Tesla’s Most Excellent Adventure, China Edition

It’s a drizzly Monday morning along Shanghai’s waterfront Bund district. My black Tesla Model S 85 is inching through rush-hour traffic as I embark on a 1,300-kilometer (807-mile) journey to Beijing. This is no ordinary road trip. I’m out to test Tesla Motors founder Elon Musk’s statement in February that Chinese drivers are needlessly worried about the logistics of owning electric vehicles—that it’s tough to power them up. “This is false,” Musk told analysts on a conference call. “It is not difficult to charge your car in China.”

Musk has good reason to want to reassure mainland drivers. Tesla has big ambitions in the world’s biggest auto market. Doing well here would help the company reach its target of delivering 55,000 vehicles globally in 2015. Musk enjoys rock star adulation in the Chinese press, and there’s no shortage of wealthy consumers who can shell out the $100,000-plus needed to buy a Model S on the mainland.