China is a market leader in terms of electric cars, but that’s just one of the emerging trends in the automotive world. Autonomous technology is quickly transitioning from science fiction into state-of-the-art science and Pony.ai is raising funds to push it closer to reality.
The second half of Q2 2018 has been notable and the flood of news from around the world continues. In China, the flood of developments is so massive that we can only show you a keyhole insight into what is happening.
A number of new electric car models come onto the scene each month in China. Below are 8 of the interesting fully electric and plug-in hybrid models that have arrived recently.
On the 24th of April at the 2018 Beijing Auto Show, Volkswagen Group held a massive press conference showing off cars like the Porsche Mission E Cross Turismo, Lamborghini Urus, and other high flyers, but the most interesting to the Chinese market was the SOL E20X.
2017 was another big year for the deployment of electric buses in China, with 89,546 electric buses deployed, but who supplies the batteries that are creating the world’s largest electric bus fleets in the world? For this, we need to find the 2017 Chinese installed capacity.
Pictures of Volkswagen’s first Chinese electric vehicle built via its joint venture with JAC recently surfaced from patent filings. The vehicle looks very similar to the iEV7S, with some minor cosmetic changes.
Editor’s note: This article follows up on our report last week that Contemporary Amperex Technology Co Ltd (CATL) was recently approved to hold an initial public offering (IPO) that targets raising $2 billion or so. Tim Dixon, based in China, dug into this topic a bit more for a story on EV Obsession. We’re reposting that story below.
The Chinese market for pure electric buses had approximately 89,546 sales last year. This is down from 115,700 sales in 2016. This means that year on year, the market sales decreased by 23%. Reports indicate that this decrease is down to multiple factors, but mainly due to changes to electric bus subsidies from Chinese national and local governments.
Electric vehicles are not all sexy next-generation roadsters or Chinese AI-linked car startups — the mundane backbone of the economy of logistics vehicles is also undergoing electrification. Tesla brought much rightful attention to its electric semi, but in China a large shift in medium- and short-range logistics vehicles is also happening.
As 2017 drew to an end, we got news on China’s electric vehicle subsidies for 2018. Major changes lie ahead. Firstly, the new subsidy policy is designed to encourage higher range and lower energy consumption in electric vehicles, while removing and decreasing subsidies to lower ranged models. Additionally, a key policy change is that regional subsidies are coming to an end in China.
