3.15 Car Annual Report: Ninety percent of commercially available vehicle refrigerant is fake

"This summer, the light air-conditioned car, it will be less than a month to add fluoride." In Beijing Caoqiao HSBC Auto Parts City, the car owner from Hebei, Mr. Zhao had complained to reporters.

The air conditioning in the car is not cool, Mr. Zhao will go to fluoride. “When I just added it, I turned on the air-conditioner switch while sitting in the car. The cold wind suddenly blew it out.” He said: “Later, the hot air was blowing in the air conditioner, and the noise of the compressor was still very loud.” I don't know that every time I go to Auto City, I add inferior refrigerants. Under the corrosion of poor quality refrigerants, air conditioning systems have experienced major problems. At the reporter’s reminder, he found a repair shop and thoroughly checked the air conditioning system. As a result, the maintenance master said that the compressor was locked up and the pipeline leaked. And this set of car air conditioning replaced, only the part of the part will be around 3,000 yuan.

Mr. Zhao’s experience is not a single case. Today, counterfeit automotive refrigerants have reached a point of severe flooding. "The fakes on the market can be seen everywhere. It is very difficult to find real goods," said Guan Huai, manager of the Shenzhen Grand Cars Automotive Products Development Co., Ltd. in Beijing.

At present, what is the status of the national R134a refrigerant market for automotive air conditioners? What are the fake refrigerants? Why can they be popular in the market? How is the refrigerant fraud chain formed? The reporter visited the auto parts city of Beijing, Hangzhou, Guangzhou, Chengdu and other places and made unannounced visits to the sources of R134a counterfeiting to try to analyze these issues one by one.

False R134a causes damage to the air conditioning system. The air conditioning refrigerant for vehicles, commonly known as automotive refrigerants, is also known as snow species in the south of Guangdong Province, especially in the area of ​​Guangdong. It is a key auxiliary product for automotive air-conditioning systems and is equivalent to the “blood” of automotive air-conditioning operations.

Li Shiyuan, director of the National Automobile Service Committee Automobile Maintenance Products Professional Committee, told reporters that starting from the “China’s National Phase-out of Ozone Depleting Substances Program” in 2002, the former State Environmental Protection Administration and the State Administration of Machinery Industry’s Automobile Division issued a joint document stipulation on the domestic offline For all air-conditioned cars, the use of Freon must be stopped and R134a environmentally-friendly refrigerants must be used as the only alternative. In 2010, the "Ozone Depleting Substances Management Regulations" promulgated the "Three Requisitions and Five Repetitions" again, indicating that it is forbidden to use Freon to protect the environment.

However, in the automotive refrigerant product market, it is common for unscrupulous traders to use the Freon R12 or other ozone-depleting substances that are prohibited by the state from pursuing R134a as an environmentally friendly refrigerant. What is more, they are posing as flammable substances such as LPG. Cause great economic losses and security risks to consumers.

Luo Yijun, Manager of OEM Business Department of Marketing Center of Sinochem Modern Environmental Protection (Xi'an) Co., Ltd., told reporters that because of the great differences in the physical and chemical properties of R134a and F12 or other refrigerants, the air-conditioning units also differ greatly. The seals, rubber lines, and desiccants are all different, so several refrigerants cannot replace and mix with each other, otherwise it will seriously affect the cooling effect and the life of the air conditioning system. For example, air conditioners are ineffective, compressors are killed, pipelines are corroded, and leaks. What's even more frightening is the air-conditioning system's explosion.

Under the banner of low-cost promotion of environmental protection It is understood that the formal production of refrigerant companies are very few. Li Shiyuan told reporters that only formal brands such as Zhejiang Juzhou Lianzhou Juhua, Xi'an Sinochem JinLing, Shenzhen Che Pao, Jiangsu Kangtai Blue Planet, Zhejiang Pujiang BaiLian and several others. However, no one can make it clear that there are fake brands of refrigerant on the market.

Why is the refrigerant market flooded with fakes?

Industry insiders told reporters that the performance, packaging, and product testing of R134a products are very professional. The supervision department can neither intuitively identify nor professionally detect instruments to effectively identify such products. This is the main reason that counterfeit products are difficult to find. .

In Jintong Auto Parts City, located on Xintang Road in Hangzhou, the reporter unannounced an interview and found that there are many brands of refrigerants. In a car accessories trade store, there are more than a dozen varieties such as Shuangqi, Ingres, New Century, Liangba, RI-TIAN Lengwang 1, and Juhua. The price range is very large, and the most expensive is RITIAN No. 1, which costs 40 yuan; the cheapest is the new century, as long as 10 yuan.

Although sales of fake refrigerants, but the sales staff will usually flicker you, now use environmentally-friendly refrigerants, and they give you the refrigerant, packaging on the outside of the can, it is also written R134a. "What kind of car?" Seeing a business door, a female salesperson surnamed Xu came over.

The reporter told her that it was her own car. She took a pair of canes from the counter and said: "Add this, cheap."

