Renewable Gossip

California-based Coda Automotive’s electric sedan will be built by China’s Harbin Hafei Automobile Industry Group. Harbin Hafei will work with other Chinese carmakers to produce electric cars for its home market.

China will soon overtake America as the world’s biggest car market, and could have 600 million or more cars on its roads in 2050. Despite a lot of talk from China about putting green cars on Chinese roads, hybrids account for only about 0.01 percent of today’s China passenger vehicle sales, according to JD Power & Associates China. That will change if Warren Buffet gets his way.

BYD Co., which is backed by Buffet, is seeking government support for hybrid sales. “We hope the local and central governments will work together to provide subsidies to consumers,” BYD Chairman Wang Chuanfu said at an automotive conference in Tianjin yesterday.

BYD is just one of many players in the growing green car scene in China. SAIC is investing $300 million in developing hybrids and electric vehicles, and plans to unveil its first hybrid by the end of next year, followed by a plug-in hybrid and a pure electric car in 2012. Chery will introduce its first plug-in electric car, the S18, next year. Chongqing Changan Automobile Co., China’s fourth-largest automaker, is building a plant with capacity to make as many as 600,000 low-emission and hybrid vehicles a year.

Harbin Hafei Automobile Industry Group, the Chinese automaker that will build California-based Coda Automotive’s electric sedan, due in 2010, signed a deal with a Chinese advanced automotive R&D consortium to jointly produce electric cars for China’s domestic market.

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