China Tries to Electrify Clean Car Market as Consumers Yawn

Jun 10, 2014

China Tries to Electrify Clean Car Market as Consumers Yawn

From next year, Chinese owners of electric cars will be able to zip from Beijing to Hong Kong, stopping off en route at charging stations, according to media reports.

But even as the number of new initiatives aimed at addressing the country’s lack of charging stations for electric cars increases, more data has emerged that suggests electric vehicles may becoming even less popular among Chinese consumers.

First up for the cross-country charging plan will be Hubei, a province in central China, where construction of 10 charging stations will kick off soon.

Each station will accommodate up to eight cars, and a charging time of 20 minutes will give a car enough power to travel 180 kilometers, the report said. It didn’t give a concrete timeline.

Charging stations also will be scattered every 38 kilometers along the 1,500-kilometer expressway from Beijing to the southern province of Hunan, which forms the major part of the highway linking the Chinese capital to Hong Kong.

Separately, a story on the People’s Daily website said 1,000 public fast-charging stations for electric vehicles will be built in Beijing within this year.

While these developments will be a source of encouragement to players in the electric-vehicle industry, China still needs to move fast if it’s to come anywhere near its goal of having 500,000 plug-in hybrid and electric vehicles on the road by next year and five million by 2020. Plug-in hybrids are cars that can run on either gasoline or electricity.

China had hoped to have 400,000 charging pillars for such vehicles in place by next year, but work is behind schedule. A charging station is a group of individual charging pillars.

According to data from the State Grid Corp. of China, as of the end of 2013 it had finished completion of 400 charging stations that can accommodate up to 19,000 electric cars.

Electric car makers are also plowing ahead with their own plans to build out charging infrastructure.

Tesla Motors has plans to develop its own nationwide supercharger networks that would allow owners to make long-distance trips between major cities free of charge. It already has two in Shanghai, and another one will come online in Beijing this month, a company spokeswoman said in late May.

Germany’s BMW recently announced plans to set up 50 charging stations in Shanghai together with State Grid Shanghai Electric Vehicle Co., a unit of one of China’s top two state-owned utility providers, and a property company.

Denza, the electric car produced by a joint venture between China’s BYD and Daimler,  has teamed up with Switzerland’s ABB to make and market home, wall-mounted, electric-car chargers in China.

Amid these baby steps comes news sure to disappoint those hoping the country will be able to meet its electric-vehicle target. In June, the number of applicants for license plates for new-energy cars in Beijing dropped about 30% compared with February. The city holds a license-plate lottery every two months.