| 作者 |
 昨日紐約時報頭版頭條 |
 |
白丁
头衔: 海归少校
声望: 学员
加入时间: 2004/02/22
文章: 201
海归分: 13636
|
|
|
作者：白丁 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
China Set to Act on Fuel Economy
November 18, 2003
By KEITH BRADSHER
GUANGZHOU, China, Nov. 17 - The Chinese government is
preparing to impose minimum fuel economy standards on new
cars for the first time, and the rules will be
significantly more stringent than those in the United
States, according to Chinese experts involved in drafting
them.
The new standards are intended both to save energy and to
force automakers to introduce the latest hybrid engines and
other technology in China, in hopes of easing the nation's
swiftly rising dependence on oil imports from volatile
countries in the Middle East.
They are the latest and most ambitious in a series of steps
to regulate China's rapidly growing auto industry, after
moves earlier this year to require that air bags be
provided for both front-seat occupants in most new vehicles
and that new family vehicles sold in major cities meet air
pollution standards nearly as strict as those in Western
Europe and the United States.
Some popular vehicles now built in China by Western
automakers, including the Chevrolet Blazer, do not measure
up to the standards the government has drafted, and may
have to be modified to get better gas mileage before the
first phase of the new rules becomes effective in July
2005.
The Chinese initiative comes at a time when Congress is
close to completing work on a major energy bill that would
make no significant changes in America's fuel economy rules
for vehicles. The Chinese standards, in general, call for
new cars, vans and sport utility vehicles to get as much as
two miles a gallon of fuel more in 2005 than the average
required in the United States, and about five miles more in
2008.
This country's economy is booming, and a growing upper
class in big cities like this one is rapidly buying all the
accouterments of a prosperous Western life, including cars.
As China burns more fossil fuels, both in factories and in
a rapidly growing fleet of motor vehicles, its contribution
to global warming is also rising faster than any other
country's.
But Zhang Jianwei, the vice president and top technical
official of the Chinese agency that writes vehicle
standards, said in a telephone interview on Monday that
energy security was the paramount concern in drafting the
new automotive fuel economy rules, and that global warming
had received little attention.
"China has become an important importer of oil so it has to
have regulations to save energy," said Mr. Zhang, who is
also deputy secretary of the 39-member interagency
committee that approved the rules at a meeting this month.
China was a net oil exporter until a decade ago, but its
output has not kept up with soaring demand. It now depends
on imports of oil for one-third of its needs, mainly from
Saudi Arabia and Angola. Before the war, Iraq was also an
important supplier. By comparison, the United States now
imports about 55 percent of the oil it uses.
The International Energy Agency predicts that by 2030, the
volume of China's oil imports will equal American imports
now. Chinese strategists have expressed growing worry about
depending on a lifeline of oil tankers stretching across
the Indian Ocean, through the Strait of Malacca, a waterway
plagued by piracy, and across the South China Sea,
protected mainly by the United States Navy.
Various Chinese government agencies still have three months
to review the legal language in the fuel economy rules,
giving automakers some time to lobby against them; as yet,
there has been no mention of the approval of the new rules
in the government-controlled Chinese media.
But Mr. Zhang said that the rules in draft form were the
product of a very strong consensus among government
agencies and that "the technical content won't be changed."
Two executives at Volkswagen, the largest foreign automaker
in China, said that representatives of their company and of
domestic Chinese automakers attended what they described as
the final interagency meeting to approve the rules. Under
pressure from the government, these auto industry
representatives agreed to the new rules despite misgivings,
the executives said. "They had no choice but to agree," one
of the Volkswagen executives added.
The executive said that Volkswagen's vehicles would meet
the first phase of the standards in 2005, while declining
to comment on compliance with the second, more rigorous
phase, which is to take effect in July 2008.
The new standards are based on a vehicle's weight - lighter
vehicles must go the farthest on a gallon - and on the type
of transmission, with manual-shift cars required to go
farther than those with less efficient automatic
transmissions.
In a major departure from American practice, all new sport
utility vehicles and minivans in China would be required to
meet the same standards as automatic-shift cars of the same
weight. In the United States, standards for sport utilities
and minivans are much lower than for cars.
The Chinese rules do not cover pickups or commercial
trucks. According to General Motors market research, there
is little demand for pickup trucks in China except from
businesses, because the affluent urban consumer who can
afford a new vehicle regards pickup trucks as
unsophisticated and too reminiscent of the horse-drawn
carts still used in some rural areas.
Typically, heavy vehicles are much harder on fuel than
light ones, but the new Chinese standards permit the heavy
vehicles to get only slightly worse gas mileage. As a
result, they provide an incentive for manufacturers to
offer smaller, lighter vehicles, which will be easier to
design.
The new standards would require all small cars sold in
China to achieve slightly better gas mileage than the
average new small car sold in the United States now gets,
according to calculations by An Feng, a transportation
consultant who advised the government on the rules. But
officials in Beijing would require much better minimum gas
mileage for minivans and, especially, S.U.V.'s than the
average vehicle of either type now gets in the United
States.
American regulations call for each automaker to produce a
fleet of passenger cars with an average fuel economy of
27.5 miles a gallon under a combination of city and highway
driving with no traffic; window-sticker values for gas
mileage, which include the effects of traffic, are about 15
percent lower. Light trucks, including vans, S.U.V.'s and
pickups, are allowed an average of 20.7 miles a gallon
without traffic.
