Will car-sharing prove the white knight to save China’s flagging electric-vehicle industry?
More than 30 major Chinese companies – most backed by major car makers – have jumped on the so called “flexible mobility” bandwagon
China’s electric vehicle (EV) industry has hit a bump in the road since the start of the year, in producing a challenger to the global market leader Tesla, after the government stopped showering the domestic sector with heavy subsidies, which had proved key for their survival and success until now.
How to encourage people to use or even buy EVs is proving more of a challenge than many makers had imagined, but one area of the auto industry that does appear to have struck the right cord in encouraging customers to use EVs – the car rental sector.
Riding high on the growth wave of China’s so-called sharing economy, more than 30 major Chinese companies – most backed by major carmakers including SAIC Motor and Geely Automobile – have jumped on the “flexible mobility” bandwagon, in developing apps which allow people to rent electric cars whenever and wherever they want.
A world leader in the global on-demand car sharing service market is Car2Go, a subsidiary of Daimler providing car-sharing services in European and North American cities, but its cars are petrol-driven Smart cars.
However, more than 95 per cent of the estimated 30,000 cars now being used on China’s emerging car-sharing market are new energy vehicles (NEVs), a classification which covers electric cars, plug-in hybrids and fuel-cell cars.
And according to a recent report from Strategy&, PWC’s strategy consulting business, the country’s low- or zero-emissions fleet is set to grow at an average 50 per cent annually in the coming five years, spurred on by electric-car makers’ desire to promote their products, and their relatively low running costs.