China’s expressway EV chargers delivered a record 28.05 million kWh on the first day of the National Day holiday, up 60.4% from a year earlier, although about half of that increase reflects a larger number of chargers being counted.
The figure for October 1 was “a record high for a single day of any holiday”, the National Energy Administration said in a statement published on October 2.
It is based on 62,700 charging connectors at expressway service areas that report to the national charging monitoring platform.
A year earlier the same platform covered 48,400 connectors, according to the agency’s release after the 2025 holiday, which means the monitored pool grew by 29.5%.
The agency did not say how much of that growth came from newly built chargers and how much from existing ones being connected to the platform.
The Comparison
Last year’s first-day total was 17.49 million kWh, itself a record at the time.
Divided by the number of connectors in each year, output per connector rose from about 361 kWh to about 447 kWh, an increase of 23.8%.
That per-connector figure, and not the 60.4% headline, is the closer measure of how much harder each charger worked.
The agency does not publish a series on a constant number of chargers and the platform also does not cover the whole network.
Highway service areas had about 89,000 charging connectors in total, Transport Vice Minister Li Yang said at a briefing on September 24, of which about 22,000 were high-power units.
Approximately 11,000 of those high-power units were added between January and August, he said.
Whether Li’s count and the agency’s monitored total are compiled on the same basis has not been stated.
Three Days of Data
Demand eased after the first day but stayed well above last year’s level.
Monitored chargers handled 2.97 million sessions between October 1 and October 3, up 48.4% from the same days of last year’s holiday, according to figures from the platform.
They delivered 71.62 million kWh over the three days, up 49.4%, for a daily average of 23.87 million kWh.
That works out to about 24 kWh per session, a partial charge.
The October 1 total was also about 22% above the 23.03 million kWh recorded on May 1, the first day of this year’s Labor Day holiday.
This year’s National Day holiday runs for seven days, against eight last year, when it was combined with the Mid-Autumn Festival.
The 2025 holiday as a whole saw 123 million kWh of expressway charging, an average of 15.36 million kWh a day.
Charging Up, Sales Down
The record came as new-car sales were falling, a reminder that charging demand follows the number of vehicles already on the road and not the pace of new sales.
Retail sales of new-energy passenger vehicles were 827,000 between September 1 and September 27, down 20% from the same period a year earlier, the China Passenger Car Association said in its weekly report published on September 30.
That took the year-to-date total to 7.50 million, down 13%.
New-energy vehicles still accounted for 65.7% of all passenger vehicle retail sales in the period, because the wider market fell faster, with total retail sales down 29% at 1.26 million.
Manufacturers’ wholesale volumes of new-energy vehicles fell 11% to 1.03 million over the same days but were up 7% for the year to date at 10.81 million, the association’s figures show.
In the final week of that period, which coincided with the Mid-Autumn Festival, average daily retail sales across the market were down 42% on the year.
New-energy vehicle orders fell 52% on the year in the following week, which included the start of the National Day holiday, according to Goldman Sachs.
The association has yet to publish its full-month figures for September.
Queues at Service Areas
Charging facilities at service areas ran “generally smoothly”, the agency said, adding that it had told local authorities to complete maintenance before the holiday and to deploy mobile charging equipment.
Local reports described a different experience at some sites.
A driver from Gansu province waited seven hours overnight at a service area on the G75 expressway, Xiaoxiang Morning Post reported.
Another drew queue number 99 at a different service area and waited more than five hours, according to Jimu News, which also reported a car being pushed to a charger after its battery fell to 1%.
The same reports included drivers elsewhere who waited 30 minutes or less.
State Grid placed 599 temporary charging connectors and 32 mobile charging trucks at busy service areas and asked drivers to leave once their batteries reached 80%.
China Southern Power Grid said its charging platform delivered 10.44 million kWh on October 1, up 24.5% and its first day above 10 million.
What the Figure Leaves Out
Battery swaps are not part of the agency’s total. Nio completed 183,469 swaps on October 1, a company record that it broke again on October 5 with 183,664.
The company operates nearly 1,100 swap stations on highways.
Li forecast that new-energy vehicle traffic on expressways would reach 17.8 million trips on October 1, about 1.8 times a normal day. In national terms, the energy involved is small.
China used an average of 28.4 billion kWh of electricity a day in 2025, based on the agency’s annual total, which puts October 1’s expressway charging at about 0.1% of a typical day’s consumption.
The strain falls on individual service areas and their grid connections at peak hours.
China had 24.22 million charging connectors of all kinds at the end of August, up 39.6% on the year, of which 5.16 million were public.
A government plan issued in August targets more than 40 million by 2030, including about 300,000 high-power units.
