Cars

HK Motors still confident on hybrid cars

By Chen Weihua (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-06-23 09:52

NEW YORK - Hybrid Kinetic Motors Co (HK Motors) CEO Wang Chuantao recently refuted claims that his company was incapable of manufacturing natural gas hybrid cars and unable to raise enough funds for the project.

HK Motors, a US subsidiary of the Hong Kong-listed Hybrid Kinetic Group Ltd, stunned the market last year by announcing plans to produce a whopping 1 million hybrid cars a year by 2018.

Most of the billions of US dollars needed for its plants in the United States will be raised through the US federal government EB-5 program. The program by the US Citizen and Immigration Services provides citizenship for individual foreign investors who invest at least $500,000 and create at least 10 jobs for American workers.

HK Motor's plan is to offer Chinese investors a path to US citizenship by asking each of them to shell out $500,000 as part of a US government visa program.

Industry pundits were also amazed by the fact that HK Motors founder Yang Rong, also known as Benjamin Yeung, was the third richest man in China in 2001 and the founder of the successful Brilliance China Automotive Holdings.

Yang fled China to the US in 2002 after being charged by the local government in northeast China's Liaoning province with alleged economic crimes.

Some media and industry experts continue to challenge the project's feasibility even after a project introduction meeting was held by HK Motors officials in Beijing last week. The meeting, attended by 200 potential investors and immigration agencies as well as officials from the US state of Alabama and the state's Baldwin County, where the first HK Motors plant will be located, was hailed by CEO Wang as a great success.

Wang said he was not surprised at suspicions held over the massive energy efficient vehicle project. "To people from the traditional auto industry, this is really beyond the norms," Wang told China Daily in an exclusive interview.

The planned multi-fuel hybrid car, which will run on natural gas, battery power and gasoline, will reach at least 45 mpg (miles per gallon), or five liters per 100 kilometers, exceeding the 35 mpg fuel economy target set for 2016 by US President Barack Obama last year.

It will meet the European Union CO2 emissions of 130 gram/kilometer even when powered by gasoline. About 85 percent of the hybrid cars in the world today do not reach that standard.

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HK Motors and its developers have done extensive research, involving more than 100-patented technologies, according to Wang. FEV, a German engine and power-train design and development firm, will lead the technological development. FEV signed a $250 million contract with HK Motors last year to develop the engine, primarily powered by natural gas.

Wang said FEV, a world leader in the field, is confident it can satisfy HK Motors' requirements and has even used its assets as collateral for the cooperation.

The much-anticipated technology will be ready next year, and the prototype will debut at a major auto show in 2012.

He said he could not understand why people would think the project was impossible when it combines all the best European technologies, including third-generation natural gas engines.

Wang, once a senior executive at a General Motors division, said big auto companies have not started such an ambitious project because they only want to make small renovations in engines in order to keep the market for their existing products.