Engineering news
Vice-minister of industry and information technology Xin Guobin said the Chinese government was working with regulators on a timetable to end production and sales of the vehicles. “Those measures will certainly bring profound changes for our car industry's development,” he told Xinhua, China’s official news agency.
The UK and France have recently made similar announcements, with measures set to come into place by 2040, but China is the world’s biggest car market. However, it is likely to take longer for the ruling to come into place.
“The implementation of the ban for such a big market like China can be later than 2040,” Liu Zhijia, an assistant general manager at Chinese carmaker Chery Automobile Co, told Bloomberg. “That will leave plenty of time for everyone to prepare.”
Manufacturers in China already have strict targets – they must ensure that 8% of their vehicles are electric or hybrid by the end of next year, and 12% by the end of 2020. A lot of the impact will depend on the details of the ban, said Chris Brace, deputy director of the Powertrain Vehicle Research Centre at the University of Bath.
“I’d be very interested to see more detail about what exactly they’re going to ban and when,” he told Professional Engineering. If the ban follows similar lines to those of the UK and France, Brace said it is likely that there will still be a significant number of hybrid vehicles on the roads, even if there are no solely fossil-fuel-powered models.
That’s due to range issues, and a lack of credible options for long-distance road haulage. “There’s still no compelling case that says we can move away from hybridised tech, but they will be the mainstream,” said Brace.
China made 28 million cars last year, almost a third of the worldwide total, as its growing middle class moves into vehicle ownership, so the ban could prove important when it comes to cutting emissions. “Because it’s an emerging market it’s easier to shape by government intervention,” said Brace. “In theory you’ve got a lot more flexibility to shape the way the market develops.”
However, he added that passenger vehicles are only a small part of the overall emissions problem. “You have to look at it globally and across all of the users and sources of energy, and only when you’ve got that understood will you see what the end game really looks like,” he said.
Nick Molden, CEO and founder of Emissions Analytics, told PE that China's new regulations around petrol and diesel cars meant that the move was probably not necessary to reduce emissions. However, he added that it was a clever strategic move as the country seeks to position itself as a major player in the growing electric car market. "They're positioning themselves to export that expertise around the world," he said. "It really just aligns their domestic objectives with their global industrial policies."