A shift from gasoline and diesel vehicles for both private and public transport to new energy is a global inevitability. At the highest level the only questions are how quickly that change takes place and the relative roles of a) the market and b) legislation in driving the transition. The French government plans to ban diesel cars from the streets of Paris by 2025 and to end the sale of gasoline vehicles by 2040. So how will China’s own electrification experience play out?

There can be little doubt that China provides an incredible opportunity for electrification of road transport. Because Chinese automakers have come relatively late to e-vehicle technology, the market has not suffered exposure to the heavy, expensive and unreliable early models of the 1990s, so market perceptions are more associated with performance, economy, reliability and the perception of environmental responsibility (although it must be stressed that e-vehicles don’t eliminate carbon emissions, rather they displace them to the primary power generating source). China is well positioned to exploit the potential in e-vehicles because it has both scale and growth potential, not having had the West’s 90-year love affair with the gasoline automobile. It also has the capacity to deliver physical infrastructure at scale and at speed, which will be required to service a market shift to intensive e-vehicle use for personal transportation.

China is also adept at dissecting the lessons of history and is becoming a master of the technology leapfrog. Witness its great success in e-commerce, in high-speed rail, in e-healthcare. Failure of earlier e-vehicle deployments outside Asia was associated with immature technology, an abundance of cheap gasoline, and the lack of widespread planning incentives.

The e-vehicle market presently splits into two important segments: pure electric, which relies exclusively on stored energy carried on board (batteries, capacitors, fuel cells in a variety of combinations, but mainly lithium-ion batteries), and plug-in hybrids, or PHEVs. Pure electric implies a range that is currently limited to around half that (at best) of a conventional gasoline engine private car. PHEVs open up opportunities to extend the operating range of e-vehicles.

Wang Chuanfu, the chairman and president of automaker BYD, has said that PHEV will remain the mainstream of global private car development, and this is a reasonable proposition. But China is different. Chinese urbanites tend toward a style of vehicle use that is much more e-vehicle-friendly. China is also unique in the world for its universal adoption of e-bike transportation — witness the strong domestic market – personal transportation with a 50-kilometer limitation.

China’s domestic infrastructure is also closer to the needs of an e-vehicle user community than most Western cities. Urbanites tend to occupy high-rise accommodation with designated parking and on-site e-bike charging stations, thus much of the infrastructure is already in place. Western counterparts park on the street and need to hunt for occasional on-street charging stations.

While Western owners typically do a great deal of intercity driving, the existence of a cheap and efficient high-speed rail network means that Chinese drivers have a different pattern of vehicle use: Short daily commutes, small families and a strong affinity for fresh produce, hence more frequent visits to local markets rather than the “monthly shop” at a distant mall. So while PHEVs may be the vehicles of choice in the West because of their extended range, China offers huge potential to become the world’s first country dominated by pure electric users. This is reflected in Wang’s statistics, which suggest clearly that the ratio of e-vehicle sales to PHEVs in China is considerably higher than that of the European Union and United States markets.

Long-range users in any region such as professional drivers will clearly target PHEVs until affordable, high-speed battery exchange programs become ubiquitous. Although Wang predicts with confidence the electrification of China’s taxi fleet by 2020, this seems an optimistic scenario, unless driven by legislation or massive State subsidies. Public procurement also plays an important role here and, given the large role of government agencies and State-owned enterprises in China, it is reasonable to assume that a State-led migration to new energy vehicles would proceed more rapidly than one that depends simply on tax breaks, hence Wang’s accurate citing of special service vehicles as a ready market (because they are definitively short-haul and typically State-operated).

China’s e-vehicle sales already outnumber EU and US markets. It’s not difficult to see why. User behaviour combined with market scale and the rapid take-up of the sharing economy mean that individual and fleet users will switch to new energy vehicles far earlier than most Western countries. As the user base grows and engineers gain greater in-service experience, we will see development in key technologies that underpin e-vehicle operation – materials for light structures and energy storage, artificial intelligence and sensors for power management and autonomous operation, and high-energy-efficient drives and actuators.

Clearly battery technology remains a key challenge to gaining greater market penetration, and we continue to see incremental improvements in lithium-ion battery technology – important innovations such as the introduction of graphene hybrid batteries will continue to help improve power curves, lengthen battery life and extend the operating range of vehicles. However plentiful lithium reserves may be, we should also learn from history and remember that even these resources are finite. Lithium recovery from recycled battery packs is inefficient and uneconomic at present – the world needs better solutions here if we are to avoid replacing one non-renewable power source with another. China’s strength in materials science and especially electrochemistry means that it will continue to play a key role in leading this fast-growing industry, and its burgeoning AI capability means that China will also be one of the dominant forces in self driving or autonomous vehicles — but that is another story!

The author is provost of the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Watch.

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