Text/Peach Lee
On April 19, Luo Junjie, director of the Operation Monitoring and Coordination Bureau of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said that the development of the mainland's new energy automobile industry has achieved positive results, and has cumulatively promoted 10.33 million vehicles, breaking through the mark of 10 million vehicles, and becoming an important force leading the electrification transformation of the global automobile industry.
Relevant data show that since the beginning of this year, although the development momentum of the new energy vehicle market has slowed down due to factors such as the suspension of production due to the epidemic, the increase in the price of upstream raw materials, and the decline in subsidies for new energy vehicle cities, the scale and development quality of the new energy vehicle market have shown an "accelerated improvement" development trend, and the industrial scale has reached a new high.
The cumulative production and sales of new energy vehicles in the first quarter were 1.293 million units and 1.257 million units, respectively, an increase of 1.4 times year-on-year, exceeding the level of the whole year of 2019. At the same time, the current market penetration rate of new energy vehicles has reached 19.3%, an increase of 11.4 percentage points year-on-year, and an increase of 5.9 percentage points over the whole year of 2021. It is worth mentioning that the cumulative sales of New Energy Passenger Vehicles of Chinese brands increased by more than 1.5 times year-on-year; in the total sales of passenger cars, Chinese brands accounted for 75.1%, an increase of 2 percentage points over the same period last year.
The above data shows that the mainland new energy vehicle market is still in a relatively hot state, new energy vehicles are still a mainstream choice in the current market, and the rise of Chinese brands also means that the mainland's new energy automobile industry has gradually matured, and the majority of consumers have become more and more recognized by the market for new energy vehicles, especially domestic new energy vehicles. Overall, new energy vehicles may remain a major choice for a long time to come.
Although the sales of new energy vehicles are rising, the construction speed of the corresponding charging facilities is somewhat less eye-catching. On April 19, Luo Junjie, director of the Operation Monitoring and Coordination Bureau of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said that the construction of charging and replacing infrastructure in the mainland has been accelerated. A total of 492,000 charging piles of various types have been built, an increase of 3.6 times year-on-year, of which 85,000 are public piles and 407,000 private piles, an increase of 1 times and 5 times respectively year-on-year, and the cumulative number of charging infrastructure is 3.109 million units; there are 154 completed substations, an increase of 1.6 times.
Although the number of charging piles is showing a rapid upward trend, it still cannot catch up with the growth rate of new energy vehicles, and the charging conflict caused by the huge number of electric vehicles and the small number of charging piles is becoming more and more obvious. According to data released by the Ministry of Public Security, as of the end of March, the number of new energy vehicles in the country has reached 8.915 million, accounting for 2.90% of the total number of vehicles. Among them, the number of pure electric vehicles is 7.245 million, accounting for 81.27% of the total number of new energy vehicles.
At present, the total number of electric vehicles in the mainland is large, according to the ownership of electric vehicles in the mainland in March, on average, every two cars can be divided into a charging pile, according to the current fastest charging speed, half an hour is full of 80% of the electricity to calculate, and it takes about an hour to charge two cars. The distribution of charging piles in the mainland is uneven, and it cannot all be charged according to the fastest charging speed, which makes it difficult to meet our charging needs in many cases, especially during peak travel periods such as holidays.
As a major factor restricting the development of new energy vehicles, the difficulty of charging has always been a difficult problem to solve. At present, it is mainly through three aspects of the way to solve this problem, the first is through technological breakthroughs to improve the capacity and charging speed of the battery, but the development of new energy so far, it is more difficult to make further breakthroughs; secondly, to further accelerate the construction of the corresponding charging facilities, improve the layout of facilities, which is the best way to solve the current problem; in addition, some car companies have also begun to alleviate the charging problem through new technical means, such as the power exchange technology used by Weilai.
Recently, Weilai announced that it has built a total of 900 substations nationwide, and the cumulative number of users has changed power more than 8 million times, and will continue to promote the construction of substations in the future. Up to now, WEILAI's power exchange service covers 31 provincial-level administrative regions and 194 prefecture-level cities, and the housing coverage rate of the electric district is 59.4%. It is reported that the second generation of Weilai replacement power station can realize the automatic parking of vehicles, users do not need to get off, you can start a self-service power exchange in the car, the whole process only takes 3 minutes, compared to the charging means, the power exchange is indeed faster.
However, some people also sing about the decline of the replacement power station, believing that with the continuous advancement of charging technology, fast charging is the best solution to the charging difficulty. And the current cost of building a charging station is extremely high, but there are many restrictions when using it, such as the adaptability of the battery, so vigorously build a replacement power station, and finally may end up empty.
Write at the end:
It is undeniable that the replacement power station may indeed decline in the future, but the author believes that at this stage, the construction of the replacement power station can indeed effectively alleviate the problem of charging difficulties, as for how to develop in the future, I believe that car companies will also have their own big calculations, after all, who will do the loss-making business?