But the Bush administration has raised the comparable
American standard to 22.2 miles a gallon for the 2007 model
year and is now completing a review of whether to raise
limits further for 2008. The administration is also
considering adopting different standards for different
weight classes of light trucks.
Over all, average fuel economy in the United States has
been eroding since the late 1980's as automakers shifted
production from cars to light trucks. It fell in the 2002
model year to the lowest level since 1980. Automakers in
Europe have accepted European Union demands to increase
fuel economy under different rules that could prove at
least as stringent as China's minimums.
The Chinese standards would require the greatest increases
for full-size S.U.V.'s like the Ford Expedition, which
would have to go as much as 29 percent farther on a gallon
of fuel in 2008 than they do now in the United States, Mr.
An calculated. Sport utility sales in China have more than
doubled so far this year, but are still a much smaller part
of the overall market than they are in the United States.
Because the American standards are fleet averages while the
Chinese standards are minimums for each vehicle, the effect
of the Chinese rules could be considerably more stringent.
A manufacturer can sell vehicles in the United States that
are far below average in fuel efficiency if it has others
in its product line that offset it by being above average.
But under the Chinese rules, the fuel-inefficient models -
especially new ones introduced after the standards take
effect - would be subject to fines no matter how well their
siblings do, Mr. Zhang said, and the maker would not be
allowed to expand production of the gas-guzzling models. In
Garrison Keillor's phrase, China plans to require that
every vehicle be above average.
Mr. An said that at the final meetings on the new rules,
the only outspoken objections had come from a
representative of the Beijing Automotive Industry Holding
Company, which makes Jeeps in a joint venture with
DaimlerChrysler.
According to people who have seen the new standards, many
Jeep models sold in China do not now comply with them;
neither do the Chevrolet Blazer sport utilities built by a
General Motors joint venture in Shenyang. Some of
Volkswagen's car models also fall slightly short, these
people said. By contrast, Honda's cars, built at a
sprawling factory complex here in Guangzhou, the commercial
hub of southern China, would comply easily because they use
advanced engine technology, these people said.
Trevor Hale, a DaimlerChrysler spokesman, declined to
comment in detail. "DaimlerChrysler complies with local
regulations where it does business," Mr. Hale said in an
e-mail response to an inquiry. "It continues working to
improve fuel economy in the vehicles it develops, builds
and sells around the world."
Bernd Leissner, the president of Volkswagen Asia Pacific,
said that his company's cars would comply because "it's
just a question of how to adapt the engine - it's something
that could be done quickly."
The fastest way to improve fuel efficiency is to switch
from gasoline to diesel engines, as Volkswagen is starting
to do in China. The latest diesel engines are much cleaner
than those of a decade ago, but are still more polluting
than gasoline engines of similar power.
A spokeswoman for General Motors, which is beginning to
introduce Cadillac luxury cars in China, said she did not
have enough information about the newly drafted rules to
comment on them, but that her company's vehicles were
comparable in fuel economy to those of rival manufacturers
in the same market segments. Executives of G.M. were
preparing for an event in Beijing on Tuesday and Wednesday
when the company plans to showcase examples of its work on
gasoline-saving fuel-cell and hybrid engines for cars.
In the United States, G.M. has argued that tighter fuel
economy rules are unnecessary because technological
improvements will someday improve efficiency anyway. G.M.
and other automakers have also contended in the United
States that higher gasoline taxes would represent a better
policy than higher gas mileage standards, because it would
give drivers an economic incentive to choose more efficient
vehicles and to drive fewer miles.
China is still considering its policy on fuel taxes, but
has not acted so far, because higher fuel taxes would
impose higher costs on many sections of society, Mr. Zhang
said.
Another company that could run into trouble over the
Chinese mileage standards is Toyota, which on Nov. 6 began
selling a locally produced version of its full-size Land
Cruiser sport utility vehicle in China. A spokesman said on
Monday that Toyota had not yet heard about the new Chinese
fuel economy regulations, which have been prepared with a
level of secrecy typical of many Chinese regulatory
actions.
Japan is also phasing in new fuel efficiency standards
based on vehicle weight that allow heavier vehicles only
slightly worse gas mileage than lighter ones. American
automakers have complained that the Japanese rules
discriminate against them because Japanese automakers tend
to produce slightly lighter cars anyway.
China has more than 100 automakers, as Detroit did a
century ago, but the bulk of its output comes from a small
number of joint ventures with multinational companies.
Total production has more than doubled in the last three
years, to about 3.8 million cars and light trucks in 2002,
nearly as many as Germany. The United States builds about
12 million a year, Japan about 10 million.
The cars that Chinese automakers produce on their own tend
to be very small and lightweight, but the engines are built
on older technology, and may not have an easy time
complying with the new fuel economy standards.
The government has been encouraging the industry to
consolidate, and the new rules may hasten that process by
forcing investment in engine designs that small companies
may not be able to afford on their own.
作者：白丁 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
|
|
|
| 返回顶端 |
|
 |
|
-
 昨日紐約時報頭版頭條 -- 白丁 - (25606 Byte) 2003-11-19 周三, 18:23 (1170 reads)
|
|
|
|
您不能在本论坛发表新主题, 不能回复主题, 不能编辑自己的文章, 不能删除自己的文章, 不能发表投票, 您 不可以 发表活动帖子在本论坛, 不能添加附件不能下载文件, |
|
|
