The Jeep brand has big plans for electrification of it’s vehicles in China over the next five years. Chinese regulations are changing due to the fact of so much smog affecting living in major cities. For years, the lack of emissions regulations have caused power plants, factories and the growing number of automobiles to create a deadly situation throughout metropolitan areas of China.
Since 2013, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) have declared a “war on pollution”. However, not much has been accomplished since then. So the Chinese government has put regulations to push electric vehicles and to eventually ban the production or sale of cars that use traditional fuels (gasoline and diesel).
China has set a deadline for automakers to meet new green-car sales targets by 2019. Like the United States’ Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) regulations, China has made a credit system for automakers to amass credits for new-energy vehicles (NEVs) equivalent to 10% of it’s annual sales by 2019. That level would rise to 12% in 2020.
A single vehicle can generate multiple credits. This means a proportion of volumes would like lower. Under the new rules, automakers will receive credits for new-energy vehicles including plug-in hybrids and fully electric cars that can be transferred or traded. Companies with annual sales volumes above 30,000 units will need to comply with the targets.
Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA), has announced that the Jeep brand would be a leader in NEVs. Eight new vehicles or refreshed products will make up the new product portfolio from Jeep, two of which will be specific vehicles to the Chinese market. Four of the vehicles will be plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV), which are hybrid electric vehicles whose battery can be recharged by plugging it into an external source of electric power, or by an traditional engine and a generator. The other four vehicles will be battery electric vehicles (BEV), these vehicle will be completely electric.
We showed you this week, spy shots taken of the Jeep Grand Commander PHEV on the streets of Metro Detroit testing. One of our eagle-eyed forum members (Bili) noticed that one of the prototypes had a sticker on the windshield indicating the vehicle was in “VP” status or Validation Prototype. This means that the vehicle was built in the assembly plant with not all production spec parts. However, most vehicles built at this point are validating certain systems. This usually means production of a vehicle, is about six months away from a production launch.
This means that the first electrified Jeep for China, will be the Chinese-specific Grand Commander PHEV model. According to the new five-year plan, introduced during FCA’s Capital Market’s Day presentation on June 1st that a fully electric version (BEV) of the Grand Commander will be coming to market in the second-quarter of 2021.
We expect the 2020 Jeep Wrangler PHEV that was announced at the launch of the 2018 Jeep Wrangler (JL) and the 2020 Jeep Renegade PHEV mule we have seen already will be two of the vehicles aimed at these new Chinese regulations.
A special thanks goes to our forum member Bili, for helping us put together the details surround Jeep and the growing Chinese regulations.
