During China's National Day holiday, the service areas along the G7 Jingxin Expressway - a 2,540 km corridor from Beijing to Urumqi that crosses the Ulan Buh and Tengger deserts - looked different from previous years. Travellers were hanging quilts over railings to air them out, and drivers were folding down rear seats to nap with the windows cracked. Battery-electric long-distance travel, according to Chinese outlet D1EV, has moved from a niche experiment to an everyday behaviour.
D1EV's reporter drove a battery-electric SUV (BEV) along the route over the holiday and found the charging queues dominated by mainstream family cars - the Xiaomi SU7, Tesla Model Y, Nio ES6, Denza D9 and several Li Auto and Aito models - rather than modified off-roaders. The same trip also highlighted what the reporter calls the real benefit of the BEV platform: parking overnight with the climate control running. At sub-zero desert temperatures, one night of heating consumed roughly 10-15% of the battery - a routine act that would be impractical in a petrol car, where idling risks carbon build-up and exhaust fumes.
That reality check sits awkwardly against the "mobile home" spectacle of recent launch events. At the April launch of the Onvo L80, Nio chief executive William Li pulled open the rear door and lay down on a three-section folding mattress with president Qin Lihong, then put on an apron and chopped carrots in the 240-litre front trunk. The L80 starts at 245,800 yuan (about $34,600), a Chinese guide price before taxes and incentives. Other examples D1EV cites: the Voyah Zhuiguang S's drainable 80-litre frunk pitched for wet swimwear and muddy shoes, the Fangchengbao Titan 3's 151-litre powered frunk and -6°C to 50°C cooler, and the Leapmotor C16's one-touch fold-flat rear bed.
What drivers actually use
After several nights sleeping in the car, D1EV's verdict is that the launch-stage stars are largely props. The fold-flat rear bed is a genuine need - a midday nap in a service area with the air conditioning running is the BEV platform's biggest advantage. A small table is also used constantly, for children's homework, meals while charging and work emails. Vehicle-to-load (V2L) power export is useful when camping, but rarely on a long-distance route.
The fridge, however, mostly held two bottles of water - a cold drink from a service-area shop costs 3 yuan, and no one would wait an extra night of charging for it. The frunk became an extra storage bin for charging cables and backpacks; in the entire G7 trip, D1EV's reporter never saw anyone actually load a fish or wet swimsuit into one. Roof-mounted bikes and integrated kitchen kits are conversation pieces at rest stops, but drivers in a hurry just want to charge and go.
Demand is surging, supply is straining
The macro data backs the anecdote. According to the National Energy Administration, over the seven-day holiday the 62,700 highway fast-charging guns on the national monitoring platform delivered 163 million kWh across 6.71 million charging sessions, with daily volume up 51.42% year on year. October 1 set a single-day holiday record of 28.05 million kWh, up more than 60% from the same day last year - and the total already exceeds the 6.02 million sessions recorded over the 2026 Spring Festival holiday.
Ministry of Transport figures show new-energy vehicles averaged 16.4 million highway trips per day during the holiday, up 32.7%, peaking near 17.8 million on day one - about 27% of all highway traffic. Yet the roughly 85,400 charging guns built in highway service areas still leave a vehicle-to-charger ratio above 500:1. The strain showed: at one Hubei service area nearly 200 cars queued simultaneously, with waits over five hours, and a BEV with 1% charge had to be pushed to a charger in Sichuan. State Grid deployed 435 emergency charging guns to the worst-affected sites.
The conclusion, D1EV argues, is that the demand side has outgrown the charging network, while the supply side's attention is split between solving that bottleneck and choreographing launch-event theatre. The quilt-airing and bed-napping on the G7 depended not on gimmicks but on three fundamentals of the electric platform: cheap stationary energy, no-idle climate control and flat-floor packaging.
