Re: Long Distance / Greg
There isn't that much inter-city travel done in China - mostly because of these long distances.
Most car travel is done around the local city, and you drive pretty slowly in the city since it's a constant battle between cars, bikes and people trying to cross the road. Some interesting facts about cars & China:
- If someone flashes their lights at you, it doesn't mean "After you." it means "Get out my way!", which gives you a useful indicator of the difference in driving styles generally.
- If you want to cross a busy road in China, you need to walk a bit out into the road so that the cars make an arc around you, keep moving slowly forwards and after the mid-point the cars will start to swerve the other way around you. If you stand at a zebra crossing and wait for cars to stop for you, you'll die of old age by the side of the road.
Back to more serious matters - the uptake of electric cars can be strongly influenced by capturing the taxi market. Half the cars on the roads are taxis, but in most provinces they are already running on compound natural gas which is already very cheap - so I'm not sure how easy it will be to convince taxi drivers to go for EVs instead. Possibly by releasing a number of taxi licenses that are valid only for EVs (taxi licenses tend to be pretty valuable, and can be sold for about £20,000 - at least that's the case in my local city).