The Volkswagen Bus is a famous old van that many people remember for being fun and useful. The podcast mentioned it when talking about new battery technology, because Volkswagen is working on making this classic van more modern and electric.
The electric vehicle market means all the cars that run on electricity instead of gas. China has the biggest number of these electric cars in the world.
The Dodge Charger is a strong and fast car that many people like because it looks cool and can go very fast. In the podcast, it was mentioned when talking about getting the most power from charging, like using two chargers at once to fill up quickly.
This means saving electricity when not many people are using it and then using that saved power when lots of people need it, so the power system works better.
AC grid power is the type of electricity that comes from power plants and is sent to buildings and chargers. It changes direction many times per second.
Term
DC
DC means electricity that flows straight in one direction, which is what batteries use to store power.
Plug-in hybrids are cars that use both gas and electricity. You can charge their batteries by plugging them in, and they can drive some distance on just electricity.
AC charging means your electric car is charged using the kind of electricity that comes from normal outlets, which is slower than special fast chargers.
New car registrations mean how many brand new cars are signed up to be driven on the road in a certain place and time. It helps people understand how many new cars are being sold.
The Mercedes-Benz S-Class is a very fancy and comfortable car that is known for being smooth and full of smart features. In the podcast, they talked about a special version that could drive through tough places like water and sand, showing how strong and capable it is.
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Welcome back to EV News, China.
Today, BYD's 1,500 kilowatt DC fast charges,
solid-state batteries for Chang'an,
and Volkswagen buys X-Pung's Brain.
Plus, stay tuned, I'll tell you why.
If you're an automotive blogger in China,
you better bring some hard evidence if you're making claims,
or you better bring your checkbook.
Another case has gone to court.
I'll fill you in.
Welcome to EV News, China,
the podcast dedicated to the world's largest electric vehicle market.
Every day, I bring you the latest headlines,
insights and analysis right from the heart of China's booming EV industry.
And I pick apart and decode how these fast-moving developments
in the East shaped the global landscape.
BYD has started rolling out its megawatt flash charging piles at scale.
According to multiple industry sources,
the company pitches their bright turquoise,
T-shaped dispenser as the world's first mass-produced,
And I do have to thank AI, Artificial Intelligence,
for helping me out with this,
because a bunch of social media posts on Chinese social media,
this went on to Weibo, and a lot of captions were in Mandarin.
And it's great, you just copy the picture,
put it into AI, say, what does this say in English, please?
And it helps me understand what I'm looking at.
Two cables hang off either end of the T-shaped pulley system.
So if you can imagine, it's got a central column,
and then a bar across the top, which is, I don't know,
maybe three meters high or something,
but well above head level.
Two cables hang either side.
Liquid cooling runs through the cables and through the unit.
BYD uses a dual gun setup.
Each cable can charge on its own, just fine.
Or if you want maximum power,
each pair of cables can run in tandem.
Use both, and you get the maximum charger output.
BYD launched the megawatt flash charges in May 2025
on their Super E platform.
The headline specs at the time,
thousand volt, thousand amp, therefore,
multiplier, thousand kilowatt.
It's megawatt charging.
It would peak at 1,360 kilowatts.
BYD claims a charge rate of two kilometers a second.
That's 1.2 miles a second, or 400 kilometers,
or 250 miles in five minutes of charging.
Yet the grid cannot hand out megawatts on every street corner.
So BYD's answer pairs the dispenser
with local energy storage for peak shaving and valley filling,
storing off peak power and discharging it
during busy demand spikes.
BYD's grid approach uses a grid connection,
anything from 280 kilowatts,
which obviously is pretty slow compared to how much power
you can output from the charger,
using battery energy storage on site,
and a supercapacitor to supply instant power.
The aim, avoid installing two KVA transformers,
or 2,000 KVA transformers at the site.
A web row post shows the previews of them being installed.
They called them the Gen 2 megawatt flash charges.
The diagram shows three boxes going in the ground, really.
