Beijing Auto joins China’s EV race
November 17, 2009 by Matt Brogan
Beijing Automotive Industry Holding Corporation (BAIC), has shown off its first self developed electric car, joining other Chinese rivals expecting a demand for clean energy cars.
BAIC is a partner of Daimler and was an unsuccessful bidder for General Motors’s Opel brand. The electric vehicle known as BE701 is able to travel a distance of 200km when fully charged with a maximum speed is 160km/h.
There is no timetable when mass production of the BE701 will begin, but details of a clean energy vehicle development and manufacturing factory has been set up and will cost 2.28 billion yuan (approx. AUD$334 million). Funding comes from the government as well as “other sources”.
The factory will be based in Beijing and will be set up to manufacture 50,000 electric cars and 100,000 hybrid models. By 2015 BAIC aim to have annual sales of 15 billion yuan which will account for between five and ten per cent of their total sales.
Other Chinese manufacturers like Chery Automobile and BYD are also investing in the green car. Chery revealed its first electric vehicle in Febuary called the S19, it is able to travel up to 150km when completely charged and has a top speed of 120km/h.
BYD Auto has revealed its plug-in hybrid car known as F3DM, they also have the e6 which is an electric crossover with hopes to send to the USA and has a range of 400km per charge.
Beijing has plans to subsidise the purchase of clean vehicles for public transport in 13 cities to assist the industry with the development of green technology. This will help promote electric vehicles to the public transport operators, taxi and postal services.
The subsidies are based on the difference in price between electric vehicles and regular fuel burning vehicles, with subsidies up to 600,000 yuan on a fuel cell powered large commercial bus.
by Adam Marshall
Print it: 
At least it has an element of style to it from that one pic above. Weird considering its Chinese, which usually means that the headlights come from Star Treck and the grilles looks like they could have come from an 1940’s Chevy!
I’d still be worried about driving a Chinese car, especially when I drive in a Chinese car in China! Arghhhh.
But to its credit it looks better than the butt ugly, vomit provoking Prius from that angle.
Some of these cars have more range than the modern Japanese and European electric efforts.
The jury is still out. The only every Western report that has detailed driving the BYD’s E6 is that it’s still shoddy. Quality sucks, but quite frankly, I find that BYD has more of a chance at making batteries for cars than actually being a car producer.
Nice try at it (BYD), but honestly, the problem with Chinese manufacturers is that they face a catch 22. To conquer the EV market, it is essentially a car market, even if you do manage to make EVs and leap of ICs, you still need riding handling and comfort, none of the current crop of Chinese manufacturers come close to making anything decent for the Western world to accept.
To accomplish that, they still need a good 5-10 years. What a lot of focus should be directed to is their breakthroughs in EV tech (batteries) not engines and cars itself. All the E6 is a copy of a Corolla, at CHinese quality with a EV engine.
Yes. And women will never vote. And we will never have a black president. The good 5 – 10 years you speak of are over. The Chinese will be a major player in the automotive industry.
I applauded their ingenuity and energy. They are aggressively striving to provide cheaper products with similar quality. It’s this sort of healthy competition that benefits the consumer.
They are the world’s factory for just about everything else. Car manufacturing is just the next step.
Without wanting to start a debate on Chinese copy cat cars. What do you think of when you see the front of the above pictured coupe?
http://image.motortrend.com/f/.....-coupe.jpg
As I said before that coupe pictured looks se.. oh sorry, real darn good. I didn’t know that my comment would be moderated for using the word ’se%y’ to describe a car. Oh well, this is Australia we live in, the land of the nanny.
It looks good
Honda