The Zhitong Finance App learned that on July 10, the Secretary for Transport and Logistics of Hong Kong, Lam Sai-hung, said in a written response to members' questions that the number of pure electric private cars on the market is increasing. Currently, about 70% of newly registered private cars are pure electric vehicles. The government has also set a target to stop newly registered fuel and hybrid private cars by 2035, and there are no plans to provide initial registration tax concessions for hybrid private cars that still have exhaust emissions. Meanwhile, to support the popularization of electric vehicles, the 2023 “Policy Address” has set a goal to increase the total number of public and private charging parking spaces in Hong Kong to about 200,000 by mid-2027.

Lam Sai-hung pointed out that the Hong Kong Transport Department has been optimizing the vehicle approval process to meet the increasing workload of type assessment applications. The Hong Kong Transport Department issued new guidelines on batch processing mechanisms to the industry in December 2022 to allow the industry to introduce electric vehicles in batches and simplify the approval application process for the same electric vehicle models. At the same time, the Hong Kong Transport Department also continues to hold a number of briefing sessions for the industry and has introduced relevant guidelines to help the industry submit complete vehicle technical data to reduce the time required for clarification on documents, thereby speeding up the progress of the overall vehicle type assessment process. The Hong Kong Transport Department will continue to maintain close communication with the industry to review vehicle inspection procedures and manpower arrangements to achieve better cost efficiency.