China has the world's most aggressive electric car goals. Communist leaders are promoting them to clean up smog-choked cities and in hopes of taking the lead in an emerging technology.
At the auto show, the global industry's biggest marketing event of the year, almost every global and Chinese auto brand is showing at least one electric concept vehicle, if not a market-ready model.
Heizmann said VW, which vies with GM for the title of China's top-selling automaker, expects annual sales of at least 400,000 "new energy vehicles" – the government's term for electric or gasoline-electric hybrids – by 2020 and 1.5 million by 2025.
The vast majority of Chinese get around by smog-free vehicles already. They're called bicycles.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Friday April 28 2017, @11:48AM
Batteries continue to improve. Ideally, we'd move to ultracapacitor based storage, but that tech is still pretty far behind where it needs to be and won't come into its own in the near term.
Still, looking into the near future assuming today's tech is the limit is unnecessarily pessimistic. That's almost never the case.