Korean media: Electric vehicles encounter a "gap". China has solved the problem. What about South Korea?

On June 16, the Korean media Korea Economic Daily published an article saying that today, there is a word always following in the electric vehicle market, which is a "gap". The gap refers to the period of stagnation before newly developed products or services are accepted by the public. Whether electric vehicles can really overcome the gap and withdraw from the stage of history has been debated endlessly.

According to SNE Research, a market research enterprise, the electric vehicle market grew 20.4% year on year in the first quarter of this year. The battery market also expanded by 22% over the same period. Although it still maintains double-digit growth, considering that the growth rate from 2017 to 2023 will exceed 40%, some analysts believe that demand is slowing down gradually.

The situation in South Korea is worse. The Korean electric vehicle market was the only major country with negative growth last year, with a decrease of 26% in the first quarter of this year. In this regard, some people worry about whether the era of electric vehicles will go away. The news that some global automobile enterprises such as General Motors and Ford have postponed the listing of electric vehicles also supports this opinion. The growing popularity of hybrid electric vehicles without inconvenient charging and fuel saving is also considered to be the reason why electric vehicles encounter a gap.

But most experts believe that the era of electric vehicles will finally come. As of the first quarter of this year, electric vehicles accounted for about 11% of new cars in the world. It is generally believed that once the problem of consumers' hesitation on electric vehicles is solved, such as the charging infrastructure of electric vehicles, the popularity of electric vehicles will begin.

At the EV3 global press conference last month, Kia President Song Haocheng said, "The electric vehicle market is certainly the future direction of development, and we expect the electric vehicle market to grow again soon. The demand for electric vehicles will not turn to hybrid vehicles, but instead to gasoline, diesel oil and other internal combustion engines."

He also said, "I think we need to provide substantive solutions on issues such as price and charging infrastructure, which are obstacles to electric vehicles."

According to a survey conducted in February this year, South Korean respondents said that the biggest inconvenience and difficulty they felt when using electric vehicles was "charging trouble caused by mileage limit (36%)". The second is "lack of charging infrastructure (28%)" and "high vehicle price (27%)". If these difficulties are solved, the number of electric vehicle consumers is expected to increase.

In fact, China, where electric vehicles account for more than 40% of the new car sales market, has solved all these problems and opened the era of popularization. Low price electric vehicles launched by Chinese companies such as BYD are also very popular.

Affected by this, global automobile manufacturers have announced that they will compete to launch electric vehicle models at a price range acceptable to consumers. Stellantis、 Volkswagen and other global automobile manufacturers recently announced the launch of low-cost electric vehicles in the range of 20 million to 30 million Korean won, and Tesla also announced that it will launch electric vehicles with a price as low as 25000 dollars. This is considered as a factor to improve the expectation of electric vehicle popularization.

Lee Heng jeou, president of the Korea Automotive Integration Technology Institute, predicted that "although it is difficult to achieve the high level growth rate in the past, the electric vehicle market will continue to maintain the growth trend after 1-2 years of adjustment." He proposed this based on the continuous development of the automobile industry in the past diesel locomotive era, which also took about 10 years as a cycle. He said: "With the full development of industrialization, electric vehicles will also present a demand pattern similar to that of internal combustion engines in the future."