China announce giant electric vehicle industrial park

China has been the talking point for the past few months now, mainly because it has quickly become the largest vehicle market in the world and it’s likely to keep growing with the government’s mandate.

Now one of the country’s biggest automakers, GAC Motor, announced that they started construction at a $6.5bn industrial park to develop and produce electric and autonomous vehicles.

It’s one of the biggest investments of its kind. The park will be located in Guangzhou’s Panyu district on 5 square kilometers.

At the location, GAC Motor will build a new electric vehicle plant, which they expect to be completed by the end of 2018 with a total investment of ¥4.69bn ($679million).

They claim a production capacity of 200,000 units per year.

Yu Jun, General Manager of GAC Motor, commented on the announcement: “The planning and construction of this industrial park is a concrete step to implement the Chinese government’s green development goals for Guangdong and the national ‘Made in China 2025′ strategy. The move will help promote the development of the automobile industry and drive economic growth.”

Earlier this year, GAC unveiled its first all-electric vehicles, the GE3, at the 2017 North America International Auto Show, which will be one of the vehicles manufactured at the new location.

Jun added: “In the coming five years, we will push out at least seven new electric vehicle models and cover three product series including pure electric, range-extending and hybrid. Our goal is for GAC Motor to take the lead in the EV business and achieve sales of 20,000 electric vehicles by 2020.”

There are also claims that the company have signed strategic partnership agreements with ‘the world’s top 10 auto suppliers’, including Aisin Seiki, Michelin, Continental and Faurecia during Auto Shanghai.

GAC is bringing everyone together at the new industrial park both for the production of electric vehicles and research and development.

China’s electric vehicle mandate requires automakers’ EV sales to represent at least 8% of their total sales in 2018, 10% in 2019 and 12% in 2020, which is why several automakers are announcing investments in local EV production. Recently we saw GM and Ford take this path, and now domestic automakers are also moving forward.