Overview of the Taiwan EV National Promotion Program Driven by Clean Zone Policy

There have more than 14 million units of motorcycle in Taiwan, and the motorcycle’s exhaust emission has become one of the causes of air pollution in urban areas. To improve the air quality in urban areas and also seek the business opportunity from the new EV industry, the Taiwanese government starts regulating sales of gasoline motorcycle in 2009 to replace the less competitive 50cc engine motorcycles by e-Scooter of the light electric vehicles (LEV). The government also earmarks NT$1.6 billion (US$49.7 million) over the next four years to subsidize buyers of 2-wheelers electric scooters (2W e-Scooter) with the feature of the advanced Li-Ion battery system. As part of this effort, the Industrial Development Bureau (IDB) of Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) formulated standards for e-Scooter’s performance and safety to bring up 8,000 units of 2W e-Scooter in 2009, and to 100,000 by the end of 2012. This is the first phase of the EV national program, and next phase will be focus on the EV fleet promotion driven by the clean zone policy to be discussed hereafter. As most of the experts predicted, EV won’t be popular in next few years till the industry finds the good cost-performance battery solution. Hence, the government should lead the policy like the zero exhaust emission zone, clean zone, to demonstrate the clean and efficient transportation by employing EV solutions. The demonstration from the e-Scooter of LEV, utility van, and mid-size bus will accumulate the fleet operation experiences including the usage scenarios, the effectiveness of the business model, and the product performance. These are crucial for the participated industry to establish the products’ interface and standards, for the local government to build up the charging infrastructure system to promote an EV as a convenient and efficient transportation system, and also for industry to develop a series of the competitive EV niche products in Taiwan for the global markets. The in-depth discussion of this clean zone plot will be discussed in this paper.