Grand China Electric Vehicles Co and Wuhan officials are joining forces to build a major electric vehicle production base, with investment of 3 billion yuan ($443 million), a company official said Monday.
The Wuhan-based Grand China Electric Vehicles facility hopes to have an annual capacity of 3,000 battery-powered vehicles, joining the new energy vehicle rush in the country.
Grand China Electric told the Global Times Monday it signed a contract with Wuhan's Hannan District, confirming an earlier report by Xinhua News Agency. Wuhan is an active promoter of electric vehicle production. The city promised to purchase buses from the company.
"Production will begin no later than the first half of 2012," Tang Lihua, who is in charge of the project, told the Global Times Monday.
The company will design and produce only power assembly and charging facilities in Wuhan, leaving the rest to major commercial vehicle producers, said Tang, who also said his company has been manufacturing buses and sanitation trucks in Shanghai and east China's Anhui Province with the help of vehicle producers.
China is racing against time to catch up with well-established new energy vehicle makers.
The country launched a pilot program in June to offer subsidies for new energy vehicle buyers and to provide financing for construction of charging infrastructure in five cities including Shanghai and Shenzhen.
Aiming to boost technology and the scale of the country's energy-efficient and new energy vehicles technology to a world-class level, the country is expected to invest 100 billion yuan ($14.72 billion) to support the industry over the next 10 years, local media quoted officials from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology as saying.
Encouraged by a series of stimulus policies, many provinces in China voiced interest in constructing world-class new energy production bases.
"What policy makers should concern themselves with right now is ... how China can catch up with overseas rivals," Chen Zheng, an auto analyst with China Securities, told the Global Times Monday.
