中国汽车将会更绿色吗?

China's auto market continues to grow. The China Association of Automobile Manufacturers says that the world's biggest auto market saw sales in 2015 rise 4.7 percent year on year and major changes are also shaping the market. For more, CCTV's Jin Yingqiao is with us in the studio.

Q1, Yingqiao, give us more data and some of the new trends in the car market.

Jin:  Well, still positive growth for the whole year, but it wasn't a smooth ride by any means. A 4.7 percent year-on-year growth to 24.6 million units in 2015 can only be good news. But on the flip side, it was the slowest annual rise in three years in 2014, the growth rate was 6.9 percent, and in 2013, 13.9 percent. In 2015, sales in the first half of this year actually saw the lowest growth in EIGHT years. In fact, a high level official from the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers even said sales this year could see NEGATIVE growth, something that the Chinese car market has not seen since the 1990s. But bright spots are also very pronounced. SUVs sales were up, and the market share of domestic passenger car brands also rise. AND there's good news for the environment as Chinese consumers continue to go green: new energy car sales were up by a whopping 400%. Car exhaust fumes account for 31 percent of the country’s total air pollution and an issue the government wants to address. A recent announcement says cities which reach sales targets for electric cars will be rewarded.

Zhu Yujie bought his second car - a hybrid fuel-electric BYD - in October. The car can go 80 kilometers on nothing but electricity. Every weekday, Zhu drives 20 kilometers to work, recharges at an underground station while working, and then drives another 20 kilometers back home.

"I bought the car because of the incentives from the local government, including generous subsidies and a free auto license. The price of the car came down from 280,000 to 218,000 yuan after the subsidies," Zhu said.

In addition to one-time subsidies and tax exemptions, the central government has also lowered the technical thresholds for making new energy vehicles, and liberalized financing channels for automakers. Denza, a joint venture between BYD and Daimler, says these are a great encouragement to manufacturers.

"The expansion of the electric car market in China has helped to improve the techniques of making key components as well as the whole vehicle. A lot of auto companies have now launched high-mileage vehicles. That means the battery technology has been improving, and the government is also encouraging the upgrading of the whole industry. I think in just three to five years, all the electric vehicles will be able to perform as well as gasoline cars in mileage, safety and reliability," Denza CEO Yan Chen said.

However, mileage anxiety still remains the biggest headache for people who own or plan to purchase new energy vehicles in China.

"The market is still being driven by government policies, so it’s relatively weak and difficult to install charging facilities, especially in very populated cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. The other difficulty is battery technology. The ability to reduce costs is not very great. It is hard to get the same cost reductions as you can with carbon-fueled vehicles. So in the future, the government should consider how it can cultivate the basic demand levels of the market as subsidies are gradually reduced," Principal analyst with His Automotive Wang Liang said.

China plans to have 5 million new energy vehicles on its roads by 2020 – a key part in hitting the environmental targets of the country’s 13th Five-year Plan. However, national sales subsidies are to be reduced by 40 percent between now and 2020. Wang says more investment in R&D and stricter assessment criteria are the keys to sustaining the recent level of growth.

Yingqiao: The hope is that electric cars can help in the fight against the smog.

Q2, Well, we saw double digit growth in the whole market later this year, tell us what's behind the surge?

Yingqiao: Right, take a look at the monthly growth rates here. In July negative growth of 6.6%, and then things started to pick up later. In November, it hit 24%, a major booster is a new tax policy. In late Septemeber the government cut the 10 percent sales tax by half for small engine cars. Keep in mind that about 70 percent of the country's new-car sales fall into that category. The last time China made a similar move was in 2009 during the global financial crisis. That tax move helped the market to a 53 percent surge that year, lifting China past the US to become the world's biggest automobile market. Another booster is preferential policies for new energy cars as we've just seen. Raised subsidies and in cities like Beijing for instance, it's much easier to get a plate for new energy cars in the plate lottery system than for traditional cars. There's a separate quota to control numbers for new energy cars.