Looks like over half of that is in China. That’s a command economy for you. If Xi says everyone will have electric cars, everyone has electric cars.
–Peter
Look at it by population: China > Europe > USA
Look at it by income or wealth (which is needed to buy a car): China<Europe<USA
–Peter <== who might have USA and Europe backwards, but that doesn’t change the point.
Is that the real reason?
Maybe the Chinese public finds that EV are more economical for them than ICE. Maybe in EV vehicles are cheaper the ICE vehicles. Maybe the cost of gasoline in China is high. Maybe the people are sick and tired of living with air pollution. China is building clean energy power plants much faster than any other country to get rid of the pollution. I guess Xi wants clean energy, clean transportation and clean air.
In 2022, China’s renewable energy capacity reached 1160.8 GW, which is almost three and a half times the United States’ capacity. China has had the world’s largest solar power capacity since 2015 and the largest wind power capacity since 2016. In 2023, China installed double the amount of solar capacity as the rest of the world combined, and 66% more wind turbines than in 2022.
In 2023, China invested an estimated 6.3 trillion yuan ($890 billion) in clean energy sectors, which is a 40% increase from 2022. Clean energy accounted for 13% of China’s fixed asset investments in 2023, up from 9% in 2022.
Wind and solar energy are expected to overtake coal in the country’s electricity production capacity for the first time in 2024, making up 40% of total installed capacity.
The surge in clean-energy investment comes as China’s real-estate sector shrank for the second year in a row. This shift positions the clean-energy industry as a key part not only of China’s energy and climate efforts, but also of its broader economic and industrial policy.
In China, electric vehicles (EVs) are generally cheaper than internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles. According to a Reuters report, more than 60% of EVs sold in 2023 in China were cheaper than their ICE equivalents. JATO reports that the cheapest EV in China is 8% less expensive than the cheapest ICE vehicle. In contrast, in the US and Europe, EVs are 146% and 92% more expensive than ICE vehicles, respectively.
Yes.
Everything you cite is true. But it’s also true that those things were accomplished in a short time because Xi demanded that they be done. He also adequately funded these projects. All benefits of a command economy.
Not that i’d want to live in one, mind you. But when you have a dictator that isn’t fully focused on his own personal benefits (which is a rare thing), a country can accomplish things much faster than a democracy, where you have to spend a lot of time on consensus building.
—Peter
I also think Xi knows there is pressure on him from:
- International agreements on climate change
- The people of China wanting clean air for their health
- To have the image of China as a clean and healthy country
- The economic benefits of clean energy and transportation
From nowhere other than himself. He is a dictator, not a public servant. A somewhat benevolent dictator, but a dictator nonetheless.
The one thing he wants is to supplant the US as the world’s superpower.
The items you cite are potential ways to accomplish his goal. He feels no pressure from them, but instead views them as steps toward his goal. He wants to do them. He is not pressured to do them from outside forces.
Remember that the most efficient organization in terms of accomplishing things quickly is one with a single leader vested with all decision making authority. In a business, that would be a CEO. In a country, that’s a dictator.
—Peter
One of the major tools in China was to limit the number of liscences for ICE cars. This resulted in long waiting lists to buy them, and demand shifted to EVs.
DB2
It also escapes no ones notice that almost every advanced economy has an auto industry, and that comes with great benefits as well as significant drawbacks. Having had air pollution worse than the worst LA smog, there are two benefits to promoting EVs by use of subsidies as well as limitations on ICE vehicles. The first is taking over another incipient industry: that of EVs worldwide, and the second is the lessening of the concentration of air pollution haze that hung over so many Chinese cities.
It’s really quite amazing to see the success of a command economy in such a short time in China, while the same-ish structure is such a disaster in other places like North Korea and Russia. (During World War II the US became a command economy, with production geared towards production ever more aircraft, tanks, ammunition and war materiel. And it worked. But you really don’t want to live like that for a long time, and luckily we didn’t.)
Do you have a reference for this story?
I don’t have a reference but this was news quite a long time ago as well as a very steep price for them. I heard the news when there was terrible air pollution in Beijing.
https://electrek.co/2019/06/06/china-boost-ev-sales-license-plate-quotas/
The Captain
Been pretty widely circulated. Here’s another:
They manipulated the license plate quotas to help EVs even in 2019. People living in free countries have a hard time understanding how much control government has in non-free countries. Heck, even Singapore, a relatively free country, has VERY tight license place quotas to reduce the number of cars on the road.
[NOTE: Ha, same article, but different preview. Weird!]
The fallout of the banking industry in China has gone down the tubes. China keeps digging a deeper hole.
I posted several articles about it on the Climate Change board, including wondering why California didn’t take that approach. Check with the Fool for their archives. 
DB2