China's car sales are driving toward a global trend of low growth despite a rebound in May but sales of new-energy cars are powering ahead, data released by the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers yesterday showed.
Deliveries of passenger cars and commercial vehicles rose 9.8 percent last month, bringing the accumulative increase of this year to 7 percent from 6 percent in April, while the combined volume of sales amounted to 10.8 million units.
The passenger car segment, making the bulk of the sales, grew 7.8 percent over the past five months. But this increase paled when compared with the double-digit growth figures in what was known as the Chinese auto market's golden era, which is now a thing of the past.
"The lower growth rate of the Chinese automobile market is aligning with the global automobile industry growth norms," Wang Xia, chairman of the Automotive Committee of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, said at the Global Automotive Forum held recently in Chongqing.
But the sport-utility vehicle market in China was one of the few bright spots as their sales surged 45 percent during the January-May period.
Another spotlight was green vehicles powered purely or partly by electric batteries.
Combined sales of green vehicles rose 1.3 times on annual basis to around 126,000 units to rank as the biggest gainer in the auto market, with domestic carmakers poised to become the biggest beneficiaries.
The combined volume of green vehicles took up under 2 percent of the total volume of cars sold. But the level of market penetration was already enough to power China to overtake the US to become the largest seller of new-energy cars last year.
Wang said electric vehicles in China have gone past the stage of "borrowing" core technologies and are now charging toward the stage of "leading development" in which the country now boasts independent intellectual property rights and new technology for further innovation as shown by Internet firms like LeEco and NextEV.