There's the AC grid power converted to DC,
stored in the battery,
discharged at ultra-high speed to the terminal.
Component one is the charging host,
which is the transformer inverter.
Component two, which is the energy storage cabinet,
using its 4C rated battery buffer.
And component three, which is the actual dispenser,
the flash charging terminal.
The label stamp on it says 1,000 volts, 1,500 amps.
Well, that matters.
That would lift the current by 50% over Gen 1,
and the nameplate data points towards bursts of maximum input
being 2,100 kilowatts, an output of 1,500 kilowatts versus Gen 1,
which was 1,360.
So a nice bump.
Gen 1 used a 200 kilowatt hour energy storage,
and that could charge at eight, discharge 800 kilowatts.
These Gen 2 leaked images looks like it's doubled.
So 400 kilowatt hours of local energy storage to buffer the grid.
That's insane.
1,500 kilowatts, 1.5 megawatt on passenger cars.
So what can we get in the West?
Well, Tesla V4, at its absolute peak,
would theoretically top out at 500 kilowatts.
Neo make 640 kilowatt charges.
X-Pung make 800 kilowatt charges.
And Zika has announced 1.2 megawatt stations.
But BYD said it's deployed over 500 of its megawatt class stations
in 200 Chinese cities by the end of last year,
and they're already rolling into Gen 2.
As you can imagine, this is deeply impressive to anyone outside of China
and overseas looking at the innovation,
because this kind of technology is,
well, it's frankly alien technology,
because we don't have the cars that can charge that quickly.
Now, Chang'an has said its solid state battery program is on track.
Chang'an posted the update on its investor interaction platform yesterday, 24th of February.
The project centers on their Golden Shield all solid state battery.
Chang'an targets an energy density for its first all solid state batteries
of 400 watt hours per kilogram.
That's about double what you might have in your average road going car.
It also claims a driving range of 932 miles or 1500 kilometers on an average size battery.
On a single charge, obviously.
On safety, Chang'an says the Golden Shield
improves on the inherent hazards of liquid electrolytes by 70%
using remote diagnostic technology to find any issues before they even escalate.
The timeline matches Chang'an's roadmap from a year ago.
Prototype fitment was to be done by the end of last year.
Yep, vehicle validation early 2026.
Yep, mass production in 2027.
That's what they say.
Chang'an describes the target as landing on roughly the same horizon
as when China will implement its planned national battery standard
and defining the terms around solid state.
Now, X-Pung has signed Volkswagen.
This is its launch customer for its smart driving stack.
It's called VLA 2.0.
Volkswagen will use X-Pung's second generation Vision Language Action VLA platform.
It marks the first time a Chinese EV maker has exported its core driving systems
at scale to a top tier established OEM.
The deal shifts Volkswagen slash X-Pung's tie-up that began three years ago.
What Stathard has joined vehicle development now moves deeper into software and AI.
X-Pung pitches VLA as end-to-end world model based systems that read the physical environment.
It supports near level four capability.
Right, so what's that level three then?
Like it's either level four or it's not.
Like the autonomy levels are not up for debate.
They're quite clearly defined.
Some of the car makers call their level two systems that are really good.
You know, level two plus.
Level two plus plus, according to Mercedes-Benz lately.
However, it's either level three or level four.
But X-Pung say it's nearly level four.
It can handle tight urban streets and camper style roads
without high definition mapping.
And it tunes itself with different driving cultures across global markets.
X-Pung says RoboTaxi is a cleared third-party closed track testing
and now move on to public roads.
The same software will land in customer cars next month in March
with its near level four features available to retail buyers.
The boss of the company, Hursha Peng, roads tested VLA through the Spring Festival
telling staff it now predicts complex road behavior with enough confidence
that the inflection point for full autonomy has arrived.
He called it the deep seek moment for self-driving.
That's a reference to an artificial intelligence Chinese platform called deep seek
that was able to do what the American systems were doing
with much smaller and cheaper models.
And that's how he describes it.
