XPeng showed journalists a battery-backed charging station rated at 1,040 kilowatts of peak output at a media workshop in Munich on July 16, hours before the global launch of its L03 sport utility vehicle.
The unit draws on stored energy to deliver megawatt-class charging at sites where the local grid cannot supply that power, according to a company slide reviewed by EV.
Rival BYD brought the same architecture to Europe three months earlier at a higher rating, showing a 1,500-kilowatt charger with on-site storage in Paris on April 8.
XPeng did not disclose the storage capacity of the station, its price, or how many units it plans to install.
Founder and chief executive He Xiaopeng named the platform X Energy on stage at the L03 launch later the same day, describing it as the basis for Europe’s fastest charging network.
Slide details
The slide carried the heading “Energy Storage & Charging Station” and set out three figures.
Peak output was given as 1,040 kilowatts under the label “Megawatt Flash Charging.”
Round-trip efficiency, abbreviated on the slide as RTE, was stated at 91.5%, implying 8.5% of the energy cycled through the battery is lost before reaching a vehicle.
Grid input compatibility was listed at 120 kilowatts to 240 kilowatts, between an eighth and a quarter of the station’s peak output.
A render on the same slide showed a two-door cabinet marked “XPENG CHARGING STATION” beside a canopied forecourt.
Weak grid connections have slowed high-power charger deployment across much of Europe, and both XPeng and BYDhave said storage lets operators avoid waiting for network upgrades.
Europe rollout
XPeng plans more than 4,000 ultra-fast charging stations across Europe by 2028.
More than 1,000 of those will be self-operated sites across 13 European countries, which reported that the megawatt charging and energy-storage stations are also set to enter the region.
Company materials put the current self-operated network above 3,000 stations in China, alongside access to more than 2.62 million integrated charging points worldwide.
The platform combines ultra-fast charging with storage and monitoring driven by artificial intelligence.
Also at the Munich event was the European debut of the Iron humanoid robot and the Aeroht flying car, as EV reported from the launch.
BYD lead
BYD launched a first-generation megawatt system in March 2025, pairing 1,000 volts and 1,000 amps for 1,000 kilowatts, and said some of the more than 4,000 planned Chinese sites would carry battery storage.
A second generation followed at a Shenzhen launch last March, raising peak output 50.0% to 1,500 kilowatts at 1,500 amps through a single gun.
Each stall carries two guns and an ultra-fast discharging storage system, and each gun is rated to serve 50 vehicles a day, according to the same reports.
BYD said in its own announcement that the paired storage system bypasses grid capacity limits without overstressing the local network.
European deployment began at the Palais Garnier in Paris on April 8, where the charger was shown alongside the DenzaZ9GT.
BYD has committed to 6,000 flash-charging stations outside China within twelve months, of which 3,000 are earmarked for Europe.
Chinese installations reached 4,239 by March 5, passed 5,000 on April 1 and exceeded 6,100 by late May, against a target of 20,000 by year-end.
Vehicles on the platform charge from 10% to 70% in five minutes and 10% to 97% in nine minutes at room temperature, BYD said.
Specification gap
Peak output on the XPeng cabinet is 69.3% of the 1,500 kilowatts a single BYD gun is rated to deliver.
Grid input on the Munich slide, at 120 kilowatts to 240 kilowatts, sits within a range charging operator Eleport reports for the rival hardware of 60 to 560 kilovolt-amperes, with 200 recommended.
Eleport describes a standard BYD configuration of two 190 kilowatt-hour units for 380 kilowatt-hours per site, built on Blade 2.0 cells rated for 10C charge and discharge.
That figure rests on a single source and has not been confirmed by the manufacturer.
No kilowatt-hour figure appears on the XPeng slide, which discloses power alone.
Neither company has published a round-trip efficiency figure other than the 91.5% shown in Munich.
Storage market
Tesla built the same architecture at larger scale more than a year earlier at its Lost Hills site in California, pairing 11 megawatts of solar across 30 acres with ten Megapacks totalling 39 megawatt-hours to serve 168 stalls on a grid connection of about 1.5 megawatts.
In the second quarter of 2026, Tesla deployed 13.5 gigawatt-hours of storage products, its second-largest quarter, taking cumulative deployments past 132 gigawatt-hours since 2016.
Shipments at BYD exceeded 60 gigawatt-hours during 2025, overtaking the 46.7 gigawatt-hours recorded by Tesla to lead global battery storage integrators, according to Benchmark data.
Neither figure has a XPeng equivalent, and the company has not announced a home battery product or a standalone grid-scale storage system.
Peak vehicle-side charging rates have trailed the megawatt threshold elsewhere, with XPeng previously at 800 kilowatts, Nio at 640 kilowatts, Li Auto at 520 kilowatts and Tesla promising 500 kilowatts from V4 Superchargers.
China groundwork
At its 2021 Tech Day, XPeng said its charging arm would introduce in-house storage-charging technology through storage-equipped supercharging stations and mobile storage vehicles.
The 2025 network plan listed exporting ultra-fast charging and piloting storage-charging equipment among its objectives.
XPeng added 150 self-operated stations in November 2025 and reached 2,910 by December 1, against a 2026 target of 10,000 sites including 4,500 liquid-cooled ultra-fast stations.
The liquid-cooled S5 charger delivers 800 kilowatts at up to 800 amps and 1,000 volts.
Chinese coverage of the hardware shown in Munich has described second-life reuse of vehicle battery packs as a core technology, a detail absent from the English-language slide.
Energy storage has featured in XPeng partnership language since January 2025, when its charging arm signed a memorandum of understanding with bp pulse covering solar-powered charging, energy storage, integrated energy networks and demand-side energy management.
European Sales
XPeng registered more than 4,645 vehicles across European markets in June, roughly 61.7% of the month’s sales outside China, according to preliminary data compiled by EV from national registration authorities.
That figure tripled from the 1,509 units recorded a year earlier.
Global deliveries reached 40,126 units in June, the company’s strongest month of 2026, against a full-year target of 550,000 to 600,000 vehicles.
The company sells in 28 European countries and expanded from 30 to 60 markets during 2025, with overseas deliveries of 45,008 vehicles last year.
Assisted-driving software arrives in Europe in early 2027, as EV found during the first ride of VLA 2.0 on European roads, with the Munich centre adapting the stack to regional roads.
The flagship GX opened pre-sales at 399,800 yuan in April after being unveiled in February as a rival to the Nio ES9.