The reporter asked her if different cars use different refrigerants. "My own car is environmentally friendly, and the cooling effect is also good." This tank will sell a dual-factor refrigerant of RMB 13. In fact, it is not environmentally friendly.

In another shop, a salesperson with a surname of Yee tried to push the reporter to a snow producer with a selling price of 15 yuan. "There are a lot of so-called freons. In fact, the inside is filled with gas and natural gas," she said. "This is the real R134a. It is purely environmentally friendly."

In fact, after the reporter’s inspection, the two types of refrigerants that claim to be environmentally friendly products and do not affect people’s health are R12.

Price factor is another factor that causes counterfeit refrigerants to run rampantly and counterfeit refrigerants because it is cheap. The reporter learned that although R134a has been used domestically for a long time, the raw material is several times more expensive than R12. This makes many black-hearted merchants take advantage of the opportunity to "fake". "Refrigerants below RMB 16 can basically be regarded as false." Wang Gang, general manager of Shenzhen Chepa Auto Supplies Development Co., Ltd., told reporters that refrigerant tanks, valves, and packaging are added together. Packaging costs about 2 yuan more. There is not much difference in the cost of packaging, but the difference in the cost of different refrigerants is very large.

Pure R134a refrigerant is 55,000 yuan/ton; pure R12 refrigerant is 26,500 yuan/ton; other substitutes are 16,500 yuan/ton. In terms of 300 grams of refrigerant per bottle (gross weight: 300 grams, net weight: 227 grams, plus 8 grams of filling loss), their actual cost is R134a: RMB 14.63 per bottle; R12 is only RMB 7.93 per bottle; Alternatives only need 5.58 yuan/bottle.

It is because of such a large price difference between the two that R12 is pretending to be popular with R134a.

In addition, the reporter found in the interview, the regular maintenance network, especially the 4S shop plus fluoride is expensive, but also makes the roadside shop, auto parts store fake and shoddy refrigerant organic.

The reporter visited several 4S shops in Beijing, and found a bottle of refrigerant that was priced at about 20 yuan. At the 4S shop, the price suddenly turned several times. Coupled with working hours, the owner went to the 4S shop to do a time of fluoride, ranging from a few hundred dollars to more than a thousand dollars.

In the auto parts market and roadside shops, leak detection and fluoridation as long as 100 yuan, so disparate prices, so many owners naturally abandoned the 4S shop.

More than 90% of commercial refrigerants are fakes. "The fake and inferior ratio of auto parts market R134a is actually over 90%." As the drafting unit of China's R134a national standard, China's largest production scale enterprise - Sinochem Modern Environmental Protection Chemical (Xi'an) Limited The company's Beijing dealer, Mr. Zhang has been in the line for nearly 10 years, feeling deeply. "The more you go down, the more fake goods you have, the second-tier cities, and the real goods are very few. When you arrive at the county-level cities, you can hardly see the real goods." Mr. Zhang told reporters that he had a reason: "Auto Parts In the city, the R134a has very little genuine goods, and even less is sold. There are two reasons. First, formal enterprises do not dare to put more products. As long as regular products appear, counterfeit goods will flock to it for up to a week. It can't be sold, and the price of real goods is significantly higher than that of counterfeit goods. Most of the refrigerants purchased are street-side maintenance stalls. They generally only look at prices, and they don't care about whether they are genuine or not."

Because of this, some regular brand sellers also sell fake goods at the same time.

In Guangzhou, the reporter serves as a sales agent for the gold-cooled agents and delivers them to the same Guangzhou agent. He drove a small noodle full of gold-cooled refrigerant and stopped in front of a residential building in Donghua Village, Xintang Town, Dongguan. The residential buildings here are mostly two-storey cement houses, and most of them use the first floor as a place for storing goods. There is a room about 89 square meters outside. It is full of refrigerant. There is a roadway next to it. On both sides, it is still a refrigerant. After passing 45 meters into another room, it is more spacious than the house outside. It is full of houses. It is also a refrigerant, and there is a large can of 1.5 kg. The agent told reporters that these are not true R134a. Like Jin Leng, such a regular brand, they do not represent a lot of agents a year, and more than 90% of them do fake products.

Hu Xiaojing, general manager of Zhejiang Luzhou Lianzhou Refrigerant Co., Ltd. calculated an account for the reporter and provided data to support Mr. Zhang’s statement. He said that statistics on the sales of R134a regular manufacturing enterprises in 2009 showed that the annual production of refrigerant R134a for automobiles was less than 3,000 tons, while the annual sales of refrigerants for vehicles on the market were nearly 30,000 tons. The serious imbalance between supply and demand has brought untold opportunities to criminals.

In June and July 2010, the reporter randomly purchased 48 brands of R134a aerosol cans from the large auto parts city in Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu and other places along with the relevant personnel of the National Conservation Commission, and passed the Guangdong Province Product Quality Supervision and Inspection Center and Zhejiang Province. Provincial Chemical Product Quality Inspection Station Co., Ltd. showed that 44 of them were counterfeit refrigerants, and the proportion of counterfeit goods was as high as 91.7%.