All right, let's move on.
China's average selling price for EVs rose in January by $295,001.
That's $28,200 for the average EV in China last month.
That's up $5,100 from the same month last year.
Power chains split the market by price.
E-Revs extended range electric vehicles
and plug-in hybrids posted the highest average selling prices.
Pure battery electric models with the lower priced electric option on average,
even as battery electric vehicles still posted very strong retail volumes.
China's pickup market has started the year with a bit more volume and a bigger tilt overseas.
January sales reached 49,000 units up 22% year on year.
Another January tally, not the CPCA, but it had 48,920.
So those numbers pretty much match the highest January in five years.
Production was 52,000 slightly above deliveries.
Exports were over half of total pickup sales last month.
And Great Wall Motor leads on pickup exports.
It also held close to 50% share of the domestic market in Chinese pickups.
SAIC, Maxus, Chang'an and JAC are closing the gap on Great Wall.
Now, what do you do if you want to fill a car park with EV charges
during the transition when we have a mix of cars on the road?
Well, you could put an AC charger into every parking spot in a multi-storey car park.
That's expensive.
Well, Chinese parking garages are now starting to deploy overhead charges.
But these are overhead charges that run on rails.
In fact, they're rail mounted robots effectively.
These are compact units which run along ceiling tracks.
The best way I can describe this is, you know, like those lighting systems
that you sometimes get in commercial offices and things.
It might be like track lighting.
I think we had it in our old house as well.
Kind of a 90s thing or maybe it was a 90s thing in homes
where you could move the lights along the track.
Maybe it's still common in some parts of the world,
but I don't really have it here anymore in homes.
It was a thing for a time.
I see it a lot in offices like that.
But the actual chargers move themselves on the tracks
above the parking spaces automatically.
So they turn each parking bay, thousands of parking bays in a multi-storey car park,
into a charge point.
The track doubles as the power.
So the track that the units run on is the power conduit and the rail itself.
So a single overhead rail serves an entire row of cars from one connection.
And then you have multiple rows for how many rows in the car park.
A social media video from an underground garage shows it in action,
a small robotic unit traveling along the ceiling and descending
with a connection to a car parked underneath.
Drivers trigger charging via the WeChat mini program or a QR code scan.
This is really clever parking.
I was in a car park recently that has an overhead scanner for each space.
And so you would cruise along the edge of the car park as it were.
And it would say three parking spaces on the next turning.
And then as you go down that lane, there's little green lights pointing to where there's
empty spaces, which does kind of save you cruising around a car park for a long time
looking for a space.
And I thought that was clever technology, but it's nothing compared to this.
Wow.
Overhead robots offer winds as well because they don't take up floor space,
which in a tight car park is a really big issue.
It avoids conflicts with pedestrians or moving vehicles.
The ceiling track avoids ground navigation problems.
No one's ever going to drive into one of these by accident.
The charger to the car solution rather than the car to charger solution is very innovative.
Of course, it's level two.
It's AC.
It's not DC fast charging.
But if your car is parked up for a few hours, well, then it should be slow charging.
Now, we'll take a quick break.
We'll come back.
We'll talk about China doing well in the European Union and Leo so as well.
Stick around back in a mo.
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Welcome back to the podcast.
European Union new car registrations last month in January fell by 4%.
According to the Carmakers Association yesterday.
But Chinese brands made up some of the losses.
Chinese brands sold 70,465 vehicles in January in the European Union.
That's up 80% year on year according to data force.
A market share rose from 4% a year ago to 7.4% last month.
BYD led the charge.
It registered almost 14,000 vehicles in the EU.
That was up 175%.
If you include the UK, and where we do have a fair bit of BYDs here,
and the EFTA countries, that figure from 14,000 rises to over 18,000.
SAIC held 2% of the EU market, including the UK and EFTA countries.
Of course, we are big on MG here.
Then they sold just shy of 20,000 units.
Li Auto has joined the China Chamber of Commerce to the EU as a full member.
