China bans production of 553 models with high fuel consumption

This just in: China has banned a huge load of cars being produced locally because they do not meet the country’s emissions and fuel consumption requirements. To be more specific, a total of 553 passenger car models that are being produced will be discontinued as early as January 1. Sources from Bloomberg said that this announcement was initially made by the China Vehicle Technology Service Center.

We were not given a complete list of the cars that had been banned, though this includes vehicles from Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, BMW, Chevrolet, and plenty others. Many big names will be affected. In the publication we saw, sedans with internal codes BJ7302ETAL2 (Mercedes), FV7145LCDBG (Audi) and SGM7161DAA2 (Chevrolet) are all covered by this ban.

Though 553 may sound like a huge number to us, the secretary general of the China Passenger Car Association, Cui Dongshu, said that that number is considered a small portion of the number of passenger cars being produced in China. On the other hand, an analyst who works in China Merchants Securities Co., Wang Liusheng said that this is the first time that the country is taking action by restricting production of certain models. He also added that this is just the beginning of it, and there might be more issues like this to come.

Wang also says that this move had to be done to emphasize a cut back on energy consumption. He continues by saying that this will also benefit the development of the industry in the long run.

Right now, China is continuing their action to stop production and sales of traditional internal combustion vehicles. “New energy vehicles” including hybrids, plug-in hybrids, EVs and fuel-cell models are what the country wants to focus on in the near future. Having said that, they will initially have to get rid of combustion vehicles. By 2030, China wants the new electric vehicles to cover about 40 percent of all sales.

Moreover, China’s plan is not just for itself, as they hope to encourage European countries like France and United Kingdom to follow their footsteps. This means that they would like these countries to start banning sales of new diesel and gasoline powered engines by 2040. In China, electric vehicles are becoming more common, and in the past year only, sales of EVs have doubled to 336,000 units. So expect this number to grow even more in 2018, after China bans the production of conventional vehicles.