Shanghai (ZXZC)- Over the past year, with the firm implementation of the national new energy strategy, China has made good progress in the new energy vehicle segment, according to Miao Wei, the Minister of Industry and Information Technology.

The achievements can be summarized in four aspects, the continuing expansion of industry scale, the remarkable improvement in technology, the significant growth in enterprise power and the increasing optimization of supporting conditions.

Currently, new energy vehicle (NEV) has become the strategic development direction for many countries’ auto industry. With more and more investment from global companies, the market scale of this segment has been expanding rapidly. However, since the industry has been changing dramatically, there are still several problems that need improving in China NEV market.

The first one is the insufficient construction of charging infrastructure for NEVs. Currently, the ratio of NEVs to the charging piles is 3.5 to 1. Even though the expected number of charging piles will be up to 500,000, it still cannot keep pace with the development of NEV market. Since the deployment of those charging piles was also not reasonable enough, less than 15 percent of public charging piles have been utilized and the segment has not formed a sustainable development business mode.

The policy system should be further improved. The minister said that the connection of supporting policies from different departments is still weak and protectionism still exists. All these result in market fragmentation and will impede the development of the segment.

Core technologies of NEV need new breakthroughs. Although domestic high-end power battery products are close to that of advanced products in foreign countries, the innovation ability is not strong enough. Besides, there is still gap from multinational companies in the development of advanced technology and the consistency of products.

The service system of the aftermarket requires improvement. There are differences in the quality guarantee of different brands and the policies of cash for bangers are also different, which are likely to exert negative effect on the NEV market.