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Automakers such as BYD, Tesla, and Li Auto are cutting back on their expenses to move their electric cars. In the case of gasoline-powered vehicles, the factory surplus is even worse.
By Keith Bradsher
Reporting from Chongqing, China
On the outskirts of Chongqing, western China’s largest city, stands a huge symbol of the country’s overabundance of car factories. It is a complex of grey buildings measuring almost a square kilometre. The thousands of workers who used to work there have left the company. Its red loading docks are closed.
The facility, a former meeting and engine plant, is a joint venture between a Chinese company and Hyundai, the South Korean giant. The complex opened in 2017 with robots and other gadgets to make gasoline-powered cars. Hyundai sold the overdue campus last year for a fraction of the $1. 1 billion needed to build and equip it. The site’s unmowed grass is already knee-deep.
“It’s all very automated, but now it’s desolate,” said Zhou Zhehui, 24, who works for a rival Chinese automaker, Chang’an, and whose apartment overlooks the former Hyundai compound.
China has more than 100 factories with the capacity to manufacture approximately 40 million internal combustion engine cars per year. That’s about double what the Chinese need to buy, and sales of those cars are falling as electric cars become more popular. .
Last month, for the first time, sales of battery-electric cars and gas-electric plug-in hybrids surpassed those of gasoline-powered cars in China’s 35 largest cities.
Dozens of gasoline-powered vehicle factories are running lightly or have already been suspended.
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