CHINA will continue to be the most important growth driver of the global auto industry in 2017 as it is this year, while new-energy vehicles and smart connected cars are set to become hot in the next decade in the domestic market, a report said yesterday.

Sales in China’s auto market are likely to jump 14 percent year on year in 2016, PricewaterhouseCoopers predicted in the report.

Rick Hanna, PwC’s global automotive leader, said grants for new-energy vehicle purchases and tax exemptions have made China the “most important growth driver” for the global auto market.

Peter Fleet, vice president of marketing, sales and services at Ford Asia-Pacific, echoed Hanna’s view and hailed the tax policy as a “very important factor” that boosted sales of Ford China. Ford and its joint ventures in China sold more than 1 million vehicles in the first 11 months of 2016. Its monthly sales hit 124,113 vehicles in November alone, up 17 percent year on year.

Last year, new-energy vehicle sales in China tripled that of the previous year to 330,000 units to top other markets globally. As subsidies are set to continue, the annual assembly of new-energy vehicles may exceed 1.85 million units by 2022, or up 28 percent annually on average between 2015 and 2022, according to PwC.