Two manufacturers in a Ministry of Transportation and Communications (MOTC) pilot project for electric buses use battery cells made in Japan, not China, the ministry said last week.
The ministry issued the statement after Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Lin Chun-hsien (林俊憲) said that the ministry was subsidizing purchases of electric buses powered by Chinese-made battery cells.
Apart from providing a subsidy of up to NT$10 million (US$354,773) to bus operators for each electric bus they buy, the ministry also requires that a majority of the components in the vehicles be made in Taiwan to qualify for the subsidy.
However, the ministry only requires seat belts or other minor components of an electric bus to be made in Taiwan, without applying the same requirement to battery cells, Lin said.
Battery cells are the most important component and account for 40 percent of the production cost of an electric bus, and China controls the core technology of producing them, he said.
“The ministry’s goal is to make electric bus manufacturing one of the nation’s strategic industries, but how can it do so if the core technology of an electric bus battery is developed by China?” he asked.
The ministry said that Master Transportation Bus Manufacturing and RAE Electric Vehicles, the domestic companies that qualified for the pilot project, use battery cells manufactured by Toshiba and Automotive Energy Supply Corp, respectively, not by Chinese manufacturers.
“We do not require battery cells on electric buses to be made in Taiwan because the Ministry of Economic Affairs had surveyed local manufacturers and found that their skills and production capacities would not be sufficient to meet demand. Batteries produced by local companies were also less competitive than those made by international manufacturers in terms of energy density, production capacity and price-performance ratio,” it said.
“We have forwarded suggestions about using locally made battery cells on electric buses to the Ministry of Economic Affairs, which will assess if it is a feasible option,” it said.
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