Innovative Guangdong: New energy vehicles accelerate Guangzhou's green life

China is now the world's largest new-energy vehicle (NEV) market. Guangdong car makers including GAC, BYD are endeavoring to make a breakthrough in NEV tech.

The output of Guangzhou's new energy vehicles (NEVs) will reach one million units by 2025, according to the news released on the 2017 Green Car China auto show.

It is learned that electric and smart vehicles will be the important trend for auto industries in future. Exactly, Guangzhou makes great progress on the development of NEVs to boost industrial upgrading in the field.

For instance, Guangzhou GAC & BYD New Energy Autobus Co., Ltd settled down at the city's Conghua District in 2014. It produced more than 2,000 new energy autobuses with sales value amounts to billions of RMB in 2016. By 2019, all buses in Guangzhou will be equipped with electric engines.

According to Chen Zhiying, Vice Mayor of Guangzhou, GAC had begun construction of a large industrial park with an investment of more than 45 billion RMB (6.52 billion USD) for new energy and intelligent connectivity vehicles on April this year.

"Development of NEVs, connected with intelligent technology, and unmanned vehicles, will be an industrial trend in the next five to 10 years. We will make great efforts to meet the market change," said Feng Xingya, general manager of GAC Group.

Construction of the first phase of the industrial park will be finished by the end of 2018, with a designed production capacity of 200,000 NEVs a year, according to the company.

The Shenzhen-based electric-car maker BYD started producing batteries at its new plant in Xining, Northwest China's Qinghai Province.

Located inside Nanchuan Industrial Park, the new battery plant covers an area of 1 square kilometer, equivalent to 140 standard football pitches.

At the initial stage, the plant has an annual production capacity of 10 gigawatt hours (GWh) of lithium batteries. With seven production lines in total, the Xining plant will have an annual production capacity of 24 GWh of lithium batteries by 2019. The latest version of BYD’s hybrid car Tang uses the standard battery of 20 kilowatt hours, so the 24 GWh of lithium batteries could satisfy 1.2 million Tang cars.

BYD chairman Wang Chuanfu said that the plant features highly advanced production technology and it will help ease the worldwide shortage of high-end battery production capacity.

The plant adopts the latest technologies in battery production, said Wang, adding that the production process is completed using nearly 100 robotics, a manufacturing execution system, an intelligent logistics system and automated guided vehicles.

“The intelligence and automation technologies used in production and logistics have taken the lead in the world and its production efficiency has been taking the lead for at least five years in the industry,” Wang said.

Batteries are the core component of new-energy vehicles (NEVs). Industrial statistics show that the global demand for new-energy batteries will exceed 1,500 GWh in 2030. BYD expects to have a total annual production capacity of 60 GWh in 2020. At present, the capacity of the production capability of BYD plants in Shenzhen and Huizhou is 16 GWh.

With rich lithium resources, Qinghai has built a complete new-energy vehicle industrial chain from lithium mining to lithium battery and electric car production.

Authorities recently announced that China would ease foreign equity restrictions in the automobile industry and significantly lower import tariffs for vehicles, as part of the country's broader opening-up push.

Data from China Association of Automobile Manufacturers showed that China produced some 29 million automobiles and sold 28.9 million in 2017, ranking the first worldwide for nine years in a row.

In future, NEVs will gain further support in the city without purchase and traffic restrictions. Besides, Guangzhou is to build more charging points for electric vehicles.