You could tell me anything really far-fetched about technology right now, and I couldn’t readily dismiss it, even if I thought you were probably lying. So reports about gigantic vending machines in China dispensing electric cars didn’t really make me blink. Unlike Mark Rogowsky of Forbes, however, I’m not high on the potential of this disruptive business model. The opening of his recent breathless article about Kandi Technologies:

“China is growing so fast it’s sometimes difficult to get different sources to even agree which the biggest cities are and how many people live in them. But that said, among them is a name unfamiliar to most Americans, the city of Hangzhou, located in eastern China, and home to 8.7 million as of 2010. That would make it the biggest city in the U.S. even though it’s barely a third the size of Shanghai, the world’s largest. But Hangzhou isn’t just big, it’s also home to an ambitious experiment that combines electric vehicles, giant vending machines and a Zipcar-like business model. Oh, and if it works, private car ownership as we know it is probably going to disappear in the world’s biggest cities.”