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Transportation China Power

China's EV Sales Set To Overtake Traditional Cars Years Ahead of West (irishtimes.com) 78

Posted by EditorDavid from the buying-batteries dept.
"Electric vehicles are expected to outsell cars with internal combustion engines in China for the first time next year," reports the Financial Times, calling it "a historic inflection point that puts the world's biggest car market years ahead of western rivals." China is set to smash international forecasts and Beijing's official targets with domestic EV sales — including pure battery and plug-in hybrids — growing about 20 per cent year on year to more than 12mn cars in 2025, according to the latest estimates supplied to the Financial Times by four investment banks and research groups. The figure would be more than double the 5.9mn sold in 2022. At the same time, sales of traditionally powered cars are expected to fall by more than 10 per cent next year to less than 11 million, reflecting a near 30 per cent plunge from 14.8 million in 2022...

Robert Liew, director of Asia-Pacific renewables research at Wood Mackenzie, said China's EV milestone signalled its success in domestic technology development and securing global supply chains for critical resources needed for EVs and their batteries. The industry's scale meant steep manufacturing cost reductions and lower prices for consumers. "They want to electrify everything," said Liew. "No other country comes close to China." While the pace of Chinese EV sales growth has eased from a post-pandemic frenzy, the forecasts suggest Beijing's official target, set in 2020, for EVs to account for 50 per cent of car sales by 2035, will be achieved 10 years in advance of schedule...

As China's EV market tracked towards year-on-year growth of near 40 per cent in 2024, the market share of foreign-branded cars fell to a record low of 37 per cent — a sharp decline from 64 per cent in 2020, according to data from Automobility, a Shanghai-based consultancy. In this month alone, GM wrote down more than $5 billion (€4.8 billion) of its business value in China; the holding company behind Porsche warned of a writedown in its Volkswagen stake of up to €20 billion; and arch rivals Nissan and Honda said they were responding to a "drastically changing business environment" with a merger.
"Meanwhile, EV sales growth has slowed in Europe and the US, reflecting the legacy car industry's slow embrace of new technology, uncertainty over government subsidies and rising protectionism against imports from China..."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the news.

China's EV Sales Set To Overtake Traditional Cars Years Ahead of West More | Reply

China's EV Sales Set To Overtake Traditional Cars Years Ahead of West

Comments Filter:

  • Communism bad, m'kay? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 04, 2025 @05:49PM (#65062311)
    American politicians previously: Communism bad, China. Be more capitalist.

    American politicians now: We can't compete in the marketplace! Sanctions! Tariffs! Bans!

    • This article is about domestic sales of EVs and clearly EV sales have decreased in most other countries. China is pushing EVs for a number of reasons including the ability to better monitor their citizens and they can also perform remote shutdowns on a citizen's EVs and even lock them inside of their vehicle. The CCP is purposely going after sales of imported EVs and other technology to boost their failing economy. Other vehicle manufacturers are looking to sell what people want and not what they are being

      • ROFL... tin foil hat post. Mobile phones are better for monitoring citizens

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by chill ( 34294 )

        This article is about domestic sales of EVs and clearly EV sales have decreased in most other countries.

        EV sales have increased in every major market. Growth rate may have decreased in some countries, but total sales has increased both in unit volume and as a percentage of all auto sales. In the US [investors.com], EV sales once again set a record at 1.3 million vehicles. For one example, Ford sold more Mustang Mach-E [motor1.com] EVs than ICE Mustang models.

        In Brazil [bnef.com], despite being at an early stage of transport electrification, Brazil has seen a rapid uptake of passenger EVs. Sales reached nearly 55,000 units in the first half of 2024,

    • using slave labor to build EVs. So yeah, sanctions & tariffs are called for.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Tablizer ( 95088 )

        Most of the west's sanctions are due to the Chinese gov't subsidizing EV & battery companies using tax breaks, discount real-estate, gov't fleet subsidies, etc.

      • using slave labor to build EVs.

        Nonsense.

        The EVs are built in Shanghai and Guangdong (Shenzen and Huizhou).

        The slave labor camps are in Xinjiang, 4000 km away.

    • You don't seem to understand how China works.

  • Different imperatives in China (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SlashTex ( 10502574 ) on Saturday January 04, 2025 @06:11PM (#65062353)
    The government is actively promoting EV sales, partially due to economics, partially due to national security.

    1 - of course, china has almost a stranglehold on current production of many of the materials (lithium, rare earths...) used in EVs and solar production.

    2- China is rightfully concerned with its vulnerability to petroleum blockades in the event of conflict. BUT, they have a metric-shit-load of coal.

    So, incenting the manufacture and purchase of EVs, which can use both of these power sources, is a no-brainer for them.
    • It's not a bad idea. Even though they'll gladly buy oil from whatever pariah state the rest of the world has embargoed, in the event of any actual conflict, it's far too easy to cut off their ability to import it and recent events have shown that pipelines are not off limits.

