MOTORSNEWS ELECTRIC CARS:China is focusing heavily on electric cars, and with powerful backing from government, it looks like China's battery-powered four-wheelers could steal a march on the Nissans, Toyotas and GMs of this world, writes CLIFFORD COONANin Beijing
In China this month, US President Barack Obama launched a joint initiative with President Hu Jintao to underline their “strong shared interest in accelerating the deployment of electric vehicles in order to reduce oil dependence, cut greenhouse gas emissions and promote economic growth”.
It’s a strong signal of support for electric cars from the world’s two largest automobile markets, but the private sector is also quick.
“It’s time for China to take the lead because we have the components and the parts and the industry is well developed here. I’m absolutely positive the Chinese electric car will play an important role internationally,” said Feng Yunzhou, vice president of Chery Auto.
Chery, one of China’s top car makers, is planning a range of electric and hybrid cars next year that can do hundreds of kilometres before you take it home and plug it into your charger, or stop at a soon-to-be-developed nationwide network of electric car charging stations.
The main problem with electric cars is that they have relatively short ranges before they need to be charged.
Also, lithium ion batteries are expensive and so electric cars are expensive, but China is a master at bringing down costs – remember how much a flat-screen TV was before people started making them in China.
Resolving these issues is the next challenge, but Chery said it is seeing longer and longer ranges for its cars.
“We’ve made breakthroughs with components, especially the batteries, and the electric engine is also in a very good position,” Feng told a conference on energy in Beijing.
China already makes more lithium-ion batteries – the energy-dense technology crucial to new electric cars – than any other country.
Shenzhen-based BYD, a rechargeable battery and electric car maker (backed by a unit of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway group and the first to launch a mass-produced hybrid that plugs into an electrical outlet), started selling its first plug-in hybrid, the F3DM, last year.
This year’s roll-call of China’s tycoons listed BYD founder Wang Chuanfu as the country’s richest man after his fortune increased over five-fold to $5.1 billion dollars (€3.4 billion).
Chinese firms are keen to dominate the market for electronic cars as China seeks to combine its need for greener transport with the need to make this environmentally friendly mode of transport cheap and reliable.
BYD’s background as a battery maker helped it to come up with an early new model – basically it just needed to put a chassis and a roof around the batteries it had already developed.
Now it plans to introduce a few hundred all-electric sedans, the e6, in the US next year. The five-seat e6 takes seven to nine hours to fully charge and has a 250-mile range, and will initially cost $40,000 (€26,774).
Chinese car makers are hoping to steal a march on GM’s plug-in electric car, the Chevrolet Volt, which is due in late 2010, and Nissan, which announced the Leaf (electric family sedan) would be available next year.
Nissan is also mulling the possibility of making all-electric cars in Guangzhou. Nissan and its Chinese joint-venture partner Dongfeng Motor recently signed an agreement with the Guangzhou government to set up an electric-car programme.
“The Leaf will go from zero to 60 miles per hour in less than 10 seconds, which for a car in this category is a very strong performance. There is still an expectation that an electric car has to be tedious and slow moving. It’s not at all,” Renault-Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn told a conference.
Toyota is also is pushing to get such a car to market in 2010 and Ford says it is five years away from producing them in significant numbers. Meanwhile Mercedes and Evonik have done deals that may see electric Mercedes for sale next year.
China is still struggling to come up with its own domestic brands, and local buyers prefer to buy GM and VW as they feel Chinese brands are of lower quality, although that is changing now car makers are getting their hands of western engineering methods. Chinese car makers are keen to develop brands that will go to the export market beyond a few small countries in Africa.
There is also a question-mark about whether Chinese consumers will go for the electric car – as many people have spent a long time waiting to get a BMW or a Mercedes.
Where China beats everyone is on component manufacturing, and the wave of Chinese electric cars coming onto the market in the last 18 months is probably more about providing the battery power than the iPod dock in the dashboard.