Chinese Electric Car Manufacturer Partners With Mexican Company For New EV

Carlos Slim is one of the world’s wealthiest industrialists. Part of his Inbursa financial empire is Giant Motors, a Mexican manufacturing company. Giant is partnering with Moldex, a subsidiary of Bimbo — the world’s largest bakery — and the Monterrey Institute of Technology to develop a new electric car to serve as a taxi to help combat Mexico City’s chronic smog problem. The first prototypes could be on the road by 2018.

JAC Motors S3 SUV

Moldex has been building light duty electric trucks for its parent company for more than two years at its factory in the state of México. As of last summer, Bimbo had 320 units in service as delivery vehicles. Each is able to carry 1,350 lbs of cargo and has a range of 45 miles — not enough to go cross country but more than enough for daily delivery needs.

Operating costs for the electric vans are said to average between 40 and 50 centavos per kilometer. By comparison, operating costs for a similar gasoline powered truck are more than 2 pesos — four times as much. Moldex is capable of producing 20 such trucks a week. Moldex announced last summer it would begin selling the trucks for 390,000 pesos — equivalent to US $19,000.

Giant Motors also announced recently a tie-in with Chinese auto maker JAC Motors (Jianghai Automobile Company), to build the JAC S2 and S3 SUVs. Production is scheduled to begin in the second half of 2017.  The S2 and S3 will be built at Giant’s factory in Ciudad Sahagún which will be expanded to add enough capacity to build 40,000 vehicles a year. The expansion will add 1,000 factory jobs and spur growth of another 4,500 jobs for suppliers and ancillary businesses.

Why is any of this important? Isn’t Mexico overrun with murderers and rapists? Apparently the answer is no. There are actually people there who buy cars and trucks and companies who manufacture them. The Chinese are consummate businessmen. They are happy to enter into profitable business ventures wherever they may be found around the world.

The vehicles made in Mexico are sold in markets around the world from Central and South America to Africa, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Here’s a thought for Trumpies. By excluding Mexicans and Mexican goods from the US, America may be empowering other nations to surpass it in manufacturing muscle. By refusing to do business with others and declaring America First! as our economic modus operandi, we may be cutting off our nose to spite our face, as my old Irish grandmother would say.

70 years ago, Robert Frost wrote a poem entitled simply Mending Wall. In it he says,

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offense.

Wise words. American Exceptionalism cuts two ways. We would be smart to bear that in mind before we cut ourselves off from the rest of the world and allow Carlos Slim, JAC Motors, and a hundred other companies that are willing to work together rather than cocooning themselves in a xenophobic cloak lead the way into the future of commerce, leaving America behind in splendid isolation.

Source and photo credit: Mexico News Daily

China Built 25,000 Electric Cars & Plug-In Hybrids In June Alone

Aoxin Ibis electric car. Photo by CarNewsChina.com.

The Chinese vehicle market is now the world's largest, and has been for a few years now.

And the country's government-industrial complex has ambitious plans to dominate global production of plug-in electric vehicles, both for reasons of competitiveness and as one effort to start to reduce its endemic and hazardous air pollution.

In the last few months, the country's carmakers have apparently started to build plug-in electric cars--known in China as "New Energy Vehicles"--at rates that exceed those of Japan and the U.S.

According to news site Gasgoo, citing statistics from the Ministry of Industry published in the Beijing Daily, the country's automakers collectively built 25,000 new-energy vehicles in June alone.

Kandi electric car

The total was made up of 10,500 battery-electric and 6,663 plug-in hybrid passenger cars, along with 6,218 battery-electric and 1,645 plug-in hybrid commercial vehicles.

That figure is a huge jump from the pace at the beginning of the year, since it's roughly one-third of the total 78,5000 built during the first six months of the year.

It's important to note, however, that those totals are not directly comparable to total sales of battery-electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles published by Green Car Reports and other outlets.

The North American sales data, both for the U.S. and Canada, include only highway-capable vehicles that meet all Federal motor vehicle safety standards.

BYD e6 electric taxi in service in Shenzhen, China

The Chinese data, on the other hand, includes some proportion of what would be deemed low-speed or neighborhood electric vehicles by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Those vehicles generally have top speeds of 35 mph or so, and often have little more equipment than brakes, lights, wipers, seat belts, and perhaps an audio system.

The Chinese auto industry is now producing plug-in cars in fast-increasing volumes, albeit perhaps not altogether willingly.

But while there's little doubt that the trend will continue, it's important to understand that when discussing China's raw production and sales numbers to those from the U.S., Japan, and various European countries, you're not yet comparing apples to apples.

Any possible Apple electric car, of course, is a different discussion altogether.