Given China’s not-so-long-ago reliance on the bicycle, headlines around skyrocketing car sales are a mixed bag for us TreeHuggers. But if you’re going to sell a lot of cars, the news reported over at Cleantechnica that 59,000 of them were plug-ins—an 80% rise compared to the year before—is certainly an encouraging sign.
True, plug-in cars still represent a relatively small (1.8%) segment of the market. But its a segment that’s growing fast, and with China looking to electric vehicles to challenge the incumbent, fossil fuel-invested European and North American auto giants, I suspect this trend will continue. Meanwhile, in other Cleantechnica news (yeah, I don’t know what I’d do without them), ABB is bidding for a government tender to install 4,500 electric vehicle charging stations across India.
