CHINA POWER: China's bid to become an electric vehicle powerhouse has stumbled over both producing cars and convincing customers to buy them.
Image: Flickr/anthonares
SHANGHAI—China has a long and successful track record of scaling up its industrial growth by hitching it to a continent-size home market. This strategy turned China's wind turbine sector from barely existent to a global leading force in five years. But when it comes to clean cars, the story appears to be different.
A program designed to boost China's transition to electric cars and plug-in hybrids has been stymied. Even with generous government support, cities here have added fewer cars than promised. The goal of revving the nation's clean car mass production has also gone unmet.
This comes as automakers from around the world are struggling to make low-emissions vehicles scale up in China, the United States and other markets where programs and regulations are calling for massive gains in fuel economy over the next 10 to 15 years.
China's program, known as "10 Cities, 1,000 Vehicles," planned to select 10 pilot cities every year from 2010 to 2012 and promote 1,000 units of clean cars in each city. Chinese cities responded to it so enthusiastically, they almost doubled the total promotion target.
But surprisingly, two years since the program rolled out, those cities have achieved less than one-quarter of that target, according to Timer, an auto consulting firm based in Shanghai. And among all the pilot cities, the company statistics show, no more than half the target was met in the best case, and in places like central China's Xiangyang, for instance, only seven clean cars were added on the roads since late 2010.
China wants clean cars badly. Already, emissions from petroleum-powered cars have choked Chinese cities with air pollution. Half of China's oil is now imported. With the largest and fastest-growing auto market in the world, the nation's dependence on foreign fuels can only get worse.
With automakers here lagging behind their Western peers in making traditional cars, the chance to catch up lies in producing technologically advanced models such as electric vehicles. Chinese clean car makers aimed to use their home market as a springboard to test new technology and create the scale of economics necessary for exports.
An array of difficulties
But as big as its need for cleaner cars may be, China's struggles in making the transition to clean vehicles have been bigger. Although Chinese leaders prepared for the promotion program with fiscal incentives and supportive policies, experts say, these blessings also developed into a curse.
As Timer analyst Robbin Cheng explained, many municipal governments were lured by benefits given to the pilot cities and were vying to get into the promotion program. To impress decisionmakers, cities came up with ambitious yet impractical plans that later failed to drive up clean car use.
The immature nature of clean cars added more difficulties. For one, even after government subsidies, clean cars still often cost much more than their cousins with internal combustion engines. Drivers complained that it was hard to find charging stations, and their vehicles, while clean, had a frequent tendency to break down. Beijing actually took dozens of electric buses off the road due to the inconvenience of using them.
Then there is a safety issue. Electric cars caught on fire in several pilot cities such like Shanghai and Hangzhou. Earlier this year, an electric taxi produced by leading Chinese automaker BYD became inflamed during a car crash in Shenzhen.
Chinese authorities never blamed carmakers for those accidents, but cities may think twice before adopting the untested clean car technology on a large scale. And for those who dare to go ahead, the question is, where would their clean cars come from?
Sales frozen by protectionism
"Chinese cities show a strong protectionism when it comes to buying clean cars," said An Feng, executive director at the Innovation Center for Energy and Transportation, a China-focused think tank based in Los Angeles.
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10 Comments
Add CommentProof once again just because government planners say so doesn't mean the people will buy into it. Much like some of the mega cities that China has built that no one wants to live in. One problem maybe the cost, like their newly built mega cites the new homes/condos require a 50% down payment and only three years to pay it off and the cost far exceeds what most people have ever in the first place.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNo electric vehicle in China can be considered "clean". China is one of the dirtiest power producers. Electric cars are merely displacing emissions to the locale of their dirtiest power stations. This has a benefit to the local cities but worsens the global impacts.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn addition to these coal powered cars, we now have to account for the polluting factors of battery manufacturing and disposal.
When China completely cleans up it's power producing sector, we will be able to refer to electrics as "clean". That glorious event is not yet evident, although the Chinese say they are making progress, they are still constructing 2 coal fired units per week. Many have no pollution controls at all. GK
Having been to a few of those pollution choked cities, I doubt petroleum powered cars are the only or even the significant cause. At best cars are a contributor to pollution produced by factories, millions of furnaces heating homes and buildings, cooking with various fuels, trucks used for shipping and a host of other pollution contributors. Also with china being the number one coal user for electricity, even if these cars were 100% PEV, the pollution from the coal plants would still be there in what ever location those are in. This is a good example of doing something, even a bad idea for good intentions but otherwise not going to solve any problem. They could remove every car on the road and it would not even be noticed as far as the effect on pollution. All that will happen here is a waste of money better spent on something useful.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnother example that political leaders are pretty much the same everywhere: they think they can make something true by passing a law that it is. Electric autos will be viable when the battery technology advances enough to make them so, not before. Pretending it is when it is not does no more good than legislating pi to be equal to 3.00 or that there is no such thing as global warming.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this'China wants..."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHint..China has over 4 times the population of the USA. It's not a monolithic entity anymore than the USA is. There are competing interesdts, etc.
The USA wants....(good luck getting any consensus).
"The research found 1,231 new coal plants with a total installed capacity of more than 1.4 million MW proposed worldwide. Beyond the biggest users -- China, India and the United States -- the assessment finds a heavy coal demand building up in Russia, Vietnam, Turkey and South Africa."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.eenews.net/public/climatewire/2012/09/17/1
Takes a lot of coal to keep those clean cars on the road.
I agree. Proper government planning, such as we often do here in the US, requires input from all stakeholders, including private business and ordinary citizens of all ages, income levels and ethnicities.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Clean" isn't an all or nothing thing. Electric cars are cleaner than gas or diesel, and can become even cleaner if power plants switch to natural gas or some sustainable technology. No other technology can become cleaner that way.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou are right that passing a law assuming that batteries are cheap won't actually make them cheap. But if the law is properly designed, it can increase demand for the batteries, which increases production, which then reduces price (as we have seen with virtually every other mass-produced item.) Some people claim that once electric car production is as large as the equivalent gasoline car production, they will be as cheap as the gas versions.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"...and can become even cleaner if power plants switch to natural gas or some sustainable technology."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI believe that is exactly what I said.
"When China completely cleans up it's power producing sector, we will be able to refer to electrics as "clean"."
Euro and N.A coal fired plants have electrostatic precipitators and sulfur scrubbers. The only thing you see coming from our stacks is water vapor fog and the unseen benign CO2. Under these circumstances we can refer to electrics as "clean", in regards to pollution (ignoring the very real pollution problem of increased battery processing).
I am not against electrics... I am against dirty power generation. People must keep their eyes on the ball, in this regard. GK