New energy automotive technology breakthroughs can turn overtaking
December 29, 2022
The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology recently disclosed that the nation’s pilot cities have cumulatively promoted 38,600 new energy vehicles since 2013, which is only 11.49% of the target amount for 2013 to 2015. It can be seen that the market application of new energy vehicles is not yet mature. However, under the stimulus of policies, the investment heat of new energy vehicles has continuously increased, and car companies have also experienced low-price competition. In the absence of a market basis, the current development of the new energy auto industry is overly pursuing scale expansion, and it is easy to cause a new round of repeated construction and waste of resources in the auto industry.
This year, the state has intensively introduced policies and measures to support new energy vehicles. After the "Guidance Opinions on Accelerating the Promotion and Application of New Energy Vehicles" was announced in July, policies concerning electricity prices, taxes, and catalog management were successively implemented. According to data from the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, production and sales of new energy vehicles in the third quarter increased by 3.9 times and 3.8 times year-on-year. At the same time, the scale of investment in local new energy auto projects has expanded rapidly.
Although policy promotion and local investment can stimulate the growth of production and sales in the short term, consumer demand is the solid foundation for the development of the new energy automobile industry. According to the declaration plan, from 2013 to 2015, 39 popularization and application cities (groups) will cumulatively promote 336,000 new energy vehicles, but as of September this year, the amount of promotion completed is only 11.49% of the target volume. The proportion of completion of nearly 20 cities and regions such as Hebei Province, Xi’an, and Chengdu is less than 10%, and the proportion of new energy vehicles to be completed in 6 cities and regions such as Changchun, Harbin, Lanzhou and Haikou is 0.
Constraints on the application of new energy vehicles include inadequate facilities, safety issues, and immature technologies. What is worrying is that the promotion of new energy vehicles places too much emphasis on quantifiable indicators, leading to low prices for car companies and the tendency for local investment to develop in a deformed manner.
The newly opened Guangzhou Auto Show opened its first new energy auto exhibition hall for the first time. The show showed that compared to Tesla ModelS, BMW i3 and other foreign car products, the new car of domestic car companies generally lacks applause and acclaimed products. After subsidizing production models, the selling price is concentrated below 100,000 yuan. One of the important reasons for low-price competition among domestic car companies is the pressure from local governments to promote quantitative indicators. Affected by local support and subsidy factors, the regional sales of domestic new energy vehicle brands are very obvious. Low-priced models can cater to local requirements for quantity promotion. Local governments also use non-market channels such as bus reform and public transport procurement to absorb the pressure of indicators. . The new energy auto industry is more difficult to manufacture than the traditional auto industry, and has more capital investment in technology research and development, product safety, and index testing. If domestic auto companies continue their low-end and large-scale development, it will be difficult to achieve a virtuous cycle of input and output. .
What deserves more vigilance is that investment in the new energy auto industry faces the risk of repeated construction and waste of resources. In recent years, the application and updating of new energy vehicles have been accelerating, involving many fields such as power battery materials, lightweight vehicles, and networking. With the development of technology, the existing key components and production processes of new energy vehicles, such as batteries and motors, will be rapidly updated. Many local cities that build large-scale new energy automobile projects do not have the automotive industry foundation and lack of new energy automotive technologies. Reserves, pure pursuit of project investment and output value scale may lay the hidden dangers of overcapacity and technology elimination.
The government support policy is the main driving force for the development of new energy vehicles in the initial period, but the industry can only achieve long-term sustainable development only if it returns to market orientation. The development of new energy automobile industry should follow the principle of heavy weight and light weight, abandon the evaluation system of quantitative indicators, and rely on technological breakthroughs on the basis of market orientation to truly realize “curve passing”.
On the one hand, the new energy automobile industry needs to create a fair and effective competitive environment. The increase in production and sales volume should be oriented toward market-oriented applications. The government has speeded up the solution to the infrastructure construction that has plagued the development of new energy vehicles through policy support and capital investment. Encourage auto companies to improve the performance of new energy vehicles and reduce production costs through technological development and technological advancement. At the same time, qualifications for new energy vehicles should be gradually liberalized, and more capital should be encouraged to enter in production and business models to promote healthy competition in the new energy automotive industry. On the other hand, local governments should be encouraged to increase the scale of new energy vehicles by opening up the market. As soon as possible, local protection was abolished and local subsidy catalogues were cancelled, making local subsidy policies for new energy vehicles more fair and reasonable. At the same time, local governments should avoid setting up invisible barriers in the form of “local factory construction”, establish a national unified new energy vehicle procurement and tendering system, and encourage auto companies to compete fairly in bus reform and public transport procurement.
Shenyang Zhongda Huanxin Refrigeration Technology Co., Ltd.
