China now leads the world in producing electric vehicles
At the National People’s Congress in March, improving China’s environment was cited as one of the country’s priorities, and combating air pollution was cited as an important objective. In China’s major cities, electric vehicles are being rolled out at a rapid pace in its “new energy” push. In 2017, Chinese automakers produced nearly 800,000 electric vehicles, including cars, buses and trucks, which are more than all electric vehicles combined in the rest of the world.
Much of the attention on electric vehicles has been focused on private cars. However, China is rapidly urbanizing, with tremendous concentration of the population within its cities. As China’s urbanization continues, living densities will increase further and city governments would need to invest in building better public transport infrastructures rather than relying on private cars to satisfy citizens’ mobility needs. The step change in combating pollution from transport sources, therefore, would need to come from electrifying public transportation.
Cities typically prefer to build underground railways as their transport backbones. Many Chinese cities have already done so. But further expansion of subway systems tends to take many years, in addition to being expensive and complex to execute. Increasingly, cities are realizing they are reliant on public buses as a solution. The challenge is to what extent can buses be as environmentally friendly as railways.
Electric buses have been in the making for over a decade, but the most common issue is the buses’ lack of range. Unlike private cars, public buses are extensively utilized and heavily loaded, exacerbating the range issue and the associated need for a good charging infrastructure.
Shenzhen shows the way
Solutions can always be found when the political will is there.
In Shenzhen, all of the city’s 16,000 buses have been converted to electric as at December last year. Leading the charge for this conversion was BYD, a company which plays a similar role in converting the city’s taxi fleet to become 100 percent electric. Although not an experienced bus manufacturer per se, BYD learned by R&D and in accumulating its experience.
In Hong Kong, the government has similarly promoted the use of electric vehicles, but it has been private car oriented. As a result of attractive tax incentives, Hong Kong purportedly has the highest ownership of Teslas per capita. Despite rolling back this incentive as a policy tweak to contain private-car growth, Hong Kong does not have a bus or commercial vehicle electric vehicle strategy. In fact, this is currently not even on the Hong Kong government’s radar screen.
HK lacks political will
Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated cities in the world, but it is missing the opportunity to take leadership in electrifying its road transport system. While Hong Kong’s challenges are unique, for example running a predominantly doubledecker bus system, these challenges are not insurmountable with a clear policy vision, Government leadership and corresponding investment. Perhaps the biggest issue in Hong Kong is its half-heartedness in policy-making, driven by fears of being wrong and also its need to manage many stakeholder interests.
Nowadays, innovation is being tied with having agile organizations. Governments around the world have been looking into various new practices to become more agile and therefore more innovative. Being agile means the need to act fast, build fast, make mistakes and quickly learn from it and innovate for the next best solution. With such strong financials, the Hong Kong government is well-placed to make these investments.
Hong Kong has always been the most developed world-class Chinese city, but it seems inconceivable how its neighboring Shenzhen has leapt so far ahead in adopting electric vehicles. In this sense, Hong Kong has much to learn from its mainland counterparts.