaven't you been committed to an institution yet?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEasy question... The cars will be electric. They will be charged with swappable lithium (or similar) batteries charged via solar power.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThey will be lighter to conserve power. They will be cleaner (minimal pollution).
That ignorant gentleman (?) should acquint himself with some science. Read: www.rexresearch.com/hiddink/hiddink.htm
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe problems on this planet are all related to our overuse of automobiles
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe issue of what type of cars the Chinese will be driving will depend largely on resource availability. I'm continually frustrated by people who say that if we all started driving electric cars we could solve global warming. However, it is rarely explained where this vast amount of electricity will come from for these electric cars.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf it comes from fossil fuel burning power plants, there is only a marginal benefit. Wind and solar power can't even make a dent in these power needs especially for a country like China.
The only real short term solution(the next 25 years)is nuclear fission power plants. As it was 20 years ago efficient nuclear fusion is still 20 years away. Both France and Japan have shown that safe and efficient nuclear fission power plants can be built. We can only hope the Chinese see the light in this regard.
Well, solid state is what the power supply will be to tap the energy out of the aether to make it float and propel.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is called Gravity Control, the technology of the Flying Saucer, which I Patented. When funding comes available I will build it. I had suggested to the Canadian and American Military to use it in Iran and Afghanistan, where they take sometimes take a whole day to cover a mile. The Armchair Generals in Ottawa and Camp Lejeune were not interested.
The solution is simple. Biomass or hydrocarbon pyrolysis will provide hydrogen for the engine and biochar for soil ammendement. No need for expensive batteries and CO2 is captured from the air! See www.eprida.com or 'pyrolysis'. Cars using such 'Gazogens' ran in isolated areas until the late fifties', when fossil fuels became available.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThat person called bucket of squid, should look the proper text up in a dictionary. Poop is not spelled squid.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisChina could buy the system of Power Generation, derived from Gravity control.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAll heating and cooking could be done electric.
Units casn be built anywhere and do not need fuel and are non-polluting.