EVwire brief: A herd of wild Asian elephants walked into an EV charging station in Pu'er, Yunnan in China, and after one of the calves got its leg stuck on a cable, a large elephant went and charged one of the chargers, tipping it over completely.
Luckily, there were maintenance electricians on site right as it happened, and they cut the electricity supply to avoid any danger to the animals. Watch the video here:
The herd stayed around half an hour before moving on. A charging gun cable was wrecked, and the operator's first estimate of the damage came to about 20,000 yuan (~2,800).
Sadly nobody seems to have discussed how to use better cable management to not trap the users’ feet to the cables in the first place…
Context:
The station sits at Nanbanghe village in Liushun township, part of Simao district on the edge of Pu'er city.
Video was originally shared by @shanghaidaily, and hat tip to our friend Syed at @etechvolution for sharing it to our circles!
A maintenance electrician surnamed Pan was on site with colleagues when they showed up. The crew got into a vehicle, killed the lights, and cut the three-phase supply. That last bit was the smart call.
Speaking to Chinese media, Pan reckoned the adults weigh at least a tonne each, with the calves at 600 to 700 kg (translated by us from Chinese).
This wasn’t totally out of the blue
This was not a random parking lot that happened to get unlucky. The site sits inside a wild Asian elephant migration corridor, with monitoring towers and supplementary feeding plots nearby. Elephants walking through is the normal state of affairs.
China's wild Asian elephants live almost entirely in Yunnan, concentrated in Xishuangbanna and Pu'er. The population is now close to 400, up from about 150 in the 1980s, according to a Xinhua Institute report published on 16 July.
At the same time the province is filling up with charging hardware.
China ended June with 23.06 million charging facilities in total and more than 5 million public ones, up 43.2% year on year, per the National Energy Administration.
As for the bill, the operator carries liability insurance and the insurer is expected to cover the loss. Yunnan has run a wild-animal-damage public liability insurance scheme with provincial subsidy since 2010, and added provincial compensation measures for wildlife damage in 2025. The local township government said it was still verifying the 20,000-yuan figure.
Charging networks have spent a decade worrying about ICEing, cable theft and vandalism. In places like Pu'er, you can add one more edge case to the risk register.
Sources: Shanghai Daily; Sing Tao Headline; MyDrivers; Sina Finance; Xinhua; National Energy Administration
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