A hall displaying electric vehicles from Nio, XPeng Motors, Zeekr and dozens of other Chinese companies was packed with visitors. A nearby area full of foreign-brand gasoline-powered cars hardly got a second look from anyone.
At the same event, Volkswagen, which is vying with Toyota for the world’s largest supplier of internal combustion engine cars, made a bold prediction: Within two years, half of the cars sold in China, the world’s largest auto market, will be electric, with more by them only 6 percent in 2020.
The theme at this week’s Shanghai Auto Show was clear. Electric cars are here to stay and Chinese automakers are leading the way.
Silvio Pietro Angori, chief executive and managing director of Italy’s Pininfarina, a nearly century-old car design company, said the global industry is not going back.
The internal combustion engine, he said, “is done, it’s gone, it doesn’t exist anymore.”
The Shanghai auto show is one of the largest in the world and the first of its size in China since 2019. During the pandemic, when China’s borders were sealed off due to “zero Covid” precautions, its auto industry was quietly transformed and market share reduced by foreign companies shrank. Today, half of the cars sold in Shanghai itself are electric.
Brian Gu, the president and vice chairman of Xpeng, said his company plans to reduce the cost of building a powertrain – mainly the battery and electric motor – by 25 percent by the end of the year. Powertrains, specifically the batteries, account for about two-fifths of Xpeng’s total cost of building an electric car.
The rise of electric vehicles
Ashwani Gupta, Nissan’s chief operating officer, surpassed Xpeng and said his company’s latest designs would reduce powertrain costs by 30 percent. Shohei Yamazaki, chairman of Nissan’s China investment subsidiary, said Nissan will rely heavily on Chinese suppliers.
“The price competition in China is very tough at the moment,” he said.
Chinese brands have adopted unusual electric car designs, while foreign companies and their Chinese joint ventures have played it safe. The wheels are almost at the corners on the Chinese brand’s cars, an architecture that also allows more space for batteries under the center floor. Nio and Xpeng have opted for sleek designs, while Changan from western China makes cars so rectangular that they look slightly cubist.
“Part of that comes from freedom from legacy,” said Felix Kilbertus, Pininfarina’s chief creative officer.
Great Wall, a Chinese manufacturer of sport utility vehicles, has a new brand of electric cars, Ora, aimed at women. It named car models for cats, in part to appeal to Hello Kitty brand lovers. It has an electric car that closely resembles a Volkswagen Beetle.
The main market for electric cars so far is China – EVs accounted for a quarter of the Chinese market last year, compared to less than 6 percent in the United States.
Most of the cars on display at the auto show use lithium batteries, the current industry standard, although companies are developing vehicles that run on sodium batteries in whole or in part.
There is currently an oversupply of lithium batteries, but in the long term many in the industry believe that sodium can become a viable alternative or complement to lithium as a key ingredient in EV batteries. For one thing, the production of sodium batteries would be more climate-friendly.
Gill Pratt, Toyota’s chief scientist, claimed at a World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, in January that replacing 90 gasoline-powered cars with hybrid cars could reduce total greenhouse gas emissions more than using the same amount of scarce lithium in a battery-electric car build.
“When you think about the total amount of lithium the world has, the key is that we use it where it’s best,” he said.
Toyota has a legitimate interest in challenging the availability of lithium. It owns many key patents for hybrid cars and has emphasized them over pure electric cars, which require far more lithium. American and European automakers like Ford Motor and Volkswagen, as well as most Chinese automakers, are still betting on battery electric cars.
Prototypes of pure sodium battery cars unveiled by domestic Chinese automakers and battery makers in recent weeks have been low-budget micro-cars. One of them, JAC Motors’ Sihao Huaxianzi, in collaboration with HiNA, a sodium battery startup, is rated for a top speed of 75 mph.
Pulkit Khurana, co-founder of Battery Smart, an Indian company that makes batteries for three-wheel auto rickshaws, expressed doubts that any technology, including sodium, would soon supplant traditional lithium batteries. And with the lithium price down two-thirds since November, the cost of lithium batteries is likely to fall significantly, he said.
A midsize car or sport utility vehicle would have enough room for a much larger sodium battery than the cheap compact cars that Chinese manufacturers are initially building. Another option is to use a combination of sodium and lithium cells in a single car battery.
Using an artificial intelligence computer program, China’s CATL, the world’s largest electric car battery maker, has figured out the complex electronics and programming for battery packs with some lithium cells and some sodium cells, said Huang Qisen, deputy dean of the company’s research institute.
CATL – the full name of the company is Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd. – said at the auto show that it would produce sodium battery cars in partnership with Chery, a Chinese automaker strongest in making low-cost small cars. However, both companies did not want to give any details.
Switching to sodium could solve one of the biggest problems with lithium batteries, which put out much less current in sub-zero temperatures.
Because of the chemical differences between sodium and lithium, a sodium battery loses less than a tenth of its performance in very cold temperatures, according to battery chemistry experts.
“It’s promising,” said Ouyang Chuying, CATL’s president of research and development. “Sodium has no resource limit.”
Li You contributed to the research. Jack Ewing contributed reporting from New York.