And will sit on the Chamber's automotive working group.
It's based in Brussels, representing more than 1,000 Chinese funded firms,
acting as a lobbying and information bridge between Beijing and Brussels.
For Li Auto, the membership offers a direct line to policy debates
on trade strategy and regulation.
It also offers early warnings on trade actions, tariffs or subsidy probes,
and a forum to coordinate responses with its other Chinese automakers.
That matters because Brussels is tightening scrutiny of Chinese EV makers.
The move fits Li Auto's recent sequence of selling overseas.
Its first R&D entity was set up in 2024, and a German R&D centre in early 2025,
now adding this membership.
It will be the official year of overseas markets.
Now, let's talk finally about this story.
If you're going to be a Chinese automotive influencer, or content creator, or blogger,
or vlogger, you have to get your facts straight.
You've got to get your ducks in a row.
MyExtro is the luxury EV brand, formed by Huawei and JAC.
If you haven't seen MyExtro, I'll try and describe it for you.
Think about a Mercedes-Benz MyBack.
The kind of Mercedes-Benz cars that are dual-coloured, like two-tone,
where the bonnet and the roof are a different colour.
You can picture a MyBack in your head, I'm sure.
It's won a defamation lawsuit against a Chinese content creator.
The court ordered them to pay US$300,000 in compensation and issue an apology for good measure.
Well, the row started last year.
After MyExtro posted a viral video of its S800 sedan,
crab-walking and driving through water-filled and sand-filled potholes alongside an S-Class.
In the clips, the S800 passed through both surfaces relatively cleanly,
while the Mercedes-Benz S-Class was displacing the substances in its path.
Obviously, MyExtro was showing off its fancy suspension
and saying that if you're sitting inside the car, you'd never know you're driving over potholes,
but the Chinese content creator responded with a video claiming the tests were staged.
And they flattered the S800 chassis.
He alleged tactics were standard practice across the Huawei brands.
MyExtro demanded an apology.
He answered with a second video that mocked Huawei's marketing.
Well, JAC then sued him in May 2025.
They were seeking a million yuan.
That's 140,000 US dollars.
He countersued for 2.5 million.
Well, yesterday, on February 24th, a Chinese court issued its first instance judgment,
ruling the content creator's claims were indeed fabricated
that the car company had done nothing wrong, damaged their reputation,
did require an apology, and, by the way, would like a 300,000 yuan or 43,000 US dollar equivalent
compensation payment.
Ouch!
The case sits in a wider clampdown on defamation on the internet.
In November last year, this same content creator appeared on a list of automotive bloggers
who defame automakers in return for getting clicks and engagement and traffic on social media.
Courts have ordered these bloggers to pay up to 2 million yuan.
That's 280,000 US dollars.
In cases bought by the likes of BYD, Great Wall, and Expung.
And in ruling last month in January, ordered a 2 million yuan penalty for a blogger
who fabricated fuel consumption claims about a BYD denser.
Well, for now, my extra is busy building the commercial image of the S800.
Delivery started last year.
The car cost over 100 grand, 700,000 yuan, that's about 100,000 US dollars, and upwards.
And they've already sold 14,000 plus of them.
It topped China's luxury sedan sales charts last month.
For now, the message to China's car bloggers is simple.
Either tell the truth and bring hard evidence or bring your checkbook.
And that's CV News China for today.
See you tomorrow.
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About this episode
China is pushing the boundaries of EV technology with BYD rolling out 1,500 kW megawatt-class fast chargers paired with local energy storage to manage grid demand. Chang'an is advancing solid-state battery development, targeting 400 Wh/kg energy density and 932-mile range, aiming for mass production by 2027. Volkswagen has become the launch customer for Xpeng’s advanced near-level 4 autonomous driving system, marking a significant tech export from China. The episode also covers rising EV prices in China, growing pickup exports, and innovative overhead rail-mounted EV chargers in parking garages, highlighting China’s rapid innovation in EV infrastructure and technology.
