Electric mobility in China Are Charging Stations Becoming Obsolete?

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If no charging station is available, China offers a solution: the charging robot. This new technological trend in electric mobility is advancing faster in China than anywhere else. Already, 40 Chinese manufacturers are producing mobile charging devices that can be summoned via a mobile app, drive autonomously, and plug in the cable automatically.

*Henrik Bork, long-time China correspondent for the German Süddeutsche Zeitung and the Frankfurter Rundschau, is Managing Director at Asia Waypoint, a consulting agency specialized in China based in Beijing.

"Electric car looking for charging station" is a thing of the past. "Charging station looking for electric cars" is the future, explained a manager of the Chinese startup DH Force recently to reporters from the Chinese automotive newspaper Zhongguo Qiche Bao. Private investors love this idea, pumping a lot of money into corresponding companies. More and more market leaders among the young companies are preparing their IPOs, including for example Zhongmu Technology from Shanghai.

Electric and hybrid vehicle boom

The "Flashbot" charging robot from Zhongmu Technology is equipped with driving functions according to SAE autonomy level 4, so it can find electric cars with empty batteries without a driver and recharge them relatively quickly with a capacity of 104 kWh. The small charging stations on wheels are meant to fill a gap created by the rapid adoption of e-mobility in China. More than 24 million electric cars and hybrids have been registered in China by the end of June this year, statistics show.

In the first half of this year, a further 4.9 million e-cars and hybrids were sold, representing growth of 32 percent compared to the same period last year. So by the end of this year, there will be far more than 30 million so-called "New Energy Vehicles" or NEV, as vehicles with alternative drives are collectively referred to in China.

Charging network is growing rapidly

At the same time, China is also leading the world in expanding the charging network. By the end of June this year, more than 10.2 million charging stations had already been erected in the People's Republic, more than in any other country in the world. In the first half of 2024, more than 1.6 million new charging stations were added, according to the "China Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure Promotion Alliance", an industry association.

According to these figures, the expansion of the charging infrastructure has grown by 14.2 percent compared to the previous year, which is remarkably fast, but still much slower than the growth of the share of e-cars and hybrids in the entire vehicle fleet of the country.

Charging robots as a solution for charging station bottlenecks

Therefore, there are still long waiting times at the charging stations at certain locations or at peak times. 70 percent of all Chinese NEV drivers expressed dissatisfaction with the current charging network in a survey. The small, autonomously driving charging robots can expand the offer exactly where there are bottlenecks, say their developers.

Many of the startups developing charging robots are targeting the parking lots of shopping centers or large supermarkets. The charging robots can be supplied with electricity from a central charging station and then supply customers within a radius of a few kilometers. An example is the offering of the start-up GGSN. Customers of the New World Group's "K11" shopping center in the Xintiandi district in downtown Shanghai find the QR codes of the charging company on signs after they have parked their electric car in the parking lot. Drivers can scan these codes with their phones and summon the little battery on wheels and then also pay cashlessly via an app on the phone. The robots automatically plug in the cable and do everything else. For customers who are not yet that technologically advanced, shopping center staff will manually push the charging robots to the electric car.

Potential for highway rest stops

The autonomously driving devices also have special potential at motorway rest stops or for the "emergency supply" of electric cars that have run out of juice on the road, say proponents of the new technology. They can cover distances of a few kilometers autonomously. They can be transported to very remote places on the loading area of tow trucks. "We want to fill a gap with our mobile service," Kevin Deng, the founder of GGSN, explained recently at a conference in Hong Kong. Drivers of electric cars would soon no longer have to fight over the few charging stations on many parking lots and charging would also simply become much faster.

As so often, German engineers were once at the forefront when this new technology was developed. Volkswagen has been experimenting with the development of charging robots for many years. However, due to the high costs, they have so far not dared to commercialize the idea.

New charging experience made in China

Not in China. Here, there is enough capital and the necessary risk-taking attitude. Therefore, the Chinese industry is currently clearly ahead again in this new, global billion-dollar market. In the city of Hefei in the Chinese province of Anhui, 400 mobile charging robots are already on the move. The robots are operated by NaaS Technology, the first charging company listed on the US tech exchange NASDAQ in China and have been developed by Gotion High-Tech, the Chinese battery manufacturer. They are equipped with a robot arm that can independently plug the charging cable into an electric car's socket. When its own battery is empty, the robot can recharge itself without human help. By the end of this year, 1,000 charging robots are expected to be scurrying around in Hefei, according to Chinese trade media. Who wants to wait in front of a charging station, asks company CEO Alex Wu, when a robot can offer "a totally new charging experience". (se)

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