In Beijing, You Have to Win a License Lottery to Buy a New Car

It’s not the half-million-yuan price tag keeping Beijing resident Sandra Zhao from buying her dream car, a BMW X4 SUV. It’s the license plate she needs to have a conventional gasoline car. She’s been in a lottery pool for five years, competing with more than 3 million fellow residents for one of the plates. The complicated bimonthly drawing awards about one plate for every 2,000 applications. Meanwhile, her husband has been on line since the end of 2017 with 420,000 others for a license to own a supposedly easier-to-acquire electric vehicle. He’s hopeful he’ll get it in another two years—those at the back of the line may have to wait eight. “Owning a car is extremely difficult in Beijing,” says Zhao, who desperately wants one to ferry her 10-month-old daughter around. “If it wasn’t for the baby, I’d rather give up the idea and use ride-hailing apps.”

Traffic congestion and air pollution are such headaches in the capital that the government since 2011 has used a lottery to restrict the number of cars registered each year. The annual new vehicle quota, which was 240,000 in 2013, fell to 100,000 in 2018. The municipal government will issue 38,000 of those plates to individual buyers of gasoline-powered cars and 54,000 for EVs. It aims to cap the number of locally registered vehicles at below 6.3 million by the end of 2020—in a city of 22 million people.