Close Menu
TechCentralTechCentral

    Subscribe to the newsletter

    Get the best South African technology news and analysis delivered to your e-mail inbox every morning.

    Facebook X (Twitter) YouTube LinkedIn
    WhatsApp Facebook X (Twitter) LinkedIn YouTube
    TechCentralTechCentral
    • News

      MultiChoice hit with multimillion-rand fine for privacy ‘breaches’

      8 July 2025

      Still in play: Ramaphosa banks on talks to ease US tariff blow

      8 July 2025

      Apple’s AI ambitions rattled by defection to Meta

      8 July 2025

      Ramaphosa blasts Trump over threatened Brics tariffs

      8 July 2025

      Court battle brewing over contentious Joburg CCTV by-law

      7 July 2025
    • World

      Cupertino vs Brussels: Apple challenges Big Tech crackdown

      7 July 2025

      Grammarly acquires e-mail start-up Superhuman

      1 July 2025

      Apple considers ditching its own AI in Siri overhaul

      1 July 2025

      Jony Ive’s first AI gadget could be … a pen

      30 June 2025

      Bumper orders for Xiaomi’s YU7 SUV heighten threat to Tesla

      27 June 2025
    • In-depth

      Siemens is battling Big Tech for AI supremacy in factories

      24 June 2025

      The algorithm will sing now: why musicians should be worried about AI

      20 June 2025

      Meta bets $72-billion on AI – and investors love it

      17 June 2025

      MultiChoice may unbundle SuperSport from DStv

      12 June 2025

      Grok promised bias-free chat. Then came the edits

      2 June 2025
    • TCS

      TCS | Connecting Saffas – Renier Lombard on The Lekker Network

      7 July 2025

      TechCentral Nexus S0E4: Takealot’s big Post Office jobs plan

      4 July 2025

      TCS | Tech, townships and tenacity: Spar’s plan to win with Spar2U

      3 July 2025

      TCS+ | First Distribution on the latest and greatest cloud technologies

      27 June 2025

      TCS+ | First Distribution on data governance in hybrid cloud environments

      27 June 2025
    • Opinion

      In defence of equity alternatives for BEE

      30 June 2025

      E-commerce in ICT distribution: enabler or disruptor?

      30 June 2025

      South Africa pioneered drone laws a decade ago – now it must catch up

      17 June 2025

      AI and the future of ICT distribution

      16 June 2025

      Singapore soared – why can’t we? Lessons South Africa refuses to learn

      13 June 2025
    • Company Hubs
      • Africa Data Centres
      • AfriGIS
      • Altron Digital Business
      • Altron Document Solutions
      • Altron Group
      • Arctic Wolf
      • AvertITD
      • Braintree
      • CallMiner
      • CambriLearn
      • CYBER1 Solutions
      • Digicloud Africa
      • Digimune
      • Domains.co.za
      • ESET
      • Euphoria Telecom
      • Incredible Business
      • iONLINE
      • Iris Network Systems
      • LSD Open
      • NEC XON
      • Network Platforms
      • Next DLP
      • Ovations
      • Paracon
      • Paratus
      • Q-KON
      • SevenC
      • SkyWire
      • Solid8 Technologies
      • Telit Cinterion
      • Tenable
      • Vertiv
      • Videri Digital
      • Wipro
      • Workday
    • Sections
      • AI and machine learning
      • Banking
      • Broadcasting and Media
      • Cloud services
      • Contact centres and CX
      • Cryptocurrencies
      • Education and skills
      • Electronics and hardware
      • Energy and sustainability
      • Enterprise software
      • Fintech
      • Information security
      • Internet and connectivity
      • Internet of Things
      • Investment
      • IT services
      • Lifestyle
      • Motoring
      • Public sector
      • Retail and e-commerce
      • Science
      • SMEs and start-ups
      • Social media
      • Talent and leadership
      • Telecoms
    • Events
    • Advertise
    TechCentralTechCentral
    Home » In-depth » World’s leading electric car visionary isn’t Elon Musk

    World’s leading electric car visionary isn’t Elon Musk

    By Agency Staff27 September 2018
    Twitter LinkedIn Facebook WhatsApp Email Telegram Copy Link
    News Alerts
    WhatsApp
    Wan Gang. Image: Rudolf Simon

    At this year’s Beijing Auto Show, a retired Chinese bureaucrat bent down to run his hands over the hood of a sleek sports coupe billed as the world’s fastest battery-powered car, and he smiled like a proud father.

