Zong Yi, left, next to one of his charging stations
 
Phnix
China wants its car market to go green, but so far, that dream is a long way off. For example, when Zong Yi, a Chinese businessman with asthma and worries about his country’s pollution problems, bought an electric Tesla Model S sedan in May, he faced a problem: how to get it home. As the WSJ’s Rose Yu and Colum Murphy report:
Mr. Zong lives in the southern Chinese boomtown of Guangzhou, where he founded a business that makes energy-efficient equipment like water heaters for swimming pools. In April, Tesla Motors Inc. delivered its first cars to customers in China in Beijing, about 1,300 miles to the north. Tesla doesn’t operate enough charging facilities between the cities to allow him to drive his car home.
Undaunted, Mr. Zong decided to build his own charging network. With the help of partners found online, he bought 20 charging pillars from Tesla for 5,000 yuan (about $800) each and put them in 16 cities along the way.
“I thought it would be cool if I could build China’s first electric-car-charging road,” said Mr. Zong, who completed the installations last month. A Tesla spokeswoman said the company is aware of, and approves of, Mr. Zong’s ambitions.
Mr. Zong’s do-it-yourself approach illustrates a major challenge faced by Tesla and other electric-car makers targeting China.
China’s government wants 500,000 gasoline-electric hybrid and all-electric vehicles on its roads by next year and five million by 2020 as part of its effort to improve air quality and reduce oil dependence. But only about 17,600 such vehicles were purchased in China last year, according to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, including 14,604 electric vehicles. About 18 million passenger cars were sold in the country last year.
Lack of infrastructure is one major reason. China had hoped to have 400,000 charging pillars for electric vehicles in place by next year, but work is behind schedule. State Grid Corp. of China, China’s largest power generator by sales, had finished completion of 400 charging stations as of the end of 2013, according to data from the company.