Even for a foreign visitor to Shanghai, renting an electric car is easy. All that's required is a valid driver's license and a passport. And it's surprisingly cheap: eHi Car Service Ltd. charges the equivalent of just $25 a day for a Chinese-built Roewe with a range of about 90 kilometers.
就连外国游客都能在上海轻而易举地租辆电动汽车，只需要一张有效驾照和一张护照。而且租金还出奇地便宜：一嗨汽车租赁有限公司(eHi Car Service Ltd.)一辆续航里程90公里的国产荣威(Roewe)租金仅相当于25美元/天。
But having completed the paperwork, picked up the keys and eased silently into Shanghai's chaotic traffic, the first-time electric car driver in the city quickly notices that nobody else appears to be driving one. In fact, there are at most 500 electric cars in Shanghai out of a total of about one million passenger vehicles, according to Zhang Dawei, the founder of EV Buy, a Shanghai company that sources and services electric cars for individuals and corporate users.
但在填完表格、拿到钥匙、悠然加入到上海车流之中后，你很快就会发现，似乎别人没有开电动汽车的。事实上，高瞻电动车(EV Buy)创始人张大伟说，在上海的大约100万乘用车保有量中，电动汽车顶多只有500辆。高瞻电动车是一家上海公司，面向个人和企业用户提供电动汽车经销、配套服务等业务。
In fairness, electric cars have met consumer resistance everywhere, not just in China. Carmakers around the world have struggled to improve battery technology. Still, Shanghai's dismal failure to popularize electric vehicles, despite a national auto policy to go electric--and generous subsidies for consumers--speaks to the immense challenges that China's leaders face in rolling out an ambitious program of economic overhauls approved at a Communist Party meeting this month. Those policies are intended to encourage innovation that leads to higher-quality and more sustainable growth driven by consumption--precisely the logic behind China's drive to build an electric car industry.
平心而论，电动汽车在全球各地都遭遇了消费阻力，不止是在中国。全球汽车制造商都在竭力提高电池技术。尽管中国汽车政策的方向是推广电动汽车，而且还为消费者提供慷慨补贴，但上海普及电动汽车的努力还是遭遇了挫败，这体现出中国领导人在贯彻三中全会经济改革方面面临的巨大挑战。经济改革的目标是鼓励创新，并以此实现高质量的、更加可持续的消费驱动型增长模式，而这正是中国打造电动汽车行业计划的初衷。
More than a decade ago, state industrial planners seized upon electric cars as the answer to a set of industrial, environmental and national-security dilemmas. Developing electric cars, the planners thought, would enable China to leapfrog the world's leading manufacturers of combustion engine vehicles, who China otherwise could never hope to challenge. It would also reduce China's rapidly growing dependence on imported oil, which leaves the world's second-largest economy vulnerable to destabilizing supply shocks. And it would mitigate chronic pollution in Chinese cities.
十多年前，国家工业规划部门把电动汽车当做解决工业、环境、国家安全等一系列问题的钥匙。规划者们认为，发展电动汽车将使中国另辟蹊径、不必再纠缠于内燃机汽车领域，中国远远不是国际先进内燃机汽车厂商的对手。另外，发展电动汽车还可使中国降低对进口石油日益严重的依赖，这种依赖令中国很容易受到供应震荡的威胁。同时，中国城市长期污染的问题也将得到缓解。
In the West, many assumed that these policy imperatives, combined with China's vaunted prowess at rolling out transport infrastructure--as well as government ownership of the country's big carmakers--would assure the success of the national push for electric vehicles. China, it was widely thought, had the chance to lead the world in an emerging technology, while pioneering a more sustainable urban growth model. Even Warren Buffett took a stake in Shenzhen-based battery and electric carmaker BYD in 2008.
西方国家很多人认为，考虑到中国的这些政策规定，再加上中国在交通基础设施建设方面的高歌猛进，以及大型汽车制造商的国有性质，中国推动电动汽车发展的战略必将取得成功。外界曾经广泛地认为，在探索更具可持续性的城镇化增长模式的同时，中国将有可能引领全球新兴科技的潮流。就连巴菲特(Warren Buffett)也在2008年入股总部位于深圳的电池和电动汽车生产商比亚迪(BYD)。
But China's electric car strategy hasn't worked out. Why?
但中国的电动汽车战略并未取得成效。这是为什么呢？
First, state planners badly miscalculated consumer demand. The wealthy elite have little interest in buying an electric car to flaunt their concern for the environment: For them, a car is still the prized marker of wealth and social status. The less well off, particularly first-time car buyers, who constitute the vast majority of car buyers in China, aspire to the thrill and freedom of the road--and a limited driving range is a turn-off.
首先，国家规划部门严重误估了消费需求。富裕阶层对购买电动汽车、标榜自己的环保意识兴趣不大：对他们来说，汽车仍是财富与社会地位的标志。而对经济条件较差的人群，特别是占绝大多数的初次购车者来说，他们渴求的是驾车上路的那种兴奋、自由的感觉，电动汽车续航里程的限制是一个致命弱点。
On the supply side, state carmakers dropped the ball, says Greg Anderson, a U.S.-based auto industry consultant and the author of the book 'Designated Drivers: How China Plans to Dominate the Global Auto Industry.' The incentive for state auto firms isn't to innovate, but 'to get as big as possible, as fast as possible, and make as much money as possible,' he says. That's best achieved by milking their existing joint ventures with foreign auto makers rather than sinking resources into new technologies.
