China Queued for Hours. Korea Paid for 6,670 Idle Chargers.

The global view

The number of the week is 163 million kWh: what Chinese drivers drew from expressway chargers over the National Day holiday, up 51% on last year. A fortnight ago we quoted China's public chargers at 5-6% utilisation; this week drivers reported queues of five to seven hours. Both numbers are true, and the gap between them is the charging business in one sentence.

A network is sized for the average and judged on its worst afternoon, and somebody pays for the hours in between. This week every region nominated a different payer. Korean taxpayers funded 6,670 chargers that now sit idle because their operators went bust, and Australia's rulemaker moved to put 14,000 kerbside chargers on household power bills.

American drivers got the third option: the customer. Paren counted US fast-charging sessions up 26% while port additions slowed and the average price reached 54 cents per kWh. Last week we said rationed capex is how utilisation climbs; this is what it looks like on a receipt.

Europe

BYD brought its flash charger to the Paris Motor Show with a schedule attached: 100 units of 1,500 kW in Europe by the end of 2026, 3,000 by the end of 2027. Today only the Denza Z9 GT can draw full power, with the Atto 8 due in early 2027. On Europe's fast chargers the average session lasts 27 minutes at about 60 kW, as we found in our case against the megawatt hype, so most early customers will be using a very expensive ordinary charger.

Fastned has a duller and more important complaint. Its German country director told electrive that grid connections, spread across more than 850 distribution operators with their own rules, are now the biggest brake on expansion, and some accept requests only once a year. The scarce input is no longer the charger but the connection, which is why the negotiable wire we covered three weeks ago matters more than any kilowatt record.

Money is cheaper for those who can show a contract. Irish operator EZO closed a €150 million investment-grade, non-recourse facility for 3,000 points under UK and Irish local-authority concessions, with owner Rubicon eyeing a 2028 IPO. Lenders will price a council contract like infrastructure long before they price a traffic forecast that way.

Switzerland nearly doubled its depot-charging subsidy to almost CHF 40 million after the first 20 million ran out within months; 135 approved applications cover about 687 electric trucks. Last month Daimler blamed missing chargers for missing trucks. In Switzerland, at least, the queue was for the money, and the depot, not the motorway megawatt bay, is where it went.

North America

Paren's Q3 report puts the US at 80,964 public fast-charging ports, with 4,106 added in the quarter and port additions running about 9% behind last year. Sessions rose 26% to 50.4 million. Fewer new plugs and more cars per plug is the only route to profit we have ever been able to model.

Prices followed. Tesla raised its non-member Supercharger rate 15% to 56.9 cents while still adding the most ports, 1,287. IONNA came second with 378, helped by converting Circle K sites, which is buying the pieces with an American accent.

Last week we reported Tesla's first Megacharger opening at a Pilot in Georgia. The follow-up count: twelve more sites under construction on I-5, I-10 and other freight corridors, four to eight 1.2 MW stalls each, and Tesla promising over 30 stations by year-end.

Washington pulled the other lever. NHTSA cut the 2031 fuel-economy target from 50.4 to 34.9 mpg and will end CAFE credit trading in 2028, removing a revenue line EV makers have counted on. A coalition of 26 states, counties and cities has sued.

China

The NEA logged a record 28.05 million kWh of highway charging on the holiday's first day, up 60% year on year. China added 11,000 high-power units at service areas in the first eight months, taking the total to about 89,000.

Our arithmetic, not the NEA's: spread the week's 163 million kWh across those 89,000 units and you get roughly 260 kWh per charger per day. Respectable, and nowhere near a seven-hour queue, which says the shortage sat on particular stretches and afternoons rather than across the network. Europe showed the same shape in July, when 145 sites ran full while the average stayed comfortable.

One detail deserves more attention than the queue length: several high-power sites reportedly slowed as their on-site storage drained. One 2,250 kW charger needs the contracted power of 750 households, and a battery can cover a busy hour, not a busy week.

BYD said it has 10,000 flash-charging stations in China and will double that by year-end. The new five-year plan targets over 40 million charge points by 2030, 300,000 of them high-power, which is a plan for the average. Golden Week was a reminder that the drivers who post the photos are queuing at the peak.

India

Hindustan Petroleum asked for a coordinated review of electricity tariffs, demand charges, connection costs and service-charge ceilings, because public charging does not pay at current rates. With 5,826 points and a target of about 6,000 by end-FY27, the ask is less about growth than about making existing chargers earn.

The Hindu's registration analysis puts EVs and hybrids at 12.7% of vehicles registered this fiscal year, but below 5% without three-wheelers. Coverage is lopsided: Assam has one public charging location per 997 EVs, Karnataka one per 144.

Delhi added 150 electric buses, taking its e-bus fleet to 5,238 of roughly 6,988, and opened five charging sites at a bus terminal and four depots. India's most electrified fleet is the one with a depot and a single owner.

Rest of Asia

South Korea spent 1.67 trillion won over six years subsidising private chargers, and 6,670 of them now sit unused because their operators went bankrupt or stopped trading. Another 17,800 have shown "status unknown" or a communication error for more than three days. A subsidy buys a charger; it does not buy an operator who can run one.

A correction to our own framing. Last week we wrote that Vietnam ordered public chargers open to all compatible vehicles from July 2027; officials and experts now say Circular 61 standardises connectors, safety and metering but does not oblige V-Green to serve other brands. Technically compatible and commercially open are two different regulations, and Vietnam has written only the first.

Oceania

Australia's energy rulemaker gave preliminary approval for network businesses to recover the cost of about 14,000 pole-mounted kerbside chargers through household bills, targeting streets private operators won't touch. The headline calls it an EV charger tax. It is also the one funding model where utilisation risk lands on every bill-payer instead of the operator.

The case for caution arrived the same week. The NRMA report on the A$78 million, 117-site national rollout was published almost entirely redacted, leaving one legible number: an average install cost of A$350,000. Fewer than half the sites are believed to be built.

Tesla lodged plans for a 37-stall hub at Albury on the Sydney–Melbourne corridor, which would be the country's largest. Fortescue, finding nobody sells a 6 MW charger, built its own with car-factory welding robots to connect 240-tonne haul trucks in the Pilbara. And the EV Council will spend A$1.43 million on a national charging roadmap due mid-2027.

South America

Brazilian electric motorcycle operator Vammo says it has reached EBITDA profitability after 10 million battery swaps from about 1,000 swap points in São Paulo, and is expanding to Campinas. In a week of subsidy write-offs, the profitable network was the one serving two wheels.

Hong Kong-listed home-charger maker Zhida Technology has lost more than 90% of its share price a year after listing, with gross margin falling from 19.2% to 7.7% in China's price war; growth in Brazil, Thailand and the UAE hasn't made up for it. Ohme, meanwhile, named Argentina among its expansion markets for smart home charging.

Africa

Eskom opened public charging at Durban's Gateway and Pavilion malls with a 20% discount for six months. It now counts 19 public chargers at 14 sites, with 84 more locations identified, as its CEO pitches EV charging as a new revenue line ahead of unbundling.

The market it is entering is small: GridCars counts over 544 sites and 650 chargers, and battery-electrics were just 13.8% of 18,945 new-energy vehicles sold in eight months.

Further north, a Jinguan Electric subsidiary signed a framework worth up to US$296 million to build 50 solar, storage and charging stations for Spiro, Africa's largest two-wheeler battery-swap platform. At about US$5.9 million each, those are small power plants with a swap counter attached.