Yang Rong was once celebrated as a pioneering automobile entrepreneur who founded the first Chinese company to be listed on Wall Street. Then, seven years ago, he fled to the US fearing arrest for alleged economic crimes. Now, Yang is plotting a comeback as a hybrid carmaker in the US — a venture requiring billions of dollars that could face daunting odds amid a weak economy and against competitors such as Toyota and Honda that have already invested millions in “green” technology. His Los Angeles-based start-up, Hybrid Kinetic Motors, plans to offer a full-range of hybrid vehicles that run on natural gas, gasoline and electricity, with production to start by 2013. Yang recently unveiled plans to build a massive plant in the southern US state of Alabama that he says will churn out as many as 1 million vehicles annually by 2018. To fund his bold ambitions, he announced earlier this week an equally lofty goal of raising nearly $7.9 billion from private investors. With the US economy in the doldrums and the hybrid car market ever-more competitive, Yang's scheme strikes some as unrealistic. “Hybrid Kinetic ... is talking about setting up a full-fledged, full-line auto company at the bottom of the second-worst recession in US economic history,” said John O'Dell, senior editor for car adviser Edmunds' GreenCarAdvisor.com. “It doesn't sound very promising to me.” A Hybrid Kinetic official acknowledged the monumental challenges facing the young company. “What we are proposing is indeed very huge and very unconventional,” Vincent Wang, a Yang associate, told Automotive News in August. Yang, 52, who now goes by Benjamin Yeung, may still be wanted by Chinese authorities who have accused him of committing unspecified economic crimes. Yang has always maintained his innocence and said that jealous officials forced him out of the automaker he founded, Brilliance China Automotive Ltd. Under Yang, Brilliance China grew into the country's largest minibus
