This week China announced it will ban the production and sale of fossil-fuel-powered cars in the near future, prompting speculation: have we finally reached the tipping point for the shift to electric vehicles?
Details haven't been released, but the announcement is consistent with the government's 13th Five Year Plan (2016-2020), which aims to expand the electric vehicle market, including building a network of charging stations to service five million electric cars by 2020.
China also previously announced a policy requiring car makers to ensure eight per cent of their vehicles are electric or hybrid by 2018, rising to 20 per cent in 2025. Because China is the world's largest car market, this could have a dramatic impact on the decisions of auto manufacturers globally.
There are lots of reasons why China wants to accelerate the uptake of electric vehicles. It desperately needs to curb air pollution, which the World Health Organization estimates kills more than a million of its citizens each year. It also wants to reduce dependence on imported oil, and help meet climate change targets. Most crucial, however, is China's intention to dominate the global market for electric vehicles and the technology that powers them, lithium-ion batteries.
There's a precedent here. In the late 1990s and 2000s, the Chinese government supported solar panel manufacturing as a strategically important industry, creating massive economies of scale that drastically reduced costs. Could the same thing happen with batteries and electric vehicles?
China's move follows plans announced by France and Britain to ban petrol and diesel cars by 2040. Spurred on by Tesla's success, big car manufacturers like Volkswagen, Nissan, Ford and Volvo are also ramping up production of electric vehicles.
They're starting from a low base. There are more than 2 million electric vehicles globally, according to the latest report from the International Energy Agency (IEA), which is just 0.2 per cent of the total number of passenger cars and light trucks in existence. But the number is at least doubling every two years, and the IEA expects a 'significant scale-up'. Its most ambitious scenario is 200 million electric vehicles by 2030, about a third of the market.
However this estimate is based on a like-for-like 'replacement model', in which people simply switch their petrol or diesel cars for electric vehicles, without a major challenge to the culture of individual car ownership. That could all be about to change.
"Banning sales of diesel and gasoline vehicles by 2040 is a