美国的汽车行业咨询师、《代驾司机：中国如何计划占领全球汽车市场》(Designated Drivers: How China Plans to Dominate the Global Auto Industry)一书的作者Greg Anderson说，在供应方面，中国国有汽车制造商犯了一个错误，它们的动机不是创新，而是尽可能快地做大，赚尽可能多的钱。它们一心利用与海外汽车厂商组建的现有合资企业赚钱，而不是投入资源进行技术革新。
State carmakers all paid lip service to the government's electric car strategy by coming up with working models, says Mr. Anderson. But they failed to deliver breakthroughs in core technologies, including batteries and battery management systems. So today, while hundreds of combustion engine car models compete in the world's largest car market, there are only a handful of electric vehicles in production for consumers to choose from.
Anderson表示，对于中国政府发展电动汽车的战略，国有汽车厂商往往通过设计一些模型来敷衍了事。在电池和电池管理系统等核心技术方面，它们都未能取得突破。因此在中国这个全球最大的汽车市场，现在虽然有上百种内燃发动机汽车，却只有少数几种已经投产的电动汽车可供消费者选择。
For its part, the government failed to deliver the infrastructure. According to China's current five-year plan--a holdover strategy from the Stalinist economy--there are supposed to be more than 400,000 charging piles nationwide by 2015. But in today's Shanghai, a city of 24 million people, only 1,000-2,000 have so far been installed, says Mr. Zhang of EV Buy--far off the pace required to help China achieve its goals.
从政府这方面来讲，它没有做到给市场发展提供完善的基础设施。根据当前的“十二五”规划，到2015年中国将建成超过40万个充电桩。但是高瞻电动车的张大伟说，在拥有2,400万人口的上海，目前只建成了1,000-2,000个充电桩，远远达不到实现“十二五”目标的速度。
Bureaucratic infighting partly explains the inertia in developing the industry. For example, State Grid Corp, the near-monopoly grid operator, has been pushing to own the battery market by promoting a national battery swapping system for car owners, says Axel Krieger, a principal in the Beijing office of McKinsey & Co. That arrangement would give it a large part of the industrial value chain, but is resisted by car manufacturers, who want to use their own batteries.
官僚斗争也是造成电动汽车行业发展缓慢的一个原因。比如，麦肯锡(McKinsey & Co., Inc.)北京分公司的管理人士柯明逸(Axel Krieger)就指出，国家电网公司(State Grid Corporation of China)通过推进构建覆盖全国的智能充换电服务网络，希望藉此控制电池市场。这种模式将使国家电网占据行业价值链的一大部分，但遭到了电动汽车厂商的抵制，后者希望使用自己的电池。
In addition, local governments have been promoting their own technical standards as a protectionist measure to support local car makers. It's hard to drive an electric car from one city to another when plugs aren't compatible. 'Every local warlord defends their own standards and technologies,' says Mr. Krieger.
另外，地方政府一直在推行自己的技术标准，作为扶持本地汽车厂商的一种保护措施。在充电器插头不兼容的情况下，电动汽车很难从一个城市开到另一个城市。柯明逸说，每个地方政府都在保护自己的标准和技术。
Finally, foreign auto makers have been scared away by government attempts to force them to hand over their intellectual property in electric vehicles in exchange for market access.
最后，中国政府要求外国汽车厂商交出电动汽车知识产权以换取市场准入的做法也吓跑了许多外国厂商。
The upshot of all this is that China is hopelessly behind on its target for electric car ownership. The five-year plan calls for 500,000 battery-electric and plug-in electric vehicles by 2015, and five million by 2020. But last year, Chinese consumers bought only 11,375 electric cars and 1,416 plug ins, according to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers. That's despite subsidies that go as high as $20,000 per car.
由此造成的结果是，中国电动汽车的保有量远远落后于目标。根据“十二五”规划，到2015年中国纯电动汽车和插电式混合动力汽车的数量将达到50万辆，并在2020年达到500万辆。但中国汽车工业协会(China Association of Automobile Manufacturers)的数据显示，2012年中国消费者仅购买了11,375辆纯电动汽车和1,416辆插电式混合动力汽车，尽管每辆车政府最高给予2万美元的补贴。
The Chinese government's new strategy appears to be to promote plug-in hybrids as an interim technology before fully electric cars kick in. That appears to be a pragmatic response to the collapse of a key policy initiative. But it's a lesson in the potholes that President Xi Jinping faces on his long road to creating an innovative economy.
中国政府的新策略似乎是在普及纯电动汽车前，先把插电式混合动力汽车作为一项中间过渡技术进行推广。这似乎是对普及纯电动汽车的政策倡议失败采取的务实对策。但是，这也是习近平在发展创新型经济的漫长道路上碰到的一个教训。