Asia Briefing: Hong Kong cabbies go electric in effort to cut emissions

Hong Kong is proving to be not immune to the pollution issues clouding people's minds north of the border, where 16,000 dead pigs have been fished out of the Huangpu River and face masks against foul air are an increasingly common sight.

The city’s amazing neon skyline is a major light polluter, it emerged last week, and, while the PH2.5 microparticle pollution is far short of Beijing, the air is a lot dirtier than it used to be.

Now the chairman of the Shenzhen-based Chinese battery maker BYD, Wang Chuanfu, is trying to replace 3,000 taxis running on liquefied petroleum gas in Hong Kong with its E6 electric cars within two years.

Hong Kong’s taxis are one of the symbols of the city, in their distinctive red and white livery. The first batch of charging stations has been completed and the second tranche is expected to be in place before May, ensuring that each e-taxi can be charged in time and fully.

“Hong Kong has been working on the promotion of green transportation in recent years,” says BYD’s Wang. “Electrifying the public transit will not just effectively lower the operation cost for transportation industry but, more importantly, it will largely reduce the vehicle emissions and improve air quality, achieving enormous social value.”

Who will pay?
Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway bought 10 per cent of BYD in 2008.

There has been a delay of around eight months in getting the first taxis out, but 45 BYD electric taxis are due to take to the streets in May, according to Wang. He expects to add 1,000 E6 taxis in Hong Kong next year.

By 2015, the number should grow to 3,000 and Wang is investing up to
€4 million to set up 45 charging units in various Hong Kong car parks.

Taxi owners are sceptical, the South China Morning Post reports. Questions remain about who will pay for the electricity, who will build the charging facilities and who will pay for the car – which costs twice the price of the popular Toyota Crown cab.

Supplying the charging stations is going to be a big, expensive issue. BYD hopes to retrofit charging facilities to existing car parks and shopping centres.

“Each charging point can serve three taxis so, for 3,000 taxis, we only need about 1,000 charging points. The retrofitting will only take us about six months,” Wang told the newspaper.

According to BYD calculations, every day a single taxi in Hong Kong produces total emissions equivalent to 14 private cars, a single-decker bus equivalent to 33 private cars and a double-decker bus produces the same tailpipe emissions as 57 units of private cars.

Zero emissions
"So, if all of the 18,000 gas-powered taxis and the 12,000 diesel-powered buses in HK could be substituted with BYD's all-electric vehicles, the goal of zero emission and zero pollution for Hong Kong city will be approached in a shorter period,"BYD says.

It reckons it’s cheaper too. Each BYD E6 cab can save more than 11,000 Hong Kong dollars (€1,100) a year because of the price difference between electricity and gasoline. Fuel costs for an electric car were just €0.26 per kilometre, less than a third of those for an LPG taxi.

At the same time, it’s going to be a loss leader. “It’s just 45 cars. If we make a profit or a loss, it won’t be a big sum, but we will run the first batch at a loss as a trial,” Wang says.

BYD has already signed up to provide 50 units of BYD E6 for London’s first electric cab fleet in London, while 49 BYD E6s have been already introduced in the Colombian capital, Bogota.

It’s been a challenge for BYD to introduce the cabs around the world. Even in its home town of Shenzhen, it wanted to introduce 2,500 electric cabs; so far only 800 are running.

Wang wants more government efforts to help support the use of electric cars, such as incentives or developing charging infrastructure.

“If someone would build the charging facilities, we wouldn’t. We are a car maker. Our main purpose is to sell cars,” he says.