USA Today - If you think China is the wonder nation, here's jolt back to reality: It can fail to reach the same unrealistic goals as the U.S. Take electric cars, for instance.

China set a goal three years ago of seeing the sales of at least 500,000 hybrid or all-electric cars and buses a year. Now, it's falling far short, the New York Times reports.

Electric car production is pretty much limited to a bunch of project cars, but no real, sustained sales. Yet China has one of the most vibrant car markets in the world right now, attracting every major automaker. Yet electric car sales have been hampered by trouble with the technology and the same hesitation about their practicality that has dogged buyers in the U.S.

"It's pretty trivial at this stage — they hardly sell any," Lin Huaibin, the manager of China vehicle sales forecasts at IHS Automotive, a global consulting firm, tells the Times.

It's interesting that China is having so much trouble given how a superrich elite seemingly can't get enough German luxury cars, showing they certainly have the incomes to afford hybrids or electrics, and how China has some homegrown automakers like BYD that had planned to export electrics to the U.S. BYD established a U.S. beachhead in Los Angeles a few months ago, but now plans to limit its American electric efforts to rental car fleets and large vehicles like buses.