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China’s global dominance in electric cars helped it overtake Japan as the world’s biggest vehicle exporter last year, official data confirmed Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Japanese giants such as Toyota and Nissan have been much more cautious than their Chinese counterparts like BYD on electric vehicles (EVs), banking instead on hybrid models.<\/p>\n
Figures released Wednesday by the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association showed shipments of cars, trucks and buses rising 16 percent to 4.42 million last year.<\/p>\n
But China exported almost 500,000 more — 4.91 million vehicles in total, as reported by the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers this month.<\/p>\n
China’s customs bureau put the number even higher at 5.22 million, a huge year-on-year rise of 57 percent, with one in three fully electric vehicles.<\/p>\n
The country had already been shipping more vehicles than Japan on a monthly basis, but Wednesday’s data confirmed that it was also number one for a whole year.<\/p>\n
Unlike Chinese firms, Japanese automakers including Toyota — re-confirmed on Tuesday as the world’s largest company by unit sales — also make huge volumes of vehicles in other countries.<\/p>\n
In 2022, vehicle production in Japan excluding motorcycles totalled 7.84 million units, but overseas production was almost 17 million.<\/p>\n
Japanese manufacturers have long bet on hybrids that combine battery power and internal combustion engines, an area they pioneered with the likes of the Toyota Prius.<\/p>\n
But they have vowed to up their game, with Toyota aiming to sell 1.5 million EVs annually by 2026 and 3.5 million by 2030.<\/p>\n
The company is also hoping to mass-produce solid-state batteries that charge faster than conventional ones and give EVs more range.<\/p>\n
Helped by strong government support, Chinese EV firms have stolen a march on more established rivals such as General Motors, Volkswagen and Toyota.<\/p>\n
BYD in the fourth quarter of 2023 even snatched Tesla’s crown for most sales of all-electric vehicles, data this month showed.<\/p>\n
On Tuesday BYD — it stands for “Build Your Dreams” — which also sells batteries to the likes of Tesla, BMW and Mercedes, said it expects net profit for last year to reach 29-31 billion yuan ($4.1-4.4 billion).<\/p>\n
But China’s success in EVs has also landed its firms in hot water with regulators in Western markets worried about unfair competition for local automakers.<\/p>\n
The European Commission is investigating Chinese state subsidies in a probe that could lead to the European Union imposing import duties.<\/p>\n
To soothe concerns, BYD is planning to build more factories abroad including a $600 million plant in Brazil and another in Hungary.<\/p>\n
“It’s kind of reminiscent of what happened to Japan in the 1980s, when they started exporting a lot of automotives,” said Christopher Richter, an auto analyst at CLSA.<\/p>\n
“So the Japanese solved it by starting (to build) a lot of factories overseas… They build overseas four times more than what they export,” he said in October.<\/p>\n
etb-sbr-stu\/kaf\/dan<\/p>\n<\/div>\n