Sitting in seemingly endless traffic in Nanjing, it’s easy to wonder as to exactly how many cars there are in Nanjing. That has always been a bit of a mystery, until now, as the new year has brought with it government willingness to share the relevant data.
As Nanjing closed out 2022, there was a grand total of 3.206 million cars on our City’s roads. This places Nanjing second in Jiangsu Province in a league table of cities with the most cars. Top place goes to Suzhou, where there are a staggering 5.073 million registered vehicles.
But it is worth remembering that a vehicle’s city of registration does not necessarily mean that is where it spends the bulk of its driving life. Local people are known to return to their home town to buy a car, aware of lower tax rates and other incentives.
In Nanjing for example, it is also common now to see cars with the license plate prefix, 苏U, which is an overflow designation for Suzhou (normally 苏E) given that the city has so many cars it has run out of available numbers.
Looking to Jiangsu as a whole, at the end of 2022, the Province had seen an increase of 5.53 percent in the number of vehicles on its roads over the previous year.
This made for a total of 24.968 million vehicles, excluding tractors. The Yangtze Evening News reports therein are 23.097 million cars, including three-wheeled vehicles and light trucks; 1.656 million motorcycles and 2.15 million trailers.
Looking to a breakdown of all 13 cities in Jiangsu Province, the number of registered motor vehicles at end 2022, in the millions, looked like this:
- Nanjing: 3.206
- Wuxi: 2.588
- Xuzhou: 2.181
- Changzhou: 1.760
- Suzhou: 5.073
- Nantong: 2.393
- Lianyungang: 1.131
- Huai’an: 0.887
- Yancheng: 1.541
- Yangzhou: 1.090
- Zhenjiang: 0.839
- Taizhou: 1.114
- Suqian: 1.131
As for new additions, in 2022, the Province saw another 2.02 million vehicles registered, including 501,000 new-energy vehicles (NEVs). This means that zero-emission vehicles accounted for 24.8 percent of the total vehicle registration volume last year. It’s a healthy figure that is also an increase of 13.4 percentage points on 2021.
There’s more good news. Overall, the number of NEVs in all of Jiangsu is now 9.912 million, up 96.3 percent on 2021.
Among them, pure-electric vehicles in Jiangsu number 8.47 million, accounting for 85.5 percent of the total number of NEVs. The remainder comprises 144,000 plug-in hybrids and 472 vehicles powered by fuel cells.
The data, which was released on 29 January, also reveals there are now 33,473,600 holders of driver’s licenses in Jiangsu, an increase of 3.65 percent.
