CHONGQING, March 28 (Xinhua) -- A total of 55 Tesla electric vehicle (EV) supercharging stations have been put into operation in southwest China's Chongqing Municipality on Saturday, as a single project with the largest number of service area supercharging stations that the U.S. carmaker has built in China.

The 55 V4 supercharging stations, with a total of 212 charging piles, are located at key transport nodes around Chongqing's main urban area, as well as along the northeastern and southeastern sections of its highway network.

On average, one supercharging station is available in a service area for every hour of driving, facilitating smoother travel for EV owners within Chongqing and to nearby provinces, including Sichuan, Hubei, Hunan, Shaanxi and Guizhou.

The extensive EV charging network, covering the Chongqing sections of 10 national expressways, is seen as a milestone for Tesla in building a robust charging infrastructure. It stands out for its scale, number of charging piles, construction efficiency and far-reaching impact, with the charging piles also accessible to non-Tesla vehicles.

Starting in 2025, Tesla planned to roll out V4 Superchargers on the Chinese mainland, where, as of March 2026, it has installed and opened over 2,500 supercharging stations with more than 12,000 supercharging piles.

Of these, over 950 stations are open to non-Tesla vehicles. Together with more than 650 destination charging stations, Tesla has built a network covering all provincial capitals and municipalities, as well as the majority of prefecture-level cities on the Chinese mainland.

Huang Lei, general manager of Tesla Western China, said the launch of these supercharging stations in Chongqing's expressway service areas underscores Tesla's confidence in deepening its presence in the Chinese market and lays a solid foundation for expanding its expressway service area charging projects to more provinces and cities.

China's EV charging infrastructure has continued to expand rapidly, with the total number of charging points reaching 21.01 million by the end of February 2026, up 47.8 percent year on year.

In October 2025, China unveiled a three-year action plan to improve the country's EV charging infrastructure, aiming to establish a nationwide network of 28 million charging facilities, with public charging capacity surpassing 300 million kilowatts by the end of 2027.

Tesla has built a Megafactory in Shanghai, the first of its kind outside the United States and its second major facility in the city following the 2019 Gigafactory. Last year, Tesla produced more than 2,000 commercial Megapack energy storage battery systems in the Shanghai Megafactory.