Great article, thank you. Reading between the lines of your data, it sounds like the overall car market in China is much smaller, per capita, than in the US. Despite having a significantly larger population (~4X that of US), they sell only ~30M new cars annually compared to the US's ~20M. Working class, semi-rural, blue-collar workers in the US buy ICE trucks, often new. I'd imagine someone from a similar social strata in China is not at all in the market for a vehicle, and if they were-- they would have no use for a vehicle from a segment like light-duty trucks (which is, of course, dominated by ICE entrants).
I do not want to discount China's innovation or achievements in the EV space but I do wonder if the uptake rates are really comparable. If I had to guess, the buyers of EVs in China are perhaps not so different than the buyers of EVs in the US (white collar, upper middle class)-- it is just that the size of that sub-market is much larger in China and the lower-classes in China are not able to afford cars at all.
China is also ahead of the US/Europe in the commercial truck BEV/HFCEV space as a percent of new vehicles sold, but not nearly to the extremes as is shown in the data for automotive sales (40% of new car sales is insane). Makes me suspect other factors at play in the automotive comparison.
As a rule, other factors are always at play. I would agree that China and the US are hard to compare, and maybe we shouldn't even. For many reasons, some of which you mention, China can move faster toward an EV fleet than the US, but it doesn't matter much if the electricity is generated by coal. I should have mentioned that.
At the same time, China's GDP per capita has been rising from near 0 in 1990 to almost $20k per person in 2022. This allows more people in China to buy cars, and even if they were all EVs it is still an increase in energy demand. It's not really a win in terms of energy use.
Great article, thank you. Reading between the lines of your data, it sounds like the overall car market in China is much smaller, per capita, than in the US. Despite having a significantly larger population (~4X that of US), they sell only ~30M new cars annually compared to the US's ~20M. Working class, semi-rural, blue-collar workers in the US buy ICE trucks, often new. I'd imagine someone from a similar social strata in China is not at all in the market for a vehicle, and if they were-- they would have no use for a vehicle from a segment like light-duty trucks (which is, of course, dominated by ICE entrants).
I do not want to discount China's innovation or achievements in the EV space but I do wonder if the uptake rates are really comparable. If I had to guess, the buyers of EVs in China are perhaps not so different than the buyers of EVs in the US (white collar, upper middle class)-- it is just that the size of that sub-market is much larger in China and the lower-classes in China are not able to afford cars at all.
China is also ahead of the US/Europe in the commercial truck BEV/HFCEV space as a percent of new vehicles sold, but not nearly to the extremes as is shown in the data for automotive sales (40% of new car sales is insane). Makes me suspect other factors at play in the automotive comparison.
As a rule, other factors are always at play. I would agree that China and the US are hard to compare, and maybe we shouldn't even. For many reasons, some of which you mention, China can move faster toward an EV fleet than the US, but it doesn't matter much if the electricity is generated by coal. I should have mentioned that.
At the same time, China's GDP per capita has been rising from near 0 in 1990 to almost $20k per person in 2022. This allows more people in China to buy cars, and even if they were all EVs it is still an increase in energy demand. It's not really a win in terms of energy use.