“China has gone from virtually no electric vehicles to having almost half of the world’s stock of electric passenger vehicles, and much more of that in terms of buses, trucks and two-wheelers,” says Mazzoco. “It was a bit of a surprise, even for Chinese policymakers.”
This sometimes meant that charging infrastructure struggled to keep up. Shenzhen, home of EV and battery maker BYD, provided an early case study. By 2017, all of the city’s buses were electric, and its taxi fleet became completely electric a year later. Initially, there were not enough loaders to keep up with the new demand.
From January, government guidelines require that each parking space in a new residential building come with load capacity. Some cities have already required this and subsidized the cost of adding chargers to older buildings and parking lots.
But driving habits in China generally differ from those in the West. Chinese car owners rely more on public charging infrastructure than their Western counterparts, Hove said. China’s two main state electric companies, State Grid and Southern Grid, maintain networks of high-speed charging stations along highways, while private companies generally install facilities in cities and towns.
In older neighborhoods, EV charging can put a strain on the network, and utilities were reluctant to make upgrades. Instead, they target charging providers to build stations where the network is strong enough – locations that may be less than convenient for drivers. But the loaders that are in place along highways and at public stations are frustratingly slow, Hove explains. Many outlets billed as fast chargers offered 50 kW charging, which can take up to an hour. Road stations should rather be equipped with 100 kW or higher chargers, he says, which can top up a car in as little as 15 minutes.
Progress in building charging infrastructure in China may have been rapid, but clumsy payment systems and broken chargers could still slow down. In 2019, Hove drove 900 miles from Beijing to Hohhot, the capital of Inner Mongolia, in a NIO ES6 EV, a mid-size SUV. On that route, he mostly loaded at State Grid points along highways and private points in towns. “Shark was a team effort,” he says, sometimes requiring multiple people to scan QR codes or phone calls to station operators. At one point, his car had to be towed some distance from the road due to a broken charging station. Another station he encountered in Beijing was so underutilized that weeds grew between the loaders. (The issue of poorly maintained stations is not unique to China.)
Chinese drivers are less likely to undertake long road trips like the one Hove tried, which makes distance anxiety less of a concern as EVs increase. This is due in part to the extensive train network, which includes more than 20,000 miles of high-speed rail. A train from Beijing to Shanghai, for example, flies passengers between cities in about four hours at a top speed of 217 mph. Hove’s journey from Beijing to Hohhot would take about five hours by highway, and half of that time by high-speed train. Consequently, most people use their cars to travel within cities or over short distances and take a train or plane for longer journeys.
Rather than expecting drivers to plug in and wait, some companies are experimenting with battery exchange stations. This works a bit like car washes, with people driving in their EVs with near-dead batteries. A robotic system changes the battery in about five minutes while the driver waits in the car. The concept was driven in other parts of the world, but it first took off in China, where it was popular among owners of truck and taxi fleets.
NIO, which in some ways aims to be a Chinese version of Tesla, has turned battery swapping into a luxury service, says Jonas Nahm, an assistant professor of energy, resources and environment at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. The company currently has 949 stations across China, with plans to triple that number by 2025. Instead of buying batteries, more than 60 percent of NIO drivers in China use its “battery as a service” rental program, which starts at about $ 150 a month. for a fixed number of exchanges, with stations concentrated in large cities where NIO cars are popular. To further alleviate distance anxiety, NIO offers permanent and flexible upgrades to higher capacity batteries and emergency charging along the way.