China's electric-car revolution may be at risk of grinding to a halt.
Only one-tenth of the 500,000 electric cars and plug-in hybrid vehicles its carmakers plan to produce by 2015 would be able to find a buyer on the mainland unless the central government rolled out supporting policies or extra incentives to boost sales, analysts said.
While sales of new-energy vehicles on the mainland during the first quarter of this year exceeded those for the whole of last year, nearly 80 per cent of the 10,202 sales in the first three months were of conventional hybrid vehicles, which are partly fuelled by petrol. Pure electric and plug-in hybrid cars accounted for only one-fifth of the sales, according to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers.
China's car manufacturers have big plans for green vehicles. Beijing Automobile Works and Guangzhou Automotive are set to produce up to 200,000 new-energy vehicles a year by 2015, while Changan Automotives aims to make about 150,000 by 2014.
Veteran auto analyst Yale Zhang Yu is careful to distinguish between the different types of new-energy vehicle. 'There are a lot of varieties under the umbrella of new-energy car. Among them, electric cars and plug-in hybrid vehicles still make up a very small portion because facilities for charging them are incomplete,' Zhang said.
He says sales of these vehicles on the mainland may not exceed 10 per cent of the government's target over the next three years unless Beijing requires its entire public fleet to be either electric or hybrid or further boosts the subsidies to buyers.
