What a difference a year makes! 🇨🇳 🚗
Of course, all vehicles will be electric eventually. But the future is not evenly distributed.
“Alarmed by rising oil imports, the Chinese government also moved in. ‘We have to take action,’ declared Wan Gang, China’s minister of science and technology who had once worked as an engineer for Audi in Germany and is the person most responsible for China’s EV drive. Beijing put in place a host of incentives, regulations and requirements to push “new energy autos,” making it today the world’s largest market for EVs.
The world of Auto Tech has important implications for geopolitics, opening a new front in the increasingly fraught rivalry between the U.S. and China. Beijing has made moving up the global manufacturing value chain a fundamental objective, and it has designated autos as a core strategic industry. A key plank of the Biden infrastructure plan is to “win the EV market” against China.
Though China has the largest new-car market in the world (about 50% bigger than the U.S.), it is too late for it to catch up with the established makers of gasoline-powered cars. With EVs, however, it has leapfrogged to the forefront, with almost half the world’s electric cars and the vast testing ground of its domestic market.
China also has moved aggressively to dominate the lithium-battery supply chain that is the basis of today’s EVs, with over 80% of battery cell manufacturing. In Washington, traditional concerns about energy security have been pushed aside by a growing cry for “battery security” and urgent plans to promote a domestic battery industry.”
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