If the question is how to prevent electric car loaders from collapse in summer, China has an idea: rolling plugs

The end of March 2024. Spain returns from Holy Week, one of the most mobility festivities in the country, and the images begin to run through mobile phones: Collapsed Tesla chargers. They are not many but enough for their users to have to wait for hours to fill their batteries.

The images leave us two readings. The first is what We explain in Xatakathe images are without any doubt the reflection of the lack of confidence in other service stations other than Tesla. The second reading is more worrying for those who want to jump into an electric car: in Spain around 5% of electric cars were being purchased in 2024. And, despite everything, the service stations (no matter how much they were) They collapsed.

It is logical that the agnostics of the electric car and also those who value make the leap in their next purchase ask themselves: what happens in a country like China? Over there, In 2024 11 million cars were sold completely electric. The figures are so overwhelming that, without a doubt, it is a challenge for load infrastructure when vacations arrive.

But also a mirror where to look at the future.

Its solution this year has been to put rolling points.

Wheels plugs

The first days of May, China celebrates as a good part of the world worker. However, over the years, the Chinese government has been expanding this holiday that now occupies the first five days of the month and, therefore, has become one of the most important rest periods in the country and one of the great moments to travel.

As It happens in Spain during Holy Weekin China the feast of the first days of the year accumulates congestion and long jams On the road. With the largest electric car park in the world, this can be a problem on roads such as the one that unites Beijing and Shanghai, separated by more than 1,300 kilometers.

One of the usual fears before the electric car is that if we do not manage to reduce the load times, little by little the service stations will be saturated and the 20-30 minutes of recharge can be transformed in hours as a result of a sustained jam to be able to operate in the plugs.

To avoid this, this year a first test has been launched with what has been described as “plug -in aircraft carriers.” That is, trucks with huge batteries already loaded that serve as plugs to several vehicles at the same time. In the Chinese media They explain that they can serve a total of eight cars at the same time and even nurture a maximum of 100 cars per truck.

The system has allowed multiplying the options that drivers had available during the Chinese New Year. They estimate that the available plugs grew by 80% on the highway between Beijing and Shanghai and that for this 238 auxiliary trucks were deployed in the 49 most busy service areas. In addition, another 246 temporary load stations were built to relieve the demand for electricity. The system was managed by the provincial Jiangsu Department of Transportation and the company Jiangsu Dlala New Energy Technology Co.

Click on the image to go to the original tweet

Once the truck empties all its batteries, it moves to a station where Recover energy through solar panels and load the batteries again. With yours already loaded it can move where more demand for electricity is required. In total, each truck has 3,600 kWh of energy.

That is, with the calculations above, each car can load a maximum of 36 kWh of electricity. That, in an electric car with a road consumption of 20 kWh/100 km is about 180 kilometers of autonomy. Despite this, we must understand that in China the extended range. Cars that, In the background, they are plug -in hybrids and whose batteries move in that range of about 40 kWh capacity, so they could not fill the batteries more.

The use of these rolling plugs is not new in China but they are generally used to get hurry to those who have not been able to reach a load point and have run out of electricity before or as auxiliary but very punctual support when a station has been filled. The power of these loaders mounted on trucks is, however, 20 times greater than the Rolling plugs of brands like Wulingdesigned for an emergency.

That of this brand, for example, has a battery inside that allows you to contribute up to 141 kWh of electricity. This means that it can fill between 1.5 and 3 electric cars batteries, depending on their size. Catl is also investing In the development of this systems although, again, these are auxiliary and smaller services.

Photo | Byd and @drivegreen80167

In Xataka | If the question is how we are going to load thousands of electric cars on the street, Portugal believes to have the answer: street lamps