When a person visits a Chinese city like Shanghai, Shenzhen, or Chengdu today, they feel as if they have stepped into the future. The streets are full of electric cars, electric scooters, and electric buses. Taxis often do not run on gasoline but on batteries. And the silence is perhaps an even bigger shock than the technologies themselves. Instead of the roar of engines, you hear only the hum of tires and the occasional beep of an electric scooter. After all, the younger generation no longer even knows how to fill up with gasoline. Are you surprised? Well, a Chinese person is surprised that you do not know how to swap a car battery.
Yet just twenty years ago, China was a symbol of smog, endless traffic jams, and cities where, after a few hours, you could feel dust in your lungs. Electromobility did not emerge there because the country suddenly decided to save the planet. It arose from pure pragmatism.
China realized three things very early on.
First, it was dependent on oil imports.
Second, Western carmakers had a decades-long head start in internal combustion engines, and catching up with them would have been extremely expensive.
And third, smog in China’s megacities was becoming a political problem.
That is why Beijing decided as early as the beginning of the 21st century that electric vehicles would be a strategic industry of the future. The real turning point came around 2009, when the state began massively subsidizing manufacturers, building charging infrastructure, and supporting domestic players such as BYD, NIO, and CATL. While Europe was still debating whether electric cars made any sense at all, China was already investing billions. And today we see the results.
China is the world’s largest market for electric vehicles and, at the same time, the largest producer of batteries. Companies like BYD and CATL now compete technologically with Tesla and, in some areas, are even surpassing it. In many Chinese cities today, electric cars no longer feel like a futuristic alternative but like an ordinary part of everyday life.
For many years, the biggest argument against electric cars was range. But this is precisely where Chinese companies have made incredible progress today. Common modern electric vehicles in China have a range of approximately 500 to 700 kilometers, and the newest models are approaching the 800-kilometer mark. Even more fascinating is the charging speed. Some new technologies can charge enough energy for hundreds of kilometers of driving in just five to ten minutes, that is, in a time comparable to conventional refueling.
And then there is another Chinese peculiarity – battery swapping. While Europe has mainly bet on charging, parts of China are experimenting with a model where a driver simply drives into an automated station and a robot swaps the depleted battery for a charged one in a few minutes. This system has been popularized most notably by the company NIO. In some cities, thousands of such stations are already in operation, and the entire process takes less time than buying a coffee at a gas station.
Of course, electromobility also has its darker side. The most common question is: what happens to the batteries after years of use? China realized very early on that recycling would be one of the biggest problems of the future. That is why it is now building a huge industry for recycling lithium, nickel, and cobalt. Moreover, old batteries often do not end up in the waste immediately. Many are given a “second life” – they are used as energy storage for power grids or solar power plants. Only afterward are they dismantled and recycled.
Interestingly, the batteries themselves last much longer than people originally thought. Today, the lifespan is said to be around one million kilometers or more than ten years of use. However, the biggest criticism of electromobility remains the question of electricity. If an electric car runs on electricity generated from coal, is it really environmentally friendly?
And this is precisely where China is full of paradoxes. On the one hand, it is the world’s largest producer of renewable energy. It is building gigantic solar and wind farms, investing in hydroelectric power plants, and dominating the global photovoltaics market. On the other hand, however, it still makes massive use of coal.
Today, approximately 55 to 60 percent of China’s electricity still comes from coal. This is a huge number, showing that China has by no means given up on fossil fuels. At the same time, however, the country is building renewable energy sources at an incredible pace.
Hydroelectric power plants today account for approximately 13 to 14 percent of electricity production. Wind energy stands at around 9 to 10 percent, and solar energy at roughly 7 to 8 percent, with solar power plants growing the fastest in the world. Nuclear energy currently makes up about 4 to 5 percent of production, but China is simultaneously building new nuclear power plants faster than most of the world.
The result is a strange combination: a country that is simultaneously the planet’s largest polluter and the largest investor in green energy. And perhaps this best captures Chinese electromobility. It is not a romantic story of environmental activists. It is a hard-nosed geopolitical and economic project. China understood that the future of the automotive industry could be rewritten – and decided that this time it did not want to be the world’s assembly plant, but the country that would set the rules.
