2nd ICAI 2022

International Conference on Automotive Industry 2022

Mladá Boleslav, Czech Republic

Besides the incentives and regulations listed above, the Chinese government provides support to some Chinese manufacturers of electric vehicles. The central and local governments directly sponsor the building of new factories and R&D centers, foreign acquisitions, and exports of products to the global market (Mercator Institute for China Studies, 2021). 3.2 Electric Car Sales in China and Worldwide Most of the growth in electromobility in the world has come after the year 2015. In 2010 only 8,200 electric vehicles (including battery electric vehicles and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles) were sold worldwide, of which 1,400 were sold in China (17 percent of world sales). In 2014 more than 250,000 electric vehicles (EVs) were sold worldwide, of which 22 percent were sold in China. China has quickly become a large part of the market for new electric vehicles. In 2017, when global sales of EVs exceeded one million vehicles (1,174,644), China approached a 50 percent share with sales of 579,000 EVs. The rapid growth in worldwide sales of EVs increased the total number of electric vehicles in operation. In 2015 their number exceeded one million, of which a quarter were in use in China. In 2018 China again achieved the highest share (54 percent) of total sales of electric vehicles in the world. Since then that share has slightly declined. As the absolute number of EVs sold in China has increased, so has their share in the number of personal automobiles sold. In 2018 the share of EVs in the total sales of personal automobiles in China increased to 4.6 percent, compared to the world average of 2.5 percent. The latest figures available are for 2020, when almost the entire world was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The year 2020 was marked by a very rapid drop in production worldwide as the pandemic closed production plants for several weeks. As the supply of electric and hybrid cars increases, so does the demand for them, and the number of such vehicles sold worldwide is rapidly growing. This has been facilitated by tighter limits on emissions which carmakers in some parts of the world (including the EU) are required to meet ( Šaroch et al ., 2021). Sales of EVs increased more than 40 percent in the first half of 2020, or by almost three million cars. However, sales of new EVs in China grew only about 10 percent, and the share of electric vehicles sold in China declined to only 39 percent of world sales. The timeline of the pandemic in China was different from that of other regions because of its earlier outbreak there. The total number of new registrations of automobiles decreased by about 9 percent in 2020. In the first half of 2020 new registrations of EVs in China showed a smaller increase than that of the entire automotive market. However, in the second half of the year, when the coronavirus crisis began to subside, this trend reversed. Thus, the share of EVs in overall sales for all of 2020 grew by 5.7%, which amounted to almost 1 percentage point more than in the previous year, when that share was 4.8 percent. Worldwide in 2020 there was a significant increase in the share of EVs in overall car sales, to 4.6 percent from 2.7 percent in 2019. According to information from the International Energy Agency (IEA), in the next ten years the pace of sales of electric vehicles will greatly increase. It is projected that in 2025, 4.5 million EVs will be sold in China alone, which will be 40 percent of the

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