New | Electric cars fail to make buzz in Beijing despite subsidies, hassle-free licence plates
Fewer than one out of a thousand prospective owners in Beijing is opting for an electric car, figures show, as the Chinese capital struggles to make its fleet of more than five million vehicles less polluting.
Only 1,701 would-be buyers of electric cars have filed applications for a new vehicle licence as of Saturday, according to the municipal government. These represent less than 0.1 per cent of the 1,841,213 applications for new Beijing licence plates, with the rest coming from conventional petrol- or diesel-powered cars.
The lack of interest in electric cars flies in the face of a series of measures by the municipal government incentivising the move away from traditional polluters in the congested city, making new registrations of traditional vehicles nearly impossible.
New applicants for conventional cars have a 0.8 per cent chance of getting a plate, an unnamed traffic management official told the . For applicants with electric cars, however, the lottery is a mere formality. The 20,000 new licence plates due to be issued for electric cars this year would allow – if the trend continues – every single applicant to get a licence plate.
The big fear is to get stuck in Beijing traffic and not have enough charge
Yet electric cars have long suffered from a reputation of unreliability and poor performance in the city where electric motorbikes have long replaced fossil fuel-powered ones. Drivers of the city’s more than 1,000 electric taxis have complained about the limited distance the cars can travel, and the long waiting lines and charging times at the city’s 500 charging stations.
