What country has gone all electric

In China, a Big Auto Show Returns to a Country That Has Gone Electric

A hall showing off electric vehicles made by Nio, XPeng Motors, Zeekr and dozens of other Chinese companies was mobbed with visitors. An area nearby full of gasoline-powered cars by foreign brands barely got a second look by anyone.

At the same event, Volkswagen, which vies with Toyota to be the worlds biggest seller of cars with combustion engines, issued a bold forecast: Within two years, half the cars sold in China, the worlds largest automobile market, will be electric, up from only 6 percent in 2020.

The theme at the Shanghai auto show this week was clear. Electric cars are here to stay, and Chinese automakers are leading the field.

Silvio Pietro Angori, the chief executive and managing director of Pininfarina of Italy, a nearly century-old car design business, said the global industry was not going back.

The internal combustion engine, he said, is done, its gone, it doesnt exist any more.

The Shanghai auto show is one of the worlds biggest, and the first of its size in China since 2019. During the pandemic, when Chinas borders were sealed because of zero Covid precautions, its auto industry was quietly transformed and the market share of foreign companies shrank. Today half the cars sold in Shanghai itself are already electric.

Brian Gu, the president and vice chairman of Xpeng, said his company planned to reduce the cost of building a powertrain primarily the battery and electric motor by 25 percent by the end of the year. Powertrains, particularly the batteries, make up about two-fifths of Xpengs overall cost of building an electric car.

Ashwani Gupta, the chief operating officer of Nissan, one-upped Xpeng, saying his companys latest designs would cut powertrain costs by 30 percent. Shohei Yamazaki, the chairman of Nissans China investments subsidiary, said Nissan would rely heavily on Chinese suppliers.

Price competition in China is very fierce right now, he said.

Chinese brands have adopted unusual electric car designs while foreign companies and their Chinese joint ventures have played it safe. The wheels are nearly at the corners of the Chinese brand cars, an architecture that also allows more room for batteries under the floor in the middle. Nio and Xpeng have chosen sleek designs, while Changan, based in western China, is making cars so rectangular that they look faintly Cubist.

Some of that comes from the freedom from legacy, said Felix Kilbertus, the chief creative officer at Pininfarina.

Great Wall, a Chinese maker of sport utility vehicles, has a new electric car brand, Ora, that is targeted to women. It named car models for cats, partly to appeal to lovers of the Hello Kitty brand. It has an electric car that strongly resembles a Volkswagen Beetle.

The main market for electric cars so far is China E.V.s were a quarter of Chinas market last year, compared with less than 6 percent in the United States.

Most of the cars displayed at the auto show use lithium batteries, the current industry standard, though companies are developing vehicles that run fully or partly on batteries made of sodium.

At the moment, there is a glut of lithium batteries, but long term many in the industry believe sodium can become a viable alternative or supplement to lithium as a key ingredient in E.V. batteries. For one thing, the production of sodium batteries would be better for the climate.

Toyotas chief scientist, Gill Pratt, contended at a session of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January that overall greenhouse gas emissions could be reduced more by replacing 90 gasoline cars with hybrid cars than by using the same amount of scarce lithium to build one battery-electric car.

If you think about the total amount of lithium that the world has, the key is lets use it where it does the most good, he said.

Toyota has a vested interest in questioning the availability of lithium. It owns many key patents for hybrid cars, and has emphasized them over entirely electric cars that require far more lithium. American and European automakers like Ford Motor and Volkswagen, as well as most Chinese automakers, are still betting on battery-electric cars.

Prototype cars with all-sodium batteries that were disclosed in recent weeks by Chinese domestic carmakers and battery manufacturers have been low-budget microcars. One of them, the Sihao Huaxianzi from JAC Motors, in collaboration with HiNA, a sodium battery start-up, is designed for a top speed of 75 miles an hour.

Pulkit Khurana, a co-founder of Battery Smart, an Indian company that provides batteries for three-wheeled auto rickshaws, expressed doubt that any technology, including sodium, would displace conventional lithium batteries soon. And with the price of lithium having dropped by two-thirds since November, the cost of lithium batteries is likely to drop significantly, he said.

A midsize car or sport utility vehicle would have enough room for a far larger sodium battery than the low-cost subcompacts that Chinese manufacturers are initially building. Another possibility is to use a combination of sodium and lithium cells in a single car battery.

Using an artificial intelligence computer program, Chinas CATL, the worlds largest manufacturer of electric car batteries, has figured out the complex electronics and programming for battery packs with some lithium cells and some sodium cells, said Huang Qisen, the deputy dean of companys research institute.

CATL the companys full name is Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd. said at the auto show that it would make sodium battery cars in cooperation with Chery, a Chinese automaker that is strongest in manufacturing low-cost subcompacts. But both companies declined to provide any details.

Switching to sodium could solve one of the biggest problems with lithium batteries, which put out much less electricity in freezing temperatures.

Because of chemical differences between sodium and lithium, a sodium battery loses less than a tenth of its power at very cold temperatures, according to battery chemistry experts.

It is promising, said Ouyang Chuying, the president of research and development at CATL. Sodium has no resource limit.

Li You contributed research. Jack Ewing contributed reporting from New York.

Countries and automakers agree to go all-electric by 2040 in weak new goal set at COP26

At COP26, several major countries and automakers have agreed to set a new goal to go all-electric by 2040.

The goal is uninspired and likely useless.

