Abstract:

In recent years, China surprised the world with the impressive growth of its electric vehicle fleet. The nation’s electric vehicle market began to take off in 2013, with four consecutive years of aggressive growth. In 2017, new plug-in electric car sales in China contributed to almost half of the total sales worldwide. Behind this success were a series of top-down macro designs, strategies, and policies that have emerged in the last decade to support the leapfrogging of the country’s automotive industry. This study comprehensively catalogues governmental actions that spurred the sales of electric cars in these cities and identifies the driving forces behind the success of the leading cities. Specifically, it includes detailed qualitative and quantitative analysis of subnational policy actions promoting electric cars and the actual market performance in the leading 30 cities in electric car sales. In addition, the subnational data also reveal some general patterns of electric car markets in China. This analysis focuses on the passenger car sector and the 30 cities that showed commitment and early success in developing the electric cars. These 30 cities collectively represented 84% of the nation’s electric car market. Figure ES 1 shows the number of electric car sales and their market penetration in the top 30 cities. The several major policy innovations by the Chinese cities studied and documented in this work add to the constantly growing global playbook of policies and contribute to finding the key ingredients to unlocking the electric vehicle markets in the remaining regions in China.