      China also has a relatively low rate of vehicle ownership (about 300 per 1,000 people) and although that's been increasing rapidly over that past several decades, it doesn't make as much sense for them to invest in older technology i

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Chinese car manufacturers realised that competing with fossil engines was not a winning strategy. At best they would become participants in global car sales.

      So they leapfrogged us. Went all in on EV technology.. Built the best batteries, the best drivetrains, got the cost down below parity, and put it all into mass production. And I do mean mass, on a scale that dwarfs the rest of the world combined.

      Same thing with renewables. Unbelievable amounts of it, and continuing to increase exponentially.

      We were asle

      • We were asleep at the wheel.

        And still are.

        The difference is accountability of leaders.China has a ruling elite formed out of and accountable to a large communist party apparatus. Our ruling elite is a bunch of folks from Harvard and Yale who pat one another on the back about how smart they are. Their leaders are focused on managing their country's economic progress. Ours are focused on managing perceptions. Their leaders are looking to the future. Ours are looking at the past. Their leaders are trying to lead their people in the dire

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          We have a similar problem with Eton in the UK. I don't know how we fix it. We were offered a better alternative, and rejected it.

  • China needs EVs (regardless of climate change) (Score:5, Informative)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Saturday January 04, 2025 @06:14PM (#65062355)

    They don't have (much) oil, and that's a major weak spot. Therefore electric cars, which can be powered using their domestic energy sources like coal, hydro, nuclear, and solar are needed.

    • Not having enough oil is a positive for them (and us from a pollution standpoint), its driven EV tech and created a massive local industry with great employment for them.

  • Domestic companies, as is typical, would rather fight change in the name of short term profits than embrace it for long term profit and good.

    So... since they're going to fail anyway and take a lot of taxpayer dollars with them... we should have let China sell EVs here. Open the fucking floodgates, so long as they meet our safety standards and don't have any extra features requiring or enabling C&C from Beijing.

    We could all be driving EVs for half the price and letting China deal with the environmental

    • Does China make a full size EV pickup? That is half the market here.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Hentes ( 2461350 )

      I would go even further than that. Most safety standards have been put there by automaker lobbyists and do little more than prevent competition. We need a cheap electric people's car and we need it yesterday. Either Western companies provide one, or we should remove all barriers and let Chinese manufacturers do it.

  • Until last year, 50% of VW's global profits came from its China operations. For decades its ICE vehicles were the market leader in China, and its factories were major profit centres. In those circumstances it's perhaps not unexpected that VW missed the move to EVs because no executive wanted to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. VW head office is now in a world of hurt because its Chinese ICE production lines are at a standstill and its European designed EV offerings are two generations behind the Ch

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      VW is going to license BYD's framework, bolt on some different shaped panels and rebadge it with a VW logo

      Hopefully that's the future: modular. It would make vehicles a lot less expensive and add flexibility. VW actually might have it right after-all.

  • Think of where we would be as a nation at this point in time had not Musk done a swan dive into the shallow pool. He committed the last of his funds into Tesla (and SpaceX) in order to save it because no other funding was forthcoming. At the time he figured a 50% chance of survival.

    Had he not, the story in 2025 not be "China doing more EVs than ICE vehicles." It would be "China dominates the world with its EV production that nobody can match." Oh, and here's a limited quantity of Nissan Leaf cars for

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by hdyoung ( 5182939 )
      Two responses: First, yes Musk took genuine serious risks with his own money. He’s earned his places as a titan of industry in a way that most current CEOs don’t deserve. Second, if Musk hadn’t blown open the EV market, China would be nowhere near where they are nowadays. Even now, most Chinese innovation isn’t really. They’re really good at taking ideas from someone else (I have no problem with that), they make a few small modifications (again, I have no problem with iterative

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Tesla is actually proof that we screwed up. Compare a Model 3 with Panasonic-Tesla battery, and one with a Chinese battery, otherwise identical. The Chinese one chargers faster, accelerates faster, degrades less.

        Chinese companies started doing the fundamental R&D to improve that tech long ago. While Musk was selling expensive luxury vehicles with fake promises of self driving, the Chinese were deploying massive amounts of automotive batteries are scale in commercial vehicles. Buses, taxis, trains, const

  • I'm much more curious about how Chinese EV owners charge their cars, especially those owners without home charging options. Has China figured out a way to make public charging work? Do the Chinese simply accept waiting 30 minutes for a partial fast charge? Or do they have a system that is more convenient? If they do, perhaps other countries can learn something.

  • https://www.reuters.com/articl [reuters.com]... [reuters.com]

    Lots of other sources with a basic Google search....ya know, as long as you're on the right side of the China Firewall.

  • I really don't get why a country (China) is compared to 'the West'.

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