China has built the largest number of public electric vehicle charging poles worldwide as new energy cars are gaining momentum in the world’s largest car market.

By the end of 2017, China was home to 213,903 public EV charging poles, ranking No 1 in the world, said Liu Kai, an official at the China Electric Car Charging Technology and Industry Alliance on Thursday.

“In the past year, around 6,054 poles were built a month on average,” said Liu.

He said that there were also 231,820 private EV charging poles, which has pushed the total number of charging poles available in the country to over 440,000.

The alliance estimated that by the end of December China had more than 1.72 million new energy cars on the road, of which nearly 1.5 million were electric ones.

A total of 777,000 new energy cars were sold in 2017, a 53.3 percent surge year-on-year, according to statistics from the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers.

Xu Haidong, an assistant to the association, expected sales would grow at around 40 percent to exceed at least 1 million in 2018, although the growth rate of the car market as a whole would slow down to around 3 percent year-on-year this year.

A survey by the China Automotive Technology & Research Center said currently buyers of new energy passenger cars are well-educated residents in tier-one and tier-two cities, with the majority of them aged between 30 and 40.

Contact the writer at lifusheng@chinadaily.com.cn