slides from my talk wednesday night

The other night I had a great time presenting at the Beijing Energy Network's wonderfully titled BEER (Beijing Energy & Environment Roundtable) event. The title of my talk was "150 Million and Counting... Controlling the Energy and Environmental Impacts of China's Vehicles." I tried to have fun with it - I presented it at 9pm at a bar, after all - while touching on a range of topics and issues related to the transportation sector in China.

Although I fear the slides may seem a little too bare-bones without the context of my accompanying speech, I did get enough requests to distribute that I figured I might as well put them online:

I welcome any questions or comments either here or by e-mail at livefrombeijing at gmail dot com.

Lastly, apologies for the light posting recently; I have been slammed at work in preparation for a trip to the States this weekend. I'll be gone for two weeks and will post while there if time permits, but no promises...

some 2008 chinese vehicle statistics released

I've been too busy to blog much recently, but this news deserves a quick post. China's National Bureau of Statistics this week released the "Statistical Communiqué of the People's Republic of China on the 2008 National Economic and Social Development" (English and Chinese). The report includes updates to total vehicle population in China:

The total number of motor vehicles for civilian use reached 64.67 million (including 14.92 million tri-wheel motor vehicles and low-speed trucks) by the end of 2008, up 13.5 percent, of which private-owned vehicles numbered 41.73 million, up 18.1 percent. The total number of cars for civilian use stood at 24.38 million, up by 24.5 percent, of which private-owned cars numbered 19.47 million, up by 28.0 percent.

Also note production statistics: 9.35 million total motor vehicles produced in 2008, of which 5 million were cars.

It appears that that the detailed data is not yet available in the online statistical yearbooks.

I'll have a lot more to say about these numbers over the next few days. But if anyone wants to start crunching your own numbers, here's some good tables to start with:

NBS data on possession of civil vehicles through 2006
NBS data on possession of private vehicles through 2006