China’s highway electric vehicle charging volume climbed 51.42 per cent year-on-year to 163 million kilowatt-hours during the week-long National Day holiday, official energy data showed on Thursday.

Drivers logged 6.711 million charging sessions between October 1 and October 7 across 62,700 monitored highway charging points. That averaged 23.26 million kilowatt-hours a day.

Demand peaked on October 1 at 28.05 million kilowatt-hours, up 60.40 per cent from the same day last year to set an all-time holiday record. Over the first three days, vehicles consumed 71.62 million kilowatt-hours across 2.968 million sessions. That worked out to 989,500 plug-in events each day.

Road trips accounted for more than 90 per cent of all passenger travel during the holiday, driven by toll-free highway access for private passenger cars. Average daily travel volume for battery-powered cars reached roughly 1.6 times normal operating levels of 9.8 million daily trips.

During the eight-day combined National Day and Mid-Autumn holiday in 2025, charging volume totaled 123 million kilowatt-hours, an average of 15.36 million a day. The National Energy Administration tracked 48,400 operational highway points during that period. The network added 14,300 monitored points over the following twelve months.

Grid managers prepared by deploying mobile emergency chargers and requiring pre-holiday hardware maintenance across intercity corridors. Highway authorities also routed charging traffic into dedicated lanes to clear standard rest-stop parking bays.

Fleet expansion is driving the surge. 92 percentage points from a year earlier. 42 per cent of all new passenger car registrations.

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