The city hopes the measure will help improve local air quality

Nov 6, 2013 19:36 GMT  ·  By

This past Tuesday, high officials in Beijing announced plans to implement new measures intended to help curb local air pollution. Long story short, it appears that the city will take steps towards cutting car sales by as much as 40%.

Specifically, it appears that, starting 2014, just 150,000 new license plates will be issued in Beijing annually for a period of four years. By comparison, a total of 240,000 cars are estimated to have been bought by people living in this city this year.

The vehicles targeted by the new yearly car sales quota are those that run on dirty fuels and therefore contribute greatly to air pollution.

As far as fuel efficient and electric cars are concerned, it appears that high officials in Beijing are not in the least against the idea that people should start buying more of them.

Thus, they expect that, thanks to their limiting the annual sales quota for pollution vehicles, the number of plates for environmentally friendly ones will triple over the next four years, i.e. jump from 20,000 in 2014 to 60,000 in 2017.

In case anyone was wondering, Beijing residents who wish to buy a car known to pollute the environment must earn the right to do so either by taking part in a lottery, or through an auction, Just Auto reports.

The same source details that, although these measures might help China improve on local air quality in Beijing, car manufacturers, especially German ones, will probably not take lightly to this piece of news. This is because sales for models such as Audi, Mercedes and BMW are likely to drop, at least in this country.

Then again, it was only recently when the news broke that an 8-year-old girl in China was suffering from lung cancer and that fine particulate matter was likely what got her sick, so maybe it isn't such a bad thing that drastic measures to reduce air pollution are being taken.