As Cars Go Electric, China Builds a Big Lead in Factories

Fueled with money from Wall Street and local officials, automakers plan to build eight million electric cars a year there, more than Europe and North America combined.

ZHAOQING, China — Xpeng Motors, a Chinese electric car start-up, recently opened a large assembly plant in southeastern China and is building a matching factory nearby. It has announced plans for a third. Another Chinese electric car company, Nio, has opened one large factory in central China and is preparing to build a second a few miles away. Zhejiang Geely, owner of Volvo, showed off an enormous new electric car factory in eastern China last month rivaling in size some of the world’s largest assembly plants. Evergrande, a troubled Chinese real estate giant, has just built electric car factories in the cities of Shanghai and Guangzhou and hopes to be making almost as many fully electric cars by 2025 as all of North America.