Electric vehicles already becoming dominant in China
The good news that Nissan is investing in its plant near Sunderland to manufacture batteries for new electric cars should be tempered by the fact that China, which announced a move to go electric a few months ago, is already heavily into the production of such vehicles.
A recent visitor to Kashgar in Xinjiang has just sent us some pictures of some of them noting, 'no noise, zero pollution; hardly any accidents because top speed remains below 80kph'.
From the pictures, we can see signs of significant ingenuity, especially the packaging of battery packs in jerry can type enclosures that can easily be removed and carried indoors for re-charging. The website of the manufacturing company www.tfbird.com shows it to already be a pretty substantial manufacturing operation.
Crude and cheerful they may be, but a visit to www.alibaba.com reveals 1,512 mainland Chinese electric car models for sale, more than a few of which claim to have achieved EEC homologation.
Quoted prices look extremely competitive, and while they don't yet offer the ranges, speeds and short charging times associated with UK and Western prototype car prototypes, they are all on sale now, and the makers are clearly hungry to get into Western markets.
