China’s Environmental Car Future

Just before the opening of the Olympics China will make an important announcement to the world on how they will start tackling the environmental problems that China faces. That’s at least what Wolfgang Grulke said (I hope I’ve quoted him correctly) during his talk about the Future last week here in Shanghai.

Wolfgang is a futurist and as such talked about, as he calls it, lessons from the future and helps companies to apply this to the present in order to survive and keep on growing.

I had to think about his words when Gordon sent me an article about Chinese car companies starting to focus on future technology.

At the recent Shanghai Car Show such cars have been presented and as Motoring ZA puts it:

One experimental clean-energy car runs on natural gas. Another uses ethanol distilled from corn. A third has a zero-emissions electric motor powered by a hydrogen fuel cell.

There are an estimated 37 million over cars in China at the moment and more than 22,000,000 are privately owned. This number will just be going up faster as more people will have the money to start buying cars. This will also effect the environment, firstly in China which in many ways has already a plethora of other challenges in this field but also the rest of the world.

The Chinese government is apparently actively endorsing this.

Beijing has made cleaner cars a policy priority, targeting the field as one of 11 priority areas in a 15-year technology development plan issued in February 2006 and promising grants and tax breaks to support industry efforts.

The campaign embodies one of Beijing’s strategies in technology development: pick new areas with no entrenched competitors so China can make breakthroughs without huge costs

It’s not just for the environment that China wants to do this. Dependency on foreign technology and on oil is another. Still, if it will help the environment it sounds like a good step into the future and it may be a sign for the established car brands to start doing their part even more, if only to keep on selling their own vehicles.

     
Posted Wednesday, April 25th, 2007 at 10:12 am,
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