China has long been a frontrunner in the electric vehicle market. With China accounting for nearly two-thirds of global electric car sales in 2024, according to the International Energy Agency, EVs are ubiquitous. Yet the country’s government, corporate, and academic ecosystems are continuing to invest in the technology to increase adoption even further with new innovations.
Charging technology that gets faster and more efficient will further reduce China’s energy dependence on fossil fuels and instead make use of electricity generated from diverse sources, especially renewable energies, says Professor Xie of Shanghai’s Tongji University.
Xie, who leads his university’s Transport and Energy Systems Laboratory, has developed cutting-edge solutions to make electric vehicles used for commuting and business operations more efficient. These range from algorithms that optimize electric truck charging in long-haul shipping tasks to pricing instruments for managing charging and discharging EVs from and to electric grids. He recently spoke with Frank Fang, a principal in Oliver Wyman’s Transportation and Advanced Industrials practice, about his innovations in electrifying China’s road transportation systems.
China is one of the world’s EV leaders. Where does its market go from here?
China will be the largest EV market for the foreseeable future. China understands that EV development and adoption will allow its automotive industry to catch up to its Western counterparts in terms of the advanced technologies they offer. EV initiatives also will also help China end its reliance on fossil fuels and enhance its national energy security.
Creating more efficient electric grids is one way for China to strengthen its energy independence. My lab developed an algorithm for optimizing the vehicle-to-grid process (a process in which electricity from an EV is given back to the energy grid) for EVs that factors in traffic flows and how EV drivers behave.
What’s your view on future trends for EVs?
I think there will be more investment in faster charging technologies.
My personal experience with these chargers is that, at least in major cities, the availability is quite sufficient for ordinary drivers. The only concern is that occasionally the charging demand is very high. For example, a large number of EV drivers travel between cities and towns that are far apart from each other during the Spring Festival period. Many EV drivers cannot find enough chargers during their trips back home.
That said, I would expect the penetration rate of EVs will continuously climb, reaching a higher level in the next five to 10 years. The penetration rates of EVs in the consumer market reached around 50% last year in China. One of the important factors to this success is the wider installation of charging infrastructure. An encouraging signal arising from the market is that now the EV purchase demand is largely driven by the competitiveness of the latest EV models and technologies instead of government subsidies.
Can battery swapping reduce the emphasis on charging infrastructure investment?
This is a controversial topic. In the early days of EV development, the battery swapping techniques had more apparent advantages because the swapping time is much shorter than the charging time. Now, charging technologies are well developed. In five years or so, we’ll probably be able to charge a vehicle in 10 minutes.
The advantage of battery swapping is not that obvious to consumers, and I think most people won’t find spending 10 minutes charging their vehicles too inconvenient. If consumers were to drive an EV with a swapped battery, some might wonder whether a new or old battery had been inserted into their car. Battery charging offers a less complicated process in that way. Also, the cost of building a new charging station is much less than the cost of building a new battery swapping station.
However, there’s no opportunity better for battery swapping than in the commercial vehicle market, where operational time is very important for electric taxis or logistics vehicles. Battery swapping may save time for those businesses.
What about the transition to electric commercial vehicles, like trucks and buses? How do you view that penetration rate in the future?
We need different charging infrastructure and solutions for commercial vehicles before many can become electrified. My lab developed a series of integrated routing-and-charging decision algorithms for electric trucks in long-haul trips. This enables them to consider the limited driving range of an electric truck and different electricity prices at different charging stations, and it tells a truck driver which route to take, which station to stop at, and how much electricity should be charged at each stopped station.
As for buses, they benefit a lot from electrification, especially when electricity is generated from renewable energy sources such as solar. We chose six cities in China – Shanghai, Guangzhou, Wuhan, Shenyang, Xining, and Kunming, which have very different sunlight and climate situations – to test a solution from my lab for optimizing e-bus charging. The core technology is an algorithm for e-bus fleets to schedule charging via photovoltaic-storage-charging stations, which tells in a daily manner when, where, and how much electricity any bus should be charged. It also can determine when and how much solar power should be stored into each at-station battery and be uploaded into the electricity grid.
As a professor, you’re training the next generation of auto and transport industry workers at a time of incredible technological change. How are you preparing them?
We not only provide the traditional transportation planning and engineering courses but encourage our students to take interdisciplinary courses. These can range from business and operations management courses to advanced mathematics and artificial intelligence classes.
New commercial problems are challenging us in ways we’ve never encountered before. It requires creative ideas to provide new solutions. That applies even to professionals like myself.
My undergraduate and graduate backgrounds are in civil, transportation, and systems engineering. But now I'm learning a lot about electrical engineering because I want to know how the energy grids work and how to use them given the growing market of smart grids.
Professionals, researchers, and students must all learn new things to combine and fuse knowledge from our different backgrounds to create new solutions.