Preface

1. Fast growth continued in the whole fleet

As China's economy steadily developed, China's vehicle fleet led the world once more in 2016, the inauguration year of the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-2020), with 28.119 million annual production and 28.028 million annual sales volume, up 14.5% and 13.7% respectively from 2015, ranking the first place in the world for 8 consecutive years.

The fast growth of China's vehicle production and sales volume in 2016 benefited from the policies of halving of vehicle purchase tax, the promotion subsidy for new energy vehicles (NEVs), etc. Although with the improvement of market mechanism and consumer purchasing power, preferential policies for the industry would gradually fade out in the future, China remained a relatively wide gap from the U.S., Europe, Japan, and other developed countries and regions in terms of quantity per capita, so it was expected China would still see a rapid increase of fleet in the coming 10～15 years. Particularly, the re-rising local brands extraordinarily performed in 2016 with a rocketing sales volume. They made a significant progress in power system performance, vehicle stability, style, and internal decoration, and constantly narrowed the gap from joint venture brands, demonstrating strong competitive edges.