BEIJING, Oct. 25 (Xinhua) -- China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) and the Society of Automotive Engineers of China (SAE-China) are leading preparations for establishment of a national innovation center for the intelligent connected vehicles (ICVs), according to the Xinhua-run Economic Information Daily on Thursday.
China's ICV market scale is expected to reach more than 100 billion yuan by 2020, said Miao Wei, minister of MIIT, at a recent ICV conference in Beijing.
He pointed out that China has attached great importance to the development of ICVs and considered it as an important means to solve problems such as traffic safety, road congestion, energy consumption and environmental pollution, and promote technological transformation and accelerated upgrading of the automobile industry.
In 2017, the MIIT unveiled an action plan for innovative development of the ICVs to speed up technology R&D and standardization of the ICVs.
In addition, China’s top economic planner, National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) is also making efforts to promote development of the intelligent vehicles.
In January this year, the NDRC approved the construction of nine major research centers, including key components of new energy vehicles, intelligent network, and power battery recycling, to address key bottlenecks in key technologies and equipment in industrial development.
Apart from the focus on development of ICVs at the national level, the local provinces and cities are also speeding up the development of ICV industry.
It is worth noting that Beijing, capital city of China, aims to bring market scale of the city's ICV and related industries to be more than 100 billion yuan by 2022.
At present, five national intelligent network vehicle demonstration zones in Shanghai, Beijing, Chongqing, Changchun and Wuhan have been completed or planned.
Enterprises have also joined the efforts to promote development of the ICVs. For example, Changan Automobile announced that it will make a transformation from a traditional automobile manufacturing enterprise to a smart travel technology company.
Changan Automobile will no longer produce non-internet new cars in 2020, said Zhu Huarong, president of Changan Automobile.
Although China's ICV market is accelerating, it will take time to really take shape, according to industry insiders.
It will take a long time for the ICVs to be available on the market as the ICVs need the support from an enormous amount of data. The data accumulation takes a long time, said Li Yanzhu, the co-founder of the maihaoche.com. (Edited by Hu Pingchao, hupingchao@xinhua.org)
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