Draft Chinese Regulations To Automakers: 'Make EVs, Or Die' China is putting a gun to the heads of its automakers. “By 2018,” the Wall Street Journal reported today, electric vehicles “must account for 8% of the maker’s production, and the percentage will rise from there.” Before the news are tweeted around the world, please note that the Journal is a bit ahead of its times. Currently, the rules are still in draft form, and a lot can change before the final regs are handed down. One thing is clear however: China’s government is forcing the electrification of its own auto industry, and quite literally so, as the bulk of China’s auto manufacturers are state-owned, in one way or the other. Message from Beijing: Make electric cars, or die. “Chinese state media has trumpeted the regulations as essentially barring car makers that don’t have new-energy capabilities,” the Wall Street Journal wrote. As so much in China, the proposed rules are a bad copy. They envision “a system with tradeable credits and minimum ratios of clean vehicles, modeled after the Zero Emission Vehicle regulation in California,” said the Chinese business magazine Caixin. Those minimum ratios would be more painful than in California: 8% in 2018, 12% in 2020. The numbers such an edict would produce are staggering. By 2018, China’s annual automobile production should be around 28.5 million units, if the 8% growth targets set by the country’s planners hold, which they usually do. 8% of that number would amount to some 2.3 million battery-electric, plug-in hybrid and fuel-cell models, cars subsumed in China under the “new electric vehicle,” or NEV, moniker. By 2020, that number would be at around 4 million NEVs. Compare that to half a million plug-in electric vehicles delivered to buyers globally in 2015. See http://ift.tt/2gyqIxH
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