The 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP26, is currently being held in Glasgow, where world leaders have gathered to update their goals and plans to address climate change.

Amid the conference today, several participating nations issued a new declaration regarding the transition to electric vehicles.

They have agreed to move to all new sales of zero-emission cars and vans globally by 2040:

As representatives of governments, businesses, and other organisations with an influence over the future of the automotive industry and road transport, we commit to rapidly accelerating the transition to zero emission vehicles to achieve the goals of theParis Agreement.

Together, we will work towards all sales of new cars and vans being zero emissionglobally by 2040, and by no later than 2035 in leading markets.

Heres a list of the nations that have joined the declaration:

• Austria
• Azerbaijan
• Cambodia
• Canada
• Cape Verde
• Chile
• Croatia
• Cyprus
• Denmark
• Dominican Republic
• El Salvador
• Finland
• Ghana
• Kenya
• Iceland
• Ireland
• Israel
• Lithuania
• Luxembourg
• Mexico
• Morocco
• Netherlands
• New Zealand
• Norway
• Paraguay
• Poland
• Rwanda
• Slovenia
• Sweden
• Turkey
• United Kingdom
• Uruguay

While the US hasnt joined the declaration, several states have, including California, New York, and Washington.

Several automakers and companies have also joined the declaration, including Ford, GM, Mercedes-Benz, Jaguar Land Rover, and Volvo.

Electreks take

In my opinion, this is a weak and unambitious goal.

There are several nations in that pledge that have already individually announced more aggressive timelines to phase out fossil fuel-powered cars.

Norway is aiming for 2025, and it is on a path to achieving it even sooner.

The Netherlands, a country that has also signed the declaration, has previously announced a ban on gas and diesel cars by 2030.

These goals are more ambitious and actually reflect a more realistic timeline of the shift in consumer demand for electric vehicles.

As I have often stated before, I believe that there will be a major shift in consumer demand around 2024-25 that will result in virtually all new car buyers realizing that their next car is going to have to be electric.

Many automakers wont be ready for this, but its going to happen as buyers realize that electric vehicles are not only a better proposition out of the box with all the compelling models that are going to be available by then, but it will also make no financial sense when accounting for resale value and gas savings.

FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.

Which countries have plans for all new cars to be electric, and when?

Plug-in electric cars currently make up a fairly small percentage of the millions of new vehicles sold globally.

But within the next two decades, they may be the only new cars available for sale in certain countries.

Multiple countries have announced plans to end the sale of new internal-combustion cars as a way to cut carbon emissions.

DON'T MISS: Norway's Goal: All New Cars Will Be Emission-Free By 2025 To Cut Carbon (Aug 2015)

So which one will be the first?

Norway is likely the friendliest nation in the world for electric cars, and it was the first to discuss making all new cars electrically powered (whether via batteries or hydrogen fuel cells).

The Scandinavian country already offers generous incentives to electric-car buyers, and has built up substantial charging infrastructure.

Oslo street scene: Nissan Leaf, Volkswagen e-Golf, Tesla Model S, July 2015

Electric cars already account for an average 24 percent of new-car sales in Norway, but certain politicians are pushing for them to make up 100 percent of new-car sales by 2025.

This goal was first proposed last August by Ola Elvestuen, a member of Norway's parliament and Chair of the Standing Committee on Energy and the Environment.

Norway's major political parties have now agreed to this "complete ban" on new internal-combustion cars, The Independent reported earlier this month.

MORE: India's ambitious goal: all electric vehicles on roads by 2030

The Netherlands is also moving to end sales of new gasoline and diesel cars by 2025.

In April, the Dutch parliament passed a motion to that effect, although it would still have to be approved by the senate to become law.

Hybrids would still be allowed under the proposed rule, and internal-combustion cars sold before 2025 would be grandfathered for operation until the ends of their lives.

Erasmus Bridge, Rotterdam, by Flickr user Martin de Lusenet (used under CC License)

Like Norway, The Netherlands boasts significant electric-car incentives, and electric cars account for a greater share of sales than in most countries.

Both Norway and The Netherlands also have concentrated populations, meaning short average commuting distances that won't tax shorter-range electric cars.

That's less true of Germany, where electric cars currently account for a relatively low percentage of sales.

Yet Deputy Economy Minister Rainer Baake believes the country should ban sales of new gasoline and diesel cars by 2030.

Baake believes an emission-free car fleet is the only way to meet Germany's goal of cutting carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050, according to Bloomberg.

Smart Fortwo Electric Drive and Mercedes-Benz B-Class Electric Drive at driving school.

The government also wants to put 1 million electric cars on German roads by 2020.

Right now, electric cars only account for about 0.6 percent of new-vehicle sales in Germany, although an incentives program approved by lawmakers in May could help boost sales.

The country with the most ambitious electric-car goal, though, may be India.

Rather than simply ending sales of new internal-combustion cars, India's government wants to make all cars in the country electric by 2030.

This would hinge on an incentive program that would allow people to buy electric cars very cheaply.

Smog in Dehli, India (by Flickr user Mfield)

However, the proposal faces the challenge of instigating mass electric-car adoption in one of the world's most populous nations, and creating the necessary infrastructure to support all of those new cars.

Many Indian homes do not have access to electricity at all, and the country currently relies heavily on fossil fuels to generate power.

But with some of the worst air pollution in the world, India may have the greatest incentive of any country to make all of the cars on its roads electric.

_______________________________________________

Follow GreenCarReports on Facebook and Twitter