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China has just released its newest 5-year development plan for plugin vehicles — its 15th — and the plan includes a target of reaching 70% plugin vehicle (or “new energy vehicle”) sales by 2030. That sounds pretty good — certainly much better than the US will do, and probably better than Europe will do. However, when you look at where the market is already, one has to think that it’s not super ambitious and the country might do much better.
Just to clarify, this 70% plugin vehicle share target is for passenger vehicle sales. The target for commercial vehicle sales is 40% plugin vehicle share. The thing is: the market was already at 61% (60.6%) last month. With that being the case, how much more needs to change to get to 70%, and how much will actually change in the industry and market by then?
Of course, as we’ve seen, several Chinese EV producers are keen to grow their sales well beyond what they can achieve even in China, so are targeting more and more sales abroad as well. That’s not the focus of this 5-year plan, but adding those ambitious targets onto the country’s targets, some of those automakers are looking to achieve huge EV sales numbers.
Naturally, as is the trend lately, a strong focus was also put on autonomous driving in the 5-year plan.
Beyond superficial targets and basically simple forecasts, though, the 5-year plan also gets into some complicated, difficult topics and the nitty gritty of the growing the industry sustainably. “Alongside broader adoption, the plan explicitly calls for stronger capacity monitoring and controls, strict conditions for projects establishing new standalone NEV manufacturers, and tighter management of battery production capacity,” CnEVPost writes. “China will step up mergers, restructuring and cross-regional consolidation among automakers, using market-based and legal mechanisms to phase out outdated and inefficient capacity and improve overall utilization.
“Oversight of market competition is another priority. The plan calls for stronger antitrust, unfair competition and pricing enforcement, as well as curbs on improper local efforts to attract investment through unauthorized subsidies, tax breaks and preferential land policies.
“The document also calls for better oversight of industry data disclosures and corporate payments, action against improper market intervention, and faster development of a unified national market.”
Sounds smart. If only every country was as logical, sensible, and intelligent.
Along with the above, there were also key parts focused on:
- automotive chips
- critical basic materials
- operating systems
- industrial software
- battery safety
- charging rates
- low-temperature performance
- AI
- smart homes and robots
- vehicle efficiency
- V2G
- heavy-duty electric trucks
- and labor productivity.
Again, can we get some of that logical foresight, common sense, and vision over here in the United States?
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