On May 5, the State Council executive meeting reviewed and approved the opinions on accelerating the development of advanced manufacturing clusters, deploying and accelerating the construction of charging infrastructure, and better supporting new energy vehicles to the countryside and rural revitalization.
The market for new energy vehicles in rural areas is vast. Accelerating the construction of charging infrastructure will not only help promote the purchase and use of new energy vehicles and release rural consumption potential, but also help develop new formats such as rural tourism and add new impetus to rural revitalization.
The meeting emphasized that it is necessary to focus on the outstanding bottlenecks that restrict the use of new energy vehicles to the countryside, moderately advance the construction of charging infrastructure, innovate the construction, operation, and maintenance models of charging infrastructure, and ensure that "it is built, managed, and sustainable." It is necessary to guide enterprises to sink their sales and service networks, and encourage vocational colleges to train maintenance technicians for rural areas to meet the growing demand for maintenance of new energy vehicles. It is necessary to further optimize the policies supporting the purchase and use of new energy vehicles, encourage enterprises to enrich the supply of new energy vehicles, and at the same time strengthen safety supervision to promote the healthy development of the rural new energy vehicle market.
Today, the activity of sending new energy vehicles to the countryside has lasted for three years. In July 2020, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and other three departments jointly launched a campaign to send new energy vehicles to the countryside. Xu Haidong, deputy chief engineer of the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, said that in the past three years, he has gone to 10 provinces (cities) to carry out 18 start-up activities, and released 6 batches of nearly 200 rural models, driving the cumulative sales of more than 4.1 million new energy rural models.