A Large-Scale Empirical Analysis of Electric Vehicle Us-age and Charging: Operational Demands and Infrastructure Implications

Abstract As global electric vehicle (EV) adoption accelerates, granular analysis of empirical usage andcharging patterns remains scarce. This study presents a unique large-scale empirical exam-ination of 1.6 million EVs, including a broad array of vehicle types—private, taxi, rental,official, bus, and special purpose vehicle—across seven major Chinese cities with over 854million observations of driving and charging events. Our findings illuminate significant het-erogeneity in EV usage, battery energy, and charging behaviour across vehicle types withnotable city differences. Day-time high-power charging presents high loads on the electric-ity grid across all vehicle types, particularly from service-oriented vehicles, including taxis,rental cars, and buses. The maximum loads also are the highest in the center of the cities. Ourstudy of large-scale EV usage offers critical insights for developing charging infrastructure,managing energy grids, and providing flexibility services, which are pivotal to the evolutionof future transport ecosystems.