China's electric car production surges

China's new-energy vehicle production jumped threefold to 25,400 vehicles year-on-year in the first quarter of 2015, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said on Thursday.

The output of pure electric passenger cars rose 400 percent from a year earlier to 11,000 cars, with plug-in hybrid passenger cars rising nearly 500 percent to 7,257 in the first three months of this year.

The output of pure electric and plug-in hybrid commercial vehicles went up by 500 percent and 61 percent, respectively.