A hall showcasing electric vehicles from Nio, XPeng Motors, Zeekr and dozens of other Chinese companies was overrun with visitors. An area nearby full of foreign brand petrol cars hardly got anyone’s attention.
At the same event, Volkswagen, which rivals Toyota to be the world’s largest seller of internal combustion engine cars, made a bold prediction: within two years, half of the cars sold in China, the world’s largest car market, will be electric. of only 6 percent in 2020.
The theme at this week’s Shanghai auto show was clear. Electric cars are here to stay, and Chinese automakers are leading the way.
Silvio Pietro Angori, the chief executive and managing director of Italy’s Pininfarina, a nearly 100-year-old car design company, said the global industry is not going back.
The internal combustion engine, he said, “is done, it’s gone, it no longer exists.”
The Shanghai auto show is one of the world’s largest and the first of its size in China since 2019. During the pandemic, as China’s borders were closed due to “zero Covid” precautions, the auto industry quietly changed and market share of foreign companies shrank. Today, half of the cars sold in Shanghai itself are already electric.
Brian Gu, Xpeng’s president and vice-chairman, said his company planned to cut the cost of building a powertrain — primarily the battery and electric motor — by 25 percent by the end of the year. Powertrains, especially the batteries, account for about two-fifths of Xpeng’s total cost of building an electric car.
The rise of electric vehicles
Ashwani Gupta, Nissan’s chief operating officer, told Xpeng that his company’s latest designs would cut powertrain costs by 30 percent. Shohei Yamazaki, the chairman of Nissan’s China subsidiary, said Nissan would rely heavily on Chinese suppliers.
“Price competition in China is very fierce at the moment,” he said.
Chinese brands have adopted unusual electric car designs, while foreign companies and their Chinese joint ventures have played it safe. The wheels sit almost on the corners of the Chinese brand’s cars, an architecture that also leaves more room for batteries under the floor in the center. Nio and Xpeng have opted for clean designs, while Changan, based in western China, makes cars that are so rectangular they look vaguely cubist.
“Part of that stems from the freedom of legacy,” said Felix Kilbertus, the chief creative officer at Pininfarina.
Great Wall, a Chinese manufacturer of SUVs, has a new electric car brand, Ora, that targets women. It mentioned car models for cats, partly to appeal to lovers of the Hello Kitty brand. It has an electric car that closely resembles a Volkswagen Beetle.
The most important electric car market to date is China — EVs were a quarter of the Chinese market last year, compared to less than 6 percent in the United States.
Most of the cars shown at the auto show use lithium batteries, the current industry standard, although companies are developing vehicles that run partially or entirely on sodium batteries.
There is currently an abundance of lithium batteries, but in the long run, many in the industry believe that sodium may become a viable alternative or addition to lithium as a key ingredient in EV batteries. On the one hand, the production of sodium batteries would be better for the climate.
Toyota’s chief scientist, Gill Pratt, argued at a session of the World Economic Forum in Davos in January that total greenhouse gas emissions could be reduced more by replacing 90 petrol cars with hybrid cars than by using the same amount of scarce lithium to build one battery -electric car.
“When you think about the total amount of lithium the world has, the key is let’s use it where it does the most good,” he said.
Toyota has every interest in questioning the availability of lithium. It holds many important patents for hybrid cars and has emphasized them over all-electric cars that require much more lithium. American and European automakers such as Ford and Volkswagen, as well as most Chinese automakers, are still betting on battery electric cars.
All-sodium battery prototype cars unveiled in recent weeks by Chinese domestic automakers and battery makers are low-budget microcars. One of them, JAC Motors’ Sihao Huaxianzi, in collaboration with HiNA, a sodium battery start-up, is designed for a top speed of 120 kilometers per hour.
Pulkit Khurana, co-founder of Battery Smart, an Indian company that supplies batteries for three-wheeled auto rickshaws, doubted that any technology, including sodium, could displace conventional lithium batteries anytime soon. And with the price of lithium down by two-thirds since November, the cost of lithium batteries is likely to drop significantly, he said.
A mid-size car or SUV would have enough room for a much larger sodium battery than the cheap subcompacts that Chinese manufacturers initially build. Another possibility is to use a combination of sodium and lithium cells in one car battery.
Using an artificial intelligence computer program, China’s CATL, the world’s largest manufacturer of electric car batteries, has discovered the complex electronics and programming for battery packs containing some lithium cells and some sodium cells, said Huang Qisen, the deputy dean of the research institute of China. Company. .
CATL – the full name of the company is Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd. — said at the auto show it would make sodium-battery cars in partnership with Chery, a Chinese automaker strongest in producing low-cost subcompacts. But both companies declined to provide details.
Switching to sodium could solve one of the biggest problems with lithium batteries, which produce much less electricity at freezing temperatures.
Due to chemical differences between sodium and lithium, a sodium battery loses less than one-tenth of its capacity in very cold temperatures, according to battery chemistry experts.
“It’s promising,” said Ouyang Chuying, the president of research and development at CATL. “Sodium has no resource limit.”
Li you contributed research. Jack Ewing contributed reporting from New York.
