There will be a boom in the popularity of electric vehicles in Taiwan in five or six years, Minister of Economic Affairs Shih Yen-shiang (施顏祥) said on Tuesday while presiding over a ceremony to mark the launch of a government project aimed at encouraging people to buy electric vehicles.
Shih said he arrived at the venue, the National Taiwan Science Education Center in Taipei, in an electric vehicle.
“It’s really cozy,” he said.
Photo: Liu Hsin-de, Taipei Times
Although such vehicles are not cheap, the Smart Electric Cars Pilot Project initiated by the Ministry of Economic Affairs has been set up to help people buy or lease such vehicles.
FUNDING
Under the three-year project, which has central-government funding of NT$2.2 billion (US$72.79 million), local governments will begin to build the basic infrastructure required for electric vehicles, including battery-charging stations, Shih said.
Once the market and relevant systems have expanded in five or six years, the electric vehicle industry will “rise up,” he said.
Under the ministry’s project, the Greater Taipei area and Greater Taichung would be the first regions in the country to implement low-carbon transportation options.
CHARGING STATIONS
In the capital, Yulon Motor Co (裕隆汽車) will make available 40 of its Luxgen multipurpose vehicles and 60 of its Tobe-brand M’Car compact cars for short-term leasing, while the governments of Taipei City and New Taipei City (新北市) will have the option of setting up 100 electric car charging stations around the greater Taipei region in the coming years, according to the Taipei Metropolis Low-Carbon Travel Program.
Greater Taichung has plans to build 161 charging stations and has purchased 64 electric vehicles for public use.
Shih said he expected Greater Tainan and Greater Kaohsiung would quickly catch up with the two pioneer regions in the promotion of low-carbon transport.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
Micron Memory Taiwan Co (台灣美光), a subsidiary of US memorychip maker Micron Technology Inc, has been granted a NT$4.7 billion (US$149.5 million) subsidy under the Ministry of Economic Affairs A+ Corporate Innovation and R&D Enhancement program, the ministry said yesterday. The US memorychip maker’s program aims to back the development of high-performance and high-bandwidth memory chips with a total budget of NT$11.75 billion, the ministry said. Aside from the government funding, Micron is to inject the remaining investment of NT$7.06 billion as the company applied to participate the government’s Global Innovation Partnership Program to deepen technology cooperation, a ministry official told the
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s leading advanced chipmaker, officially began volume production of its 2-nanometer chips in the fourth quarter of this year, according to a recent update on the company’s Web site. The low-key announcement confirms that TSMC, the go-to chipmaker for artificial intelligence (AI) hardware providers Nvidia Corp and iPhone maker Apple Inc, met its original roadmap for the next-generation technology. Production is currently centered at Fab 22 in Kaohsiung, utilizing the company’s first-generation nanosheet transistor technology. The new architecture achieves “full-node strides in performance and power consumption,” TSMC said. The company described the 2nm process as
RSS