Support CleanTechnica's work through a Substack subscription, on Patreon, or on Stripe. Help us produce all of the high-quality, original content we publish week after week despite the challenges of content-scraping AI, antisocial media, inflation, and other hurdles.
China has just released its newest 5-year development plan for plugin vehicles — its 15th — and the plan includes a target of reaching 70% plugin vehicle (or “new energy vehicle”) sales by 2030. That sounds pretty good — certainly much better than the US will do, and probably better than Europe will do. However, when you look at where the market is already, one has to think that it’s not super ambitious and the country might do much better.
Just to clarify, this 70% plugin vehicle share target is for passenger vehicle sales. The target for commercial vehicle sales is 40% plugin vehicle share. The thing is: the market was already at 61% (60.6%) last month. With that being the case, how much more needs to change to get to 70%, and how much will actually change in the industry and market by then?
Of course, as we’ve seen, several Chinese EV producers are keen to grow their sales well beyond what they can achieve even in China, so are targeting more and more sales abroad as well. That’s not the focus of this 5-year plan, but adding those ambitious targets onto the country’s targets, some of those automakers are looking to achieve huge EV sales numbers.
