26 Mar MIT Technology Review: Electric Avenues: EVs and the Future of Mobility
Media Source: MIT Technology Review
Extract from The Green Future Index 2022, published by MIT Technology Review
The 2022 green society pillar was enhanced with a new indicator, which measured each economy’s efforts to incorporate electric vehicles into its respective transportation grid. Electrifying mobility is as essential to encoding sustainability into our societal structures and behaviors as ramped-up reforestation efforts, recycling, or more energy-efficient buildings.
“Transportation is the largest single driver of fossil fuel energy consumption outside the
manufacturing sector.
The push for electrification of transportation is motivated, first and foremost, by energy security.”
Bill Russo
Founder and CEO, Automobility Ltd
China’s recent adoption of EVs is not only a significant and growing part of the country’s decarbonization strategy, but one with potentially important lessons for the rest of the world. The take-up rate of EVs in China was prodigious in 2021. Average monthly sales now make up 12% of total passenger vehicles sold, and the 3.3 million EVs bought in China in 2021 (over three-quarters of which were produced by domestic automakers) represent just over half of all new electric cars sold worldwide that year (see Figure below). However, the real transformative power of China’s new mobility space is going to come in the form of a complete and systemic reimagining of the country’s mobility sector, according to Bill Russo, CEO of Automobility Ltd, a Shanghai-based new mobility strategy and investment advisory firm. He believes China’s policymakers are driven to electrify mobility by the knowledge that “transportation is the largest single driver of fossil fuel energy consumption outside the manufacturing sector, and the push for electrification of transportation is motivated, first and foremost, by energy security.” This, Russo notes, has also informed broader systemic efforts to develop longer-term solutions, “particularly hydrogen energy and fuel cell electric vehicle technologies.” While many potential hydrogen applications are not relevant for personal and public mobility, he believes that centralized planning objectives have linked the two to provide much-needed scale to China’s overall “new energy” scientific and industrial development efforts.
However, it is in the secondary objective of China’s transport electrification project that its real transformative power lies. While China leads the world in EV ownership, Russo points out that overall personal vehicle ownership per capita is very low when compared to other high- and middle-income countries, and he believes this will continue to be the case. Indeed, overall automobile sales have been steadily declining in China since 2017. This transition is useful for China on two fronts. First, it gives China an opportunity to wean itself off foreign technology, and the focus on EVs allows China to reset the race for new mobility intellectual property. “China’s traditional internal combustion engine auto industry doesn’t have the same legacy [as in the West], so its firms are not intellectual property leaders,” says Russo. Second, the fact that individual vehicle use is slowing supports sustainability objectives, and as EV growth rises, it allows China to fundamentally rethink mobility. “EVs are not just creating a secular shift, but a generational shift as to what ‘owning’ mobility means,” says Russo. Younger consumers in China, unlike their counterparts in many other markets, are not buying the priciest, highest-performance models. Russo notes the biggest EV in China is the modest Wuling Hongguang mini EV, which is priced at around $5,000. “I think we are going to see the demographics of EV shifting to a younger, more environmentally conscious demographic,” Russo adds.
EV consumption habits, therefore, will start to further disrupt mobility, Russo explains. “More alternatives to the consumption of personally owned vehicles will emerge, and the aspiration to own a vehicle will go away, increasing the notion of mobility as a service. This makes EVs more productive, and when you increase the productive utility of the vehicle from 5% to 40%, it significantly reduces the number of vehicles you need to serve that mobility.” This, he believes will usher in China’s “Mobility 2.0” era: “smart EVs with autonomous or early-stage drive-assistance technology, which will be developed in parallel with the electrification of transportation.” The result, Russo believes, will be nothing short of a radical scaling up of sustainable transportation in China. Given the country’s prodigious efforts to build up export manufacturing competency in other climate-friendly technologies such as wind and solar, China’s EVs will likely soon start having similar impacts on many other countries’ green futures as well.
SOURCE: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/03/24/1048253/the-green-future-index-2022/amp/
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