    In a way, that’s exactly what he was. Two decades earlier, Wan Gang persuaded China’s State Council to throw its vast power behind the risky, unproven technology of electric cars. He advocated using government money, including subsidies, to help create a world champion industry that would surpass Western car makers. That coupe he was admiring at the April auto show? It was built by homegrown NIO.

    Elon Musk made a name for himself promoting new-energy vehicles, but when the history of the electric car is finally written, Wan may loom larger. Chinese drivers buy one of every two EVs sold, and the global car industry is pivoting to adjust. It’s a revolution fomented by Wan, a former minister of science & technology whose achievements are even more extraordinary when you consider that he never joined the Chinese Communist Party.

    He’s the father of China’s electric vehicle industry. Without Wan Gang, it’s unlikely China would have pushed to surpass the West

    “He’s the father of China’s electric vehicle industry,” said Levi Tillemann, a former US department of energy adviser and author of The Great Race: The Global Quest for the Car of the Future. “Without Wan Gang, it’s unlikely China would have pushed to surpass the West. That was his big idea.”

    Wan, 66, who stepped down in March and now holds an academic post at a Beijing-based think-tank, currently isn’t giving interviews, his office said.

    After decades of hype and false starts, electric vehicles are on course to represent a significant segment of the auto industry. This year, China’s production of NEVs is expected to reach a million vehicles, a 26% increase from last year. The UK, France and India are proposing bans on vehicles powered by internal combustion engines, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

    Long before becoming the nation’s top futurist, Wan suffered through the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, China’s great leap backward for science and technology. Sent from Shanghai to a remote village near North Korea at age 16 to learn values from peasants, he spent his days repairing the town’s smoke-belching tractor and building its electricity grid from scratch, according to the state-run People’s Daily and author Lisa Margonelli, who interviewed Wan.

    Lucky few

    One of the lucky few of his generation to attend college, Wan was admitted to a PhD programme in mechanical engineering at Clausthal University of Technology in Germany. When he graduated in 1991, job offers came from all the big German car makers, but he picked Audi because it was the smallest and provided the best chances for promotion.

    As an executive in Audi’s planning department, Wan played the role of ambassador, showing its state-of-the-art factory in Ingolstadt to Chinese delegates trying to resurrect their decrepit auto industry. One guest was then-science minister Zhu Lilan, who took a liking to the engineer.

    Months after their first meeting, in 2000, Wan was back home selling Zhu and the rest of the State Council on the idea of leapfrogging. China was choking in smog, and its car makers, Wan reasoned, could never hope to catch up with Japanese, American or German manufacturers when it came to traditional vehicles.

    Nio’s ES8 electric vehicle

    A bet on new technologies could put China on more equal footing or even allow it to take the lead, he theorised. It also could help the country break its dependence on foreign oil.

    “Wan Gang was saying, ‘I want to create a system where we can be energy secure and there’s a more level playing field for our companies,”’ said Bill Russo, a former Chrysler executive who now heads auto consultant Gao Feng Advisory in Beijing. “He knew you couldn’t win playing the old game.”

    And so did some high-powered colleagues. Former vice Premier Li Lanqing, who started in 1952 at the automaker now known as China FAW Group, developed the plan to create the NEV research program. And Ma Kai spearheaded NEV stimulus policies while running the National Development and Reform Commission that helps oversee the economy.

    We were just scientists comparing notes. I never felt once, not evenly remotely, that he was fishing

    By 2007, Wan was minister of science & technology, overseeing billions of yuan with sway to help funnel research-and-development money toward favoured industries. In that job, he repeatedly challenged China’s engineers: build a fleet of electric buses for the 2008 Beijing Olympics; put a thousand battery-powered vehicles on the streets of every major city. The spring of 2010 brought subsidies of as much as US$10 000 for every EV the car makers could sell.

