A couple of years ago, simple electric vehicle charging points popped up seemingly overnight around a village near the Ming Tombs, a collection of imperial resting places dating back half a millennium. The village on Beijing’s rural outskirts, home to fewer than 900 people and with little more than fields, orchards, and a few rural restaurants, hardly looks like a center of China’s EV future, but it forms one small, crucial part of an ambitious strategy.
China has set a goal of having 40 percent of the vehicles sold in the country be EVs by 2030, which means a lot more vehicles will need to be charged. By 2025, the government aims to have in place charging infrastructure to meet the needs of more than 20 million cars. Right now, of China’s 810,000 public charging points, more than 70 percent are in heavily populated coastal areas, such as Guangdong and Shanghai. But that’s starting to change. Guidelines issued in January by the National Development and Reform Commission and several other agencies call for bringing charging stations to all counties and villages as part of the government’s “rural revitalization” effort.
The electrification project forms a key part of China’s plan to become carbon neutral by 2060, a signature initiative of President Xi Jinping that has the potential added benefit of reducing dependence on oil and gas imports.
Chinese leaders began thinking about ways to build a domestic EV industry in the 1990s. Back then, China was aware it couldn’t match the West in internal combustion engine innovation, says Fengming Lu, a lecturer in the department of political and social change at the Australian National University. But with EVs, China saw an opportunity to leapfrog automakers in the US, Germany, and Japan to develop what it saw as the industry of the future.
Today, not only does China produce the majority of the world’s EV batteries, it’s also forging ahead with the development and manufacturing of EVs—and selling them to the world. These efforts to grow the EV industry are already paying off domestically: At the end of 2021, EVs made up just 3 percent of the total passenger fleet in China, a figure that’s expected to rise to 32 percent by 2030 and 77 percent by 2040, according to a projection by BloombergNEF.
“Foreign auto brands were seen as the most desirable, but that’s different for electric vehicles,” says Ilaria Mazzocco, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who has researched the Chinese EV industry. Many young people are drawn to the idea of owning a more eco-friendly vehicle, she adds. And local governments offer plenty of incentives: In some cities, EV owners pay less for license plates and can keep driving on days when conventional vehicles are restricted due to high air pollution. But each EV sold is another vehicle that needs charging.
In 2009, China’s government enacted a series of policies to promote research and development and encourage state oil companies to invest in EV infrastructure. But uptake was slow and only seven of 25 cities met a goal of having 1,000 EVs and hybrids on the road by 2012, according to research by Sabrina Weithmann of the Aschaffenburg University of Applied Sciences. The flurry of activity had the potential to create chaos, with EV owners having to navigate a patchwork of different charging systems that weren’t always interchangeable.
In 2013, government agencies launched a new set of pilot programs, this time insisting on interoperability for charging systems and infrastructure. Today there is one standard for charging that even Tesla, which uses a proprietary charging system in North America, has had to adapt to. In contrast, the US has three different systems. (Earlier this month, the US government proposed standards aimed at stemming some of the chaos.) The EU has a common plug standard, but different payment systems for charging networks can still cause confusion.
China’s interoperability gives it an advantage over other countries that are trying to encourage EV adoption, says Anders Hove, a Beijing-based researcher for the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. Drivers can plug into any outlet and generally don’t need special cards or subscriptions, and they can pay with QR codes using common payment methods such as WeChat Pay or Alipay.
The government has also heavily subsidized all aspects of the industry, including battery manufacturing. For example, from 2015 to 2019 automakers that manufacture cars in China were required to use batteries from a handful of white-listed domestic companies in order to be eligible for government subsidies, says Lu, a measure that helped create domestic battery giants like CATL and BYD. Companies that manufacture cars in China are required to meet fuel efficiency standards similar to those in California and ensure a certain percentage of the cars they produce are EVs—or buy credits from companies that make EVs, which is another way to prop up domestic companies, says Tu Le, founder of Sino Auto Insights, a mobility consultancy.
In recent years, even as subsidies for EV purchases are being phased out, sales have taken off. In 2021, nearly 3 million battery EVs or hybrids were sold in China, close to 15 percent of all new car sales for the year, according to the Chinese Passenger Car Association. There’s lots of choice, too, from the country’s best-selling EV, the $5,000 Wuling Hongguang Mini EV, to very tiny cars that are little more than enclosed mopeds, right up to luxury options from Tesla and domestic rival NIO. There’s even Great Wall Motors’ Ora Ballet Cat, a pastel VW Beetle–like EV marketed exclusively to women.
“China has gone from having virtually no electric vehicles to having almost half of the world’s stock of passenger electric vehicles, and far more of that in terms of buses, trucks, and two-wheelers,” says Mazzoco. “This was somewhat of a surprise, even for Chinese policymakers.”
