China’s week-long holiday: BEV owners fight over charging ports, no A/C for families

China is now the world’s largest market for battery electric vehicles (BEVs). Although the market share for BEVs (about 10 percent) is behind Germany (about 17 percent), China still leads the world’s BEV market by the sheer volume of cars sold – about 1.5 million units, between January to August 2021.

The problem however is that infrastructure support and faster charging solutions are not keeping up with growth.

As the world's largest BEV market, China's experience offers a good reference for governments in other countries in anticipating future challenges with BEVs, and how to avoid them. 

Last week was China’s National Day Golden Week holiday. Being a long holiday, many families took the opportunity to travel and since many families now own electric vehicles, the inherent problem with an electric car’s long charging time becomes amplified in the recent peak holiday travel season.

Chinese social media networks were ablaze with users complaining about long waiting times at public charging stations. Drivers complained that they had to wait for hours for their turn, and when it’s their turn, the charging process takes easily another one to two hours, maybe even three, depending on vehicle and charging port's output.

In one post, a BEV user shared that his drive from Shenzhen to his hometown in Hunan province usually took him 8 hours, but because he was driving a BEV, it took him 16 hours.

He required two charging stops, each time spending 4 hours in queuing and charging.

In another viral post, two couples were filmed fighting over a charging port.

In another post, a family travelling in an XPeng P7 was stuck in a terribly long traffic jam on the highway, and the family had to get out of the car to rest by the roadside, allegedly because the XPeng’s battery was running dangerously low to keep the air-conditioning on.

The spike in power consumption also strained power grids. China’s Xinhua news agency said in Shandong province, power consumption by local EV charging facilities surged 46 percent.

The situation highlighted the biggest problem with BEVs – long charging time.

Even with combustion engine cars that can be filled up in a matter of minutes, it is normal for long queues to form at petrol stations during peak travelling season.

Yes, there are faster solutions like battery swap stations, which as its name suggests, allows drivers to swap their depleted batteries for a fully-charged one in just minutes. Companies like Nio and Geely operate many of such facilities in China.

The problem is that different BEV manufacturers have different battery types and design and without a commonly agreed industry standard, battery swapping stations cannot be rolled out on a big scale.

Of course there are DC fast chargers, which many of these Chinese public charging facilities already offer, but a 30 minute charging time is still too slow to cope with peak holiday traffic.

There are over 5 million EVs in China (Chinese statistics group PHEVs and BEVs together, but an overwhelming majority of EVs are BEVs anyway) but only 923,000 public charging facilities, according to Chinese government data.

But these are just temporary setbacks. Don’t expect the Chinese government to back down from its goal to have EVs (including PHEVs) making up 20 percent of new passenger car sales by 2025, reaching 50 percent by 2035, with the rest being made up by regular hybrids.

The solution is to intensify investments in public charging infrastructure, which because of the inherently slower ‘refueling’ time of a BEV, needs to scaled up to a much wider coverage than petrol stations.

Also read: EVs become mainstream - China on track to hit EV targets ahead of schedule

China has the resources and political will to see this through. The question is, how many countries can replicate this.

In the meantime, don’t dismiss a hybrid yet. We need different solutions for different needs.

Also, if you are someone who is very concerned on carbon emissions, then use public transport - recognised by UNDP as the single most effective method to reduce carbon in transportation, not electric cars or hybrids - and of course, plant more trees.

Also read: BEVs are cleaner than hybrids? Not true, at least not for Malaysia