Passenger car sales in China were flat in March year-on-year, with electric and hybrid vehicles accounting for a third of sales, according to figures released Monday by a trade federation. A total of 1.59 million units were sold in March, a slight increase of 0.3% year on year, said the China Federation of Individual Car Manufacturers (CPCA). Compared to February, car sales increased by 14.3%.
With 543,000 hybrid and electric cars sold in March, sales for this type of vehicle are still showing strong growth in the world’s largest automotive market (21.9% over one year). They represent about a third (34%) of the total. In this niche, the American Tesla sold around 77,000 units, in second place, far however behind the Chinese BYD (192,000), a manufacturer increasingly present on the European market. Tesla, which has already had a factory in Shanghai since 2019, will set up a second in the same city to manufacture its Megapack batteries, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Sunday. The plant will have an initial capacity of 10,000 Megapack batteries per year and is expected to start production “in the second quarter of 2024”, according to this source.
China, the world’s largest producer of greenhouse gases in absolute terms, is aiming for automobile sales in 2035 that will mainly consist of electric and hybrid vehicles. Automotive sales in the country increased in 2021 (4.4%) and 2022 (1.9%), after several years of decline due to the general economic slowdown and then the Covid-19 epidemic. They had suffered a sharp contraction in January (-37.9% over one year), after the cessation of purchase incentives for electric and hybrid vehicles.