At times that has meant charging infrastructure struggled to keep up. Shenzhen, home to EV and battery maker BYD, provided an early case study. By 2017, all of the city’s buses were electric, and its taxi fleet went all-electric a year later. At first, there weren’t enough chargers to keep up with the new demand.
As of January, government guidelines require that each parking space in a new residential building come with charging capabilities. Some cities had already required this and subsidized the cost of adding chargers to older buildings and parking lots.
But driving habits in China are, generally speaking, different from those in the West. Chinese car owners rely more on public charging infrastructure than their Western counterparts, says Hove. 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 within cities and villages.
In older neighborhoods, EV charging can put a strain on the grid, and utility companies have been reluctant to make upgrades. Instead, they direct charging providers to build stations where the grid is strong enough—locations that may be less than convenient for drivers. But the chargers that are in place along highways and at public stations are frustratingly slow, Hove explains. Many outlets billed as rapid chargers offered 50-kW charging, which can take up to an hour. Roadside stations should instead be equipped with 100-kW or higher chargers, he says, which can replenish a car in as little as 15 minutes.
Progress building charging infrastructure in China may have been rapid, but clunky payment systems and broken chargers can still slow down a trip. In 2019, Hove drove 900 miles from Beijing to Hohhot, the capital of Inner Mongolia, in an NIO ES6 EV, a midsize SUV. On that route, he charged mostly at State Grid points along highways and private points in towns. “Charging was a team effort,” he says, and sometimes required multiple people scanning QR codes or phone calls to station operators. At one point, his car had to be towed some of the way due to a broken charging station. Another station he came across in Beijing was so underutilized that weeds were growing among the chargers. (The issue of poorly maintained stations isn’t unique to China.)
Chinese drivers are less likely to take long road trips like the one Hove attempted, which may make range anxiety less of a concern as EVs proliferate. That’s partly thanks to the extensive train network, which includes more than 20,000 miles of high-speed rail. A train from Beijing to Shanghai, for instance, whizzes passengers between the 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 that time by high-speed train. As a result, most people use their cars to travel inside 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-swapping stations. These work a bit like car washes, with people driving their EVs in with near-dead batteries. A robotic system changes the battery in about five minutes while the driver waits in the car. The concept has been floated in other parts of the world, but it first took off in China, where it has been 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 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 purchasing batteries, more than 60 percent of NIO drivers in China use its “battery as a service” leasing program, which starts at about $150 a month for a set number of swaps, with stations concentrated in major cities where NIO cars are popular. To further alleviate range anxiety, NIO offers permanent and flexible upgrades to higher-capacity batteries and emergency roadside charging.
Battery swapping is unlikely to be a large-scale solution because batteries are generally not interchangeable among different car brands, and even the slightest compatibility issue can be a safety hazard. But that hasn’t stopped several companies from introducing their own battery-swapping systems, including automakers Geely and Aion and battery maker CATL. In 2021, state energy company Sinopec launched a partnership with NIO to install battery-exchange stations in Sinopec gas stations.
Pricey top-down solutions from the government or big automakers aren’t the only way to keep cars charged—especially in a country like China, where labor costs remain low. EV owners in cities can simply pay a parking attendant to rotate which car is plugged in every few hours or hire gig workers to pick up an EV in the evening, charge it overnight, and return it the next morning.
Experts warn that just making the switch to electric vehicles won’t be sufficient for China to reach its carbon-neutral goals. The final piece of the epic EV charging puzzle is optimizing when and how cars are charged. Much of China’s energy is still generated by coal, and the country needs to do more to incentivize switching to renewables and encourage people to charge their cars during off-peak hours.
Researchers in China, as well as in the US, have suggested that integrating EVs with the electrical grid—so car batteries can store excess capacity and feed it back into the grid when demand is high—could be a way to manage energy demand and avoid power outages. A 2020 trial in Shanghai showed the potential, and by the following year there were reportedly 42 vehicle-to-grid programs underway across China, but they are so far largely small-scale pilot programs.
Back in the village by the Ming Tombs, EVs are an increasingly common sight. Here, comfortably within a single charge of Beijing’s central business district, China’s EV boom is rapidly expanding. Further out, in rural areas that are not as well connected to major cities, private companies, local authorities, and the central government are trying to expand EVs further.
As many Western countries struggle with legacy auto industry infrastructure, China is surging ahead. If current projections hold, by 2040 the vast majority of cars on Chinese roads will be EVs. Such a rapid shift won’t just have profound implications domestically, it will also likely place China at the forefront of the global EV industry. From that position, China would be able to shape the infrastructure and technology that powers the planetwide shift to electric vehicles. “China is a massive country,” says Le from Sino Auto Insights. Once 1.4 billion people start moving in the same direction, he adds, it could be hard for other countries to catch up.