    “There will be a strategic window for developing electric vehicles over the next 10 to 20 years,” Wan told state media that March. “We have to take action now.” China’s R&D rush was on.

    A few months later, the mood was tense at Argonne National Laboratory, the US federal research centre near Chicago, where scientists invented the lithium-ion battery technology used in GM’s plug-in hybrid, the Volt.

    Wan was visiting the lab to learn about chemical recipes for batteries. US counterintelligence briefed scientist Jeff Chamberlain and his team about the dangers of letting secrets slip. The Americans were wary, until they got to know Wan.

    No choice

    “It all dissolved the moment you talked to him,” Chamberlain said. “We were just scientists comparing notes. I never felt once, not evenly remotely, that he was fishing. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t doing it, but we never felt it.”

    The world’s automakers invited Wan inside, too. They had no choice.

    “He was our most important customer in China,” said Makoto Yoshida, a government affairs officer at Nissan, who last summer gave Wan a tour of a facility near Yokohama, where the minister drove hybrid cars. “If China says ‘we can’t accept your technology’, it’s a big problem for us, which is why Wan Gang was the key person.”

    If China says ‘we can’t accept your technology’, it’s a big problem for us, which is why Wan Gang was the key person

    Today, there are more than 100 Chinese-made electric car models on the market, built by giants like Warren Buffett-backed BYD and start-ups such as NIO, which raised about $1-billion in an initial public offering this month.

    Wang Chuanfu, the billionaire founder of BYD, China’s biggest maker of NEVs, recalled meeting Wan in 2014. “I was impressed by Wan’s obsession with clean-energy technology,” he said.

    NEVs account for about one of every 20 passenger cars purchased in China, numbers likely to rise because of state incentives — Wan’s real legacy.

    The government is building a vast network of charging stations and strong-arming consumers into buying EVs by making them the only sure way to get a licence plate in big cities. (Otherwise, drivers have to enter lotteries.) Starting next year, every automaker wanting to operate in China has to meet production targets for battery-powered vehicles or buy credits from rivals.

    For Chamberlain, these are beneficial changes. Since 2016, the American scientist has run Volta Energy Technologies, a battery start-up in Naperville, Illinois. He said the revolution wrought by Wan means it no longer matters if the US rolls back emissions or fuel-efficiency standards, as President Donald Trump talks about.

    “Whether it’s Ford or General Motors or VW, or Hyundai or Toyota, if they want to participate in the Chinese market they must have electric vehicles,” Chamberlain said. “I’m happy for Wan Gang because that was his vision from many years ago.”  — Reported with assistance from Jason Clenfield, Ying Tian, Elisabeth Behrmann, David Welch, Jie Ma, Yan Zhang, Lee Miller, Brent O’Brien and Kevin Dharmawan, (c) 2018 Bloomberg LP



    Elon Musk Nio Tesla top Wan Gang
    Subscribe to TechCentral Subscribe to TechCentral
    Share. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn WhatsApp Telegram Email Copy Link
    Previous ArticleFacebook unveils Oculus Quest in bid to take VR mainstream
    Next Article Woolworths dives headfirst into m-commerce

    Related Posts

    Without US subsidies, Musk would be back in South Africa – Trump

    1 July 2025

    Starlink eyes South Africa licence with R2-billion investment pledge

    30 June 2025

    Ramaphosa backs Malatsi’s BEE reforms for ICT sector

    26 June 2025
    Company News

    Stay warm this winter with Samsung’s energy-efficient air conditioners

    8 July 2025

    Huawei launches next-gen fibre-to-the-room solution

    7 July 2025

    Remote monitoring tools: IT lifesavers or hacker gateways?

    7 July 2025
    Opinion

    In defence of equity alternatives for BEE

    30 June 2025

    E-commerce in ICT distribution: enabler or disruptor?

    30 June 2025

    South Africa pioneered drone laws a decade ago – now it must catch up

    17 June 2025

    Subscribe to Updates

    Get the best South African technology news and analysis delivered to your e-mail inbox every morning.

    © 2009 - 2025 NewsCentral Media

    Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.