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China: Electric car sales drop 34 percent

2019-10-16T16:56:24.746Z


China is the largest electric car market in the world - but sales there now fell by around 33 percent. Hydrogen cars should soon be alike.



Minus 33.1 percent. Sales of battery-electric cars in China declined so sharply in September compared to the same month last year. Even harder hit it plug-in hybrids, whose sales fell by 38.4 percent, as the Association of Chinese automaker CAAM announced.

This downturn is particularly hard for electrical manufacturers, as China is the largest market for battery electric vehicles. According to CAAM, around 717,000 electric cars were produced in the People's Republic during the first nine months of the year.

However, the past e-car boom was heavily subsidy-driven and increased the number of vehicles sold from around 10,000 in 2009 to over 1.26 million in 2018. In 2017 alone, the Chinese government subsidized e-car manufacturers by around 3.1 Billions of dollars.

Government wants better quality

Above all, the high subsidies increased the production of cheap and low-quality e-cars - until the government decided in March of this year to subsidize only cars with a range of at least 250 kilometers. For e-cars with a range of more than 400 kilometers, the subsidies were halved. By the end of 2020, they will be completely eliminated.

The government is urging manufacturers to offer better quality cars, analyst Yale Zhang told the Financial Times. This should have triggered a consolidation process that could drive smaller manufacturers to bankruptcy. The start-up Nio, once traded as China's Tesla, lost $ 479 million in the second quarter of the year, up more than 25 percent from the previous quarter.

For fuel-cell cars that run on hydrogen, the subsidy will fall from 2021 also, as the Chinese Ministry of Finance now announced. Experts had previously assumed that the hydrogen cars were not affected by the cuts. Despite the financial support, China's fuel cell industry has not made any breakthroughs, the ministry said the move.

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So far, China was planning to put one million hydrogen cars on the road by 2030. By the end of 2017 there were just 1200 pieces. Analyst Zhang says it will take another ten to twenty years to produce the fuel cell in large numbers economically.

The Ministry of Finance confirmed that electric cars would remain the focus of the Chinese mobility turnaround. "Electric cars and fuel cell vehicles are designed for different scenarios and will complement each other instead of replacing each other," says the Ministry of Finance.

Source: spiegel

All tech articles on 2019-10-16

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