Five-Hour Waits and a Queue Ticket Numbered 99: China's EV Fleet Meets the Holiday Crush
As roughly 300 million people took to China's roads for the National Day break, the country's booming electric-vehicle fleet ran into its annual stress test: highway service areas where drivers queue for chargers, in one widely shared phrase, 'like lining up at a canteen window.' The emblematic case: a driver holding ticket No. 99 and waiting more than five hours, while a car that ran down to 1 percent sat stranded a few steps from the plugs it never reached.
高速服务区新能源车充电像排队打饭 — 'charging at the highway service area like queuing for the canteen' — is the phrase that captured the first two days of the Golden Week for China's electric-car owners. Qilu Evening News' round-up of the worst bottlenecks was liked more than 1,700 times, and the cases it collected have the texture of shared misfortune: at the Dazhou North service area on the G65 Baomao expressway, a car that ran its battery down to 1 percent coasted to a stop — in the slang, it 'squatted by the road' (趴窝) — and had to be pushed the last few meters, where it joined a queue of dozens rather than jump it.
The waits vary wildly by hour and stretch. A Chengdu driver told the paper his 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) trip needed two charging stops, one with a four-and-a-half hour queue and one over an hour; another driver drew ticket number 99 at the Lingjiang service area and waited more than five hours. Past 2 a.m., the same plazas stood empty, and some corridors saw queues of half an hour or none at all — the crunch is concentrated in the daylight peak, when everyone drives.
The arithmetic behind the queue is the story. September's sales, tallied by Yicai, show the fleet still compounding: BYD alone delivered 463,560 new-energy vehicles in the month, Zeekr's deliveries more than doubled year-on-year, and Huawei-affiliated brands added tens of thousands more. Charging stalls, by contrast, are fixed, and the highway network's supply was sized for average days. Three hundred million trips compress a year of demand into a fortnight, and the canteen runs out of trays.
The comments under the trending topic have settled into a folk wisdom of their own. One poster's advice list — plan your stops, never run the battery to empty, bring snacks and stretch your legs, and let cars that finish charging vacate the bay — reads like etiquette for a shared kitchen. Another asked the question the whole topic orbits: chargers have been built for years and sales keep climbing, so is there any fixing this?
For now, the answer is timing. The canteen opens twice a year, at the two golden weeks, and the holiday's scale was known well in advance — the drivers holding ticket No. 99 knew exactly which line they were in.