Electric car market still should not be exaggerated

On April 6, the first batch of private pure electric vehicles in Shanghai were put on the road. Immediately afterwards, Beijing reported that privately-purchased electric vehicles could enjoy the policy of “not to shake the line and not to pay taxes”.

In the era of high oil prices, electric vehicles became the docking point for private car owners to seek low-cost vehicles and the country's environmental protection philosophy. However, the bottleneck of large-scale promotion has caused the development space of the electric vehicle theory to encounter the embarrassment of “looking beautiful”.

The key issue is that traditional thermal power is still the mainstream of the domestic power generation structure. Even if electric vehicles are popularized, it is only a matter of shifting the use of terminal pollution from automobiles to the upstream. It can be seen that only by fundamentally expanding the market for new energy generation can it be possible to achieve a truly clean environmental protection concept.

In fact, the policy of encouraging electric cars to enter the homes of ordinary people has long been encouraged. In June 2010, ministries and commissions such as the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Science and Technology jointly issued the "Circular on Launching Private Subsidy for Subsidies for New Energy Vehicles," and confirmed pilot projects to start private subsidies for new energy vehicles in five cities including Shanghai and Changchun. However, policy high-profile encouragement has always been met with cold markets. The crux of the problem is that the use of electric vehicles is limited by many conditions. This is evident from the analysis of the characteristics of the first batch of private car owners in Shanghai electric cars.

First of all, Shanghai's eight car owners all work in the Shanghai International Automobile City area. One of the important reasons for this is that electric vehicle charging piles are currently concentrated in Shanghai International Automobile City to facilitate car charging. Second, these owners only regard electric vehicles as short-distance means of transportation. Due to the limited current life of the electric vehicle, it is possible to travel about 200 kilometers on a single charge. This way, if the owner wants to travel long distances, he must also choose a traditional fuel vehicle. This makes the use of electric vehicles has a strong limitation, which may offset its low cost advantage. Thirdly, the 8 owners enjoy the protection of on-site service provided by the manufacturers after the failure to avoid their worries. But once electric vehicles have become popular, can manufacturers still maintain this level of service? From the current post-sale protection of fuel vehicles, it seems that there are still difficulties. In addition, the technical level of China's new energy vehicles can only guarantee normal operation of the batteries within 100,000 kilometers, and it needs to be replaced after this trip. This has also become the economic cost that ordinary car buyers have to consider.

More importantly, although electric energy is more environmentally friendly than fuel during use. But unfortunately, the expansion of the electric vehicle market will inevitably increase the demand for electricity, and the current domestic power generation process is not environmentally friendly. Due to the lag in grid-connected and storage technologies such as wind power and solar power generation, traditional coal-fired power generation still accounts for about 70% of the total grid-connected electricity.

The main component of coal is carbon, which accounts for about 60%-80%. After the complete combustion of carbon, carbon dioxide is produced, and carbon monoxide is also generated when incomplete combustion occurs. Moreover, sulfur is contained in the electric coal, and sulfur dioxide is generated when it is burned. The emission of sulfur dioxide will cause air pollution and produce acid rain to pollute the water source. In view of this, if the domestic power generation model is difficult to integrate with new energy sources in a large area, considering the environmental protection point of view, the “single strike” of electric vehicles is only the conversion of the sewage structure. There is no substantial change in the total amount of pollution.