Electric vehicles have three treasures, energy saving, subsidies, and license plates. In today's policy and car companies are pushing new energy vehicles, electric vehicles have undoubtedly become the choice of many car buyers. Since the earliest introduction of the new energy vehicle subsidy policy in 2013, the dividends brought by subsidies have also stimulated the rapid growth of the new energy vehicle market, and the output of new energy vehicles has also increased by more than ten times between 2013 (17,500 units) and 2020 (235,000 vehicles), all of which seem to be steadily advancing in the general direction.
However, with the increasingly large number of new energy vehicles, the problem of car use derived from them has become more and more severe, for example, in this year's National Day holiday, the difficulty of charging has become a major pain point for many electric vehicle owners when traveling. During this year's National Day, an electric vehicle owner who returned to Hunan from Shenzhen said that because of the insufficient charging resources in the service area, it took 5 hours to charge the vehicle, and the original 8-hour drive was extended to 16 hours.
But the opposite of the charging problem is not the shortage of charging piles. According to the latest data released by the Charging Alliance, as of August 2021, the cumulative number of charging infrastructure in the country was 2.105 million units, an increase of 52.3% year-on-year, and the ratio of vehicle piles was 3:1, and the ratio of vehicle piles is currently the highest in the world. It is not difficult to see from the data that the ratio of 3:1 charging piles is completely sufficient to meet the continuous energy demand of domestic new energy models. But why is it that under this popularity, there is still a problem of charging difficulties?
As many fuel vehicles and electric vehicle owners argue about the issue of endurance, the core of the problem of electric vehicle charging difficulties is actually not only the number of charging facilities, but also the charging technology. As fuel owners say, even in the peak of travel, when there are more vehicles in the gas station, it only takes half an hour from queuing to refueling. The electric car needs not only to wait in line for an idle charging pile, but also to spend time waiting for charging, which will consume a lot of time.
It is true that from the perspective of laying layout, the current number of charging piles in the high-speed service area is indeed difficult to meet the sudden increase in charging demand. But starting from reality, can further expanding the number of charging piles solve the current problem of charging difficulties? Obviously not, the first aspect is that in the face of the continuous expansion of the new energy vehicle market, increasing the number of charging piles can only be said to be a bottomless pit, because charging piles are not like gas stations, that is, adding and leaving, charging is a process, increasing charging piles to a certain extent only reduces the queuing time of electric vehicle owners, and the core problem of charging is the time cost of waiting for charging.
The second aspect is that the current charging pile market construction still comes from a third party, and it is necessary to achieve equipment laying through market investment. However, the charging pile itself is a market with a relatively long payback period and a lack of traffic realization at present. And more importantly, the high-speed service area is not like the ordinary urban area, the use rate of charging piles is far less stable than the city, if it is only to cope with the travel peak brought about by the three long holidays a year and increase the number of charging piles in a large number, this practice is extremely uneconomic.
Because increasing the number of charging piles not only brings construction costs and maintenance costs, but also has another problem is the off-peak travel time, these increased charging piles are undoubtedly another kind of waste of resources, so in the long run, increasing the number of charging piles is only a slow-off strategy to solve the charging difficulties of new energy vehicles at present.
From the demand level, the fastest way to solve the problem of charging is undoubtedly to increase the number of charging piles, so Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong and other places have announced the promotion plan of charging and replacing infrastructure. Beijing plans to build no less than 50,000 new electric vehicle charging piles and about 100 substations by 2022; Shanghai plans to build 200,000 new charging piles by the end of 2025; Guangdong plans to build about 180,000 charging piles in the province by 2022; and Hunan plans to have more than 400,000 charging facilities by 2025.
As mentioned above, to expand the distribution of charging piles to alleviate the problem of charging difficulties, in the long run, it is only a delay, the core is still in the optimization and unification of charging technology. Because for now, we can indeed see that many companies have made contributions to optimizing charging methods, such as Weilai's power exchange technology and GAC New Energy's super fast-charging battery.
But from the current environment, these advanced electric vehicle technologies are more like signboards for their own battles, which also means that these technologies are currently limited to the models of the corresponding brands, so the problem is also coming, the market layout of charging piles with third parties as the core, at best, meets the basic slow charging and fast charging facilities, which also means that these facilities lack the conditions to cope with advanced technologies, and these high-speed development of new energy technologies can only stay in a state of isolation. Therefore, if you want to break through the problem of charging difficulties, you must not be able to bypass the unification, and the progress of the unified level is the key to truly solving the charging difficulties.
In fact, both car companies and consumers want to unify charging and battery technology and achieve progress together, which can not only maximize the applicability of new energy technology, but also the most effective solution to solve the problem of charging difficulties. But of course, even now, there is still considerable room for development of new energy technology, and charging solutions are constantly optimizing and improving.
It is precisely because of this that many dedicated car companies are now sharing technology and striving to promote the development of the entire new energy automobile industry. For example, BYD's blade battery and GAC New Energy's magazine battery are open to sharing to the entire new energy vehicle industry to promote the popularity of blade batteries and benefit the industry and consumers, and the concept of this technology sharing is also the core of solving the problem of charging difficulties.
It is true that new energy vehicles, as the core direction of today's automotive industry, do have a visible development speed. However, from a practical point of view, new energy vehicles are still in the development stage, whether it is technology or market supporting need to be further improved, so the derived problems are naturally more obvious, such as the problem of charging is the new energy automobile industry has been trying to overcome the difficulty. However, from the current action of car companies, with the sharing of technology and the multi-party cooperation of various car companies, it is believed that the problem of electric vehicle charging difficulties will be well solved in the near future.
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