Despite tax incentives, Chinese consumers don't want Chinese-made plug-ins
Some in China, including communists like Premier Wen Jiabao and even some government agencies, are beginning to have cold feet when it comes to China’s bets on the future of plug-in vehicles, both as a solution to China’s foreign energy dependence, and as a way to make the Chinese auto industry a world leader.
Likewise, the latest Pike forecast for hybrids and plug-in vehicles suggests that most government targets for plug-in adoption, such as US and German targets, will fall far short of being met.
Overall, Pike is forecasting that hybrids and plug-ins will achieve a worldwide market penetration of 13.9 million units by 2017, led by hybrids, and that worldwide hybrid and plug-in sales will reach about 3 million unit sales per year in 2017, led by the Asian Pacific region. In North America, Pike predicts that hybrids and plug-ins will achieve 4.9 percent of total vehicle share, again led by cordless hybrid cars.
Yet, Pike could be far off based on the latest news coming out of China according to Forbes and the Financial Times. It’s not that China is necessarily going to back away from plug-in vehicles; however, there is a good chance that China is going reduce their short-to-midterm electrification expectations while embracing other alternatives, such as more focus on conventional hybrids, more efficient ICE engines and alternative fuels.
Did Pike take this potential into consideration when highlighting China as a key to 2017 hybrid and plug-in sales?
Regardless, electrification is inevitable and most experts agree that China will still see electrification as the long term end goal, despite the fact that China is beginning to accept that electrification will take much longer than once expected, especially if most solutions are largely built in China. Hence hybrid cars might be far more important than plug-ins for some time.
Therefore, the real energy question today seems to be what does the world do in the interim to electrification, since mainstreamed electrification is going to take many decades to achieve, especially if replacing the billion+ legacy fleet of autos is added into the equation? Can the world just wait, or is it time for a more serious and robust energy solution’s conversation?
