“China has gone from virtually no electric vehicles to nearly half of the world’s electric passenger car stock, and much more in buses, trucks and two-wheelers,” said Mazzoco. “This was somewhat of a surprise, even to Chinese policymakers.”
That sometimes meant that the charging infrastructure struggled to keep up. Shenzhen, home of EV and battery maker BYD, provided an early case study. In 2017, all the city’s buses were electric and a year later the taxi fleet went fully electric. In the beginning, there were not enough chargers to meet the new demand.
As of January, government guidelines require every parking space in a new residential building to have charging facilities. Some cities had already mandated this and subsidized the cost of adding chargers to older buildings and parking lots.
But driving habits in China are generally different from those in the West. Chinese car owners rely more on public charging infrastructure than their Western counterparts, Hove says. China’s two main electricity 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, charging electric cars can strain the grid, and utilities are hesitant to make upgrades. Instead, they send charging providers to build stations where the network is strong enough — locations that may not be as convenient for drivers. But the chargers lining highways and public stations are frustratingly slow, Hove explains. Many outlets billed as fast chargers offered 50kW charging, which can take up to an hour. Roadside stations should instead be equipped with chargers of 100 kW or higher, he says, which can charge a car in just 15 minutes.
Progress in building charging infrastructure in China may have been rapid, but clunky payment systems and broken chargers can still delay a journey. In 2019, Hove drove 900 miles from Beijing to Hohhot, the capital of Inner Mongolia, in a NIO ES6 EV, a mid-sized SUV. On that route, he mainly charged at State Grid points along highways and private points in cities. “Charging was a team effort,” he says, and sometimes multiple people had to scan QR codes or make phone calls to station operators. At one point, his car had to be towed a bit because of a broken charging station. Another station he encountered in Beijing was so underutilized that weeds were growing between the loaders. (The problem of poorly maintained stations is not unique to China.)
Chinese drivers are less likely to make long car journeys like Hove’s, so range fears may become less important as EVs increase. This is partly due to the extensive train network, which consists of more than 20,000 kilometers of high-speed trains. A train from Beijing to Shanghai, for example, whizzes passengers between the cities in about four hours with a top speed of 217 mph. Hove’s journey from Beijing to Hohhot would take about five hours by highway, and half that time by high-speed train. As a result, most people use their car to travel within cities or over short distances, and take the train or plane for longer journeys.
Rather than expect drivers to plug in and wait, some companies are experimenting with battery change stations. These work a bit like car washes, with people driving their EVs in with low batteries. A robotic system changes the battery in about five minutes while the driver waits in the car. The concept has been launched in other parts of the world, but it first started in China, where it was popular among truck and taxi fleet owners.
NIO, which aims to be, in a sense, a Chinese version of Tesla, has turned battery swapping into a luxury service, said Jonas Nahm, an assistant professor of energy, resources and environment at the 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 are using its “battery as a service” lease program, which starts at about $150 a month for a certain number of switches, with stations concentrated in major cities where NIO cars are popular. To further reduce range fears, NIO offers permanent and flexible upgrades to higher capacity batteries and emergency roadside chargers.
