Is China taking the lead in the Electrical Vehicle Industry? Pascal’s China Lens - week 40

Title: Is China taking the lead in the Electrical Vehicle Industry?
Website: https://www.pascalcoppens.com/

CONTENT: In this video, I explain why and how China has been investing more than any other country in EVs and the infrastructure. I shed light on how Tesla is the top EV car brand in China, but is getting challenged now by a mini-EV from GM join-venture and by new data policies from government. I elaborate on how 500 Chinese EV car companies are making the EV car of the future by focusing on smart mobility and new battery business models.

TRANSCRIPT
More than a hundred years ago Henry Ford started ford motors and the whole automotive
industry just started a revolution which today is still extremely interesting to look at.
Later on it went from Detroit to Europe in Germany and France and Italy and UK, in Sweden, lots of places
where the biggest brands and the most famous companies were building the cars of the future
then later end of last century it was all about Japan and Honda and Toyota and so on
and the question is could now this century it all be about China. Could China lead the new car
industry and specifically an electrical vehicle. I believe there's a really good chance and I'm going
to talk a little bit about this. Just about a month ago at the Shanghai autoshow there was 800,000
visitors. Imagine in COVID-19 period still; and all of these visitors they visited more than
a thousand different car suppliers. They all want to buy these new cars and a lot of them
are electrical vehicles. In China one out of ten people own a personal car. In Europe
that's one out of two. In America it's one out of one - it means every American has a car on average.
What that means is that if Chinese would all buy a car like Americans would each have one car then
we would have serious traffic jams. The biggest traffic jam ever recorded in history was in China.
There's one guy that claims he got stuck for seven days. I don't know if it's true,
but it shows that adding 10 times more cars in a country like China would be a disaster;
specifically when we think about the ecology, the environment. I mean there's already so much
pollution and more than a million people get killed because of the pollution in China every
year so imagine this going times 10. It's not bearable. This is not something China can continue.
But is it really all about the environment when we think about electrical vehicles? There's actually
one other aspect and that's oil because a lot of oil gets imported into China these days. If you
look at the history China was self-sufficient many, many years back but today it's really depending on
the oil of the world and so this is one of the real motivations for China, the country, in itself
to go full electrical because then they are not dependent on the oil from the U.S. and the Middle East
and all these countries that might block it at some point so this is the real reason.
So, for the past decades China has been investing billions of dollars into building batteries.
It started from the mobile phone industry. Before that was all Japan and then it moved to China.
Big companies like BYD started building the best batteries in the world.
Now, today most of the battery industry is actually run by China they've had so much
capacity these days we're talking about more than 60 of capacity both on the components, on the cells,
the raw materials it's almost 80 percent globally that is produced in China and there's only four
countries like America, Poland, South-Korea and China that are really producing the batteries for
the world specifically for the cars so they almost got a monopoly and it's just not about the fact
that they're building batteries they're building the smartest batteries and a lot of innovation
is coming from China. Even tesla is using the CATL batteries in its products. So this is really
something that China has invested in. The other thing they've invested in over the past years are
charging stations. I went to China end of 2019 to visit State Grid, one of the biggest energy companies
in the world - it's probably the biggest - and they showed me this picture that I took which is about
all the charging stations over the whole country. In just two years time they installed more than
one million charging stations and when there's all these stations that means electrical vehicles
can charge everywhere this is a big advantage of the infrastructure investment that China has done
and that the U.S didn't do. Now Biden might change that but so far a lot of the EV is not taking off
in the U.S. because people can't charge everywhere. 
KEYWORDS

Pascal Coppens, China, innovation, trends, keynote, speaker, public speaker, electrical vehicles. EV, tesla

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