Future private car stock in China: current growth pattern and effects of car sales restriction

Yu Gan,Steven Przesmitzki,Zifeng Lu,Michael Wang,Xin He,Hao Cai

doi:10.1007/s11027-019-09868-3

Yu Gan, Steven Przesmitzki + Show 4 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11027-019-09868-3

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Abstract

Car stock projection is essential to evaluating the energy and environmental impacts of private cars in China. Since the private car ownership rate in China has not reached its saturation level, limited and outdated data used in previous studies has resulted in high uncertainties regarding the functions of car ownership and significantly reduced the robustness of the projection of private car stocks. In this work, we estimate China’s current growth pattern of private car ownership by analyzing more than 6300 pairs of private car ownership and income data collected from various official statistics at the national, provincial, and city levels in the period of 1997–2017. The dataset covers a much wider per-capita disposable income range than national-level data alone and allows us to make satisfactory projections of private car stocks in China up to 2040. We project that the private car stock in China could reach 403 million in 2040, if the current growth pattern of car ownership continues. Significant discrepancies in private car ownership curves are observed for cities with and without car sales restrictions. Without car sales restrictions, we estimate that the private car stock would be even higher at 455 million by 2040, demonstrating the effectiveness of the current restriction policy in controlling car stocks in China. We further quantify the potential impacts of car sales restrictions on future car stock levels by implementing hypothetical national car sales caps. Results show that, although the private car stocks would still continue to grow before 2030, the stock levels would be stable at ~ 280 and ~ 350 million by 2040 for scenarios of 20 and 25 million sales caps, respectively. The impact of private car stock growth on energy consumption in China is also examined. Pump-to-wheels energy consumption of the private car fleet is projected to be 131, 147, 90, and 113 million tonnes of oil equivalent by 2040 for scenarios of the current growth pattern, no sales restriction, the 20 million sales cap, and the 25 million sales cap, respectively. Analysis reveals that private car sales restriction and vehicle population growth control could be an effective strategy for energy consumption reduction (thus greenhouse gas emission mitigation) in China, although the development of the automotive industry may be restrained.

Highlights

For the past decades, the world has witnessed tremendous economic growth and an unprecedented scale of urbanization in China (Gan and Griffin 2018)
A significant difference between the current work and previous studies in projecting China’s car stocks is that we estimate China’s specific private car ownership curve by fitting national car ownership and income data, and a large amount of data collected at the province and the city levels
This will overcome the lack of income-grouped national data after 2012 due to the discontinued statistics, capture the characteristics of private car ownership in recent years, and expand the private car ownership curve to much higher income levels, which have been demonstrated to be important to the private car stock projection in China (Fig. 2)

Summary

Introduction

The world has witnessed tremendous economic growth and an unprecedented scale of urbanization in China (Gan and Griffin 2018). A number of studies have attempted to assess car growth in China (He et al 2005; Hsieh et al 2018; Huo and Wang 2012; Huo et al 2007; Kobos et al 2003; Wang and He 2000; Wang et al 2006; Yan and Crookes 2009). In these studies, a widely recognized method of projecting private car stocks has been to assume an S-curve growth pattern of vehicle ownership that increases slowly in the beginning when economic levels are low, rises steeply subsequently, and gradually approaches a saturation level (Lu et al 2018). Based on the limited national car ownership data, they concluded that China’s private car stock projection would have large uncertainties, varying from 200 to 700 million by 2040 (Hsieh et al 2018)

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