In July this year, the sales volumes of new energy vehicles (NEVs) in China fell 4.7 percent from a year earlier to 80,000 units. Chinese companies produced 65,000 purely electric cars in July, 4.8% below July 2018. The reduction of sales first time since January 2017 was connected with lowering of subsidies for purchase of NEVs from the government, announced this year.
CAAM’s forecast for NEV sales in 2019 was cut from 1.6 million units to 1.5 million units, while total China auto sales are expected to drop by 5 percent to 26.68 million vehicles.
In January-July, sales of NEVs in China grew 40.9% to 699,000 units, CAAM said. And taking into account the latest monthly average sales amount, it will be very hard to reach even those 1.5 million units sales, forecasted by CAAM. At the moment, annualized average of sales is 1.2 million units.