Fuel economy of Chinese light-duty car manufacturers: An efficiency analysis perspective

Yi Li, Zhaohua Wang, Ke Wang and Bin Zhang

Energy, 2021, vol. 220, issue C

Abstract: In 2012, the State Council of China released the auto industry development plan to accelerate the deployment of energy-saving vehicles (ESVs) and new energy vehicles (NEVs). Based on milestone fuel economy policies, China has set overall fleet-average fuel economy targets of decreasing the fuel consumption per hundred kilometres to 5.0, 4.0, and, 3.2 L/100 km by 2020, 2025, and 2030, respectively. In this study, the task responses of these targets from auto companies (i.e. car manufacturers and imported car dealers) are examined using a unique database of test-cycle fuel economy parameters for 35,129 models. Malmquist decomposition is used to estimate the technical progress of the auto industry towards achieving the fuel economy targets and the technical efficiency of each company for catching up with the best practice. To explore the effects of new policies on fuel economy improvement, three scenarios regarding technical changes are designed to predict company-level fuel economy. The estimation results show that according to the current rate of technical progress and technical efficiency increase, the average fuel economy indicator of the light-duty fleet will reach 6.8, 6.2, and 5.5 L/100 km by 2020, 2025, and 2030, respectively. This indicates that Chinese light-duty car manufacturers still need to accelerate the development, adoption, and marketisation process of fuel economy technologies to reach the mandatory fleet-average fuel economy targets timeously.

Keywords: Fuel economy; Phase-in regulation; Corporate average fuel consumption; Malmquist productivity index (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544220327298
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:energy:v:220:y:2021:i:c:s0360544220327298

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2020.119622

Access Statistics for this article

Energy is currently edited by Henrik Lund and Mark J. Kaiser

More articles in Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().