I’ve had the same conversation with a lot of charging site developers over the past few years. They’ve secured the grid connection, chosen a location with good traffic visibility, signed the lease, and bought hardware from a reputable manufacturer. Six months later, they’re on the phone asking why their Bank Holiday throughput numbers look nothing like the projections.
The answer is almost always the same: the infrastructure was specced for average demand, not peak demand. And in on the go charging, peak demand is the only demand that matters.
En-Route Is a Different Animal
Destination charging is relatively forgiving. A driver who parks at a shopping centre for two hours doesn’t particularly care whether their car charged at 50kW or 22kW — they got what they needed. The operator can smooth demand across a long dwell time, slower chargers are perfectly adequate, and if one unit is out of service there are usually others nearby.
En-route is the opposite of all of this. The driver has stopped at a motorway service area because their battery told them to. They have a destination. They have a schedule. Twenty minutes is a long stop; forty minutes is a frustrating one. And if your charger is the only DC option for the next thirty miles and it’s showing an error screen, that driver is not coming back — and they will tell people about it.
This shapes everything about how en-route charging infrastructure should be designed. Throughput per hour matters more than total installed capacity. Uptime at a remote unmanned site matters more than headline efficiency numbers. And the ability to handle a completely unpredictable mix of vehicles — a 50kW-limited city car, a 150kW SUV, and a 350kW-capable HGV arriving within minutes of each other — is not a nice-to-have. It is the core operational requirement.
The Throughput Problem Nobody Budgets For
Many charging operators overlook the “idle capacity” caused by EV charge tapering, leaving conventional fixed-allocation sites operating far below their grid capacity during peak hours. The HanYuan distributed charging system eliminates this waste by dynamically routing released capacity to high-demand bays in real time, pushing actual peak throughput close to its theoretical maximum. Furthermore, by keeping power modules within their optimal 60–80% load range, it maintains a near-99% system efficiency under real mixed-load conditions.
The Uptime Problem That Only Shows Up at the Worst Possible Moment
Fleet depots typically have maintenance staff on site or nearby. Motorway service areas and highway charging hubs often do not. When a conventional DC charger develops a fault at a remote location, the repair sequence is slow by design: a call is logged, a specialist high-voltage engineer is dispatched, parts are sourced, and the bay stays dark while the process moves. I have seen operators lose a charging bay for the better part of two weeks from a single component failure.
At a four-bay site, one unit offline is 25% of your capacity gone. During a peak weekend, that is a material revenue loss and a reputational one.
The Injet Hanhui 480 addresses this directly through its integrated Programmable Power Controller design. By consolidating core charger functions into a single engineered unit and reducing internal wiring by 90%, the hardware is significantly less likely to develop faults in the first place. When something does go wrong, the background monitoring system identifies the fault remotely in under 10 minutes. The fix is a PPC module swap that any competent on-site technician can complete in 15 minutes without specialist high-voltage training. The bay is back in service the same day.
For CPOs managing a portfolio of highway charging stations, this changes the maintenance model entirely. You do not need a specialist engineer on standby near every remote site. You need local PPC stock and a clear procedure. That is a very different cost base.
Open Protocols Matter More Than People Realise
One more thing I’d push back on when I hear it from operators: the idea that you need a vendor’s proprietary energy management platform to run an en-route site intelligently.
OCPP 2.0.1 already gives you scheduled charging, dynamic load management, and real-time demand monitoring as standard, through an open protocol that works with any back-office system. Dynamic Load Management automatically keeps your total site draw below the threshold that triggers grid demand charge penalties. Scheduled off-peak windows handle overnight operational costs. None of this requires a proprietary subscription.
Both HanYuan and Hanhui 480 are fully OCPP 2.0.1 compliant. They integrate with whatever CPO platform you already use. No lock-in, no ongoing licensing cost for functionality the protocol already provides for free.
What Good En-Route Infrastructure Actually Looks Like
If I were speccing a new motorway charging hub today, the priorities would be these: a power architecture that delivers full grid capacity to whichever vehicle needs it most, hardware that can be serviced quickly at a remote location without specialist engineers, and open protocol compliance that keeps the management layer flexible and cost-controlled.
The on the go charging solutions that hold up through peak season are the ones built around these priorities from the start — not retrofitted with software patches when the throughput numbers disappoint.
If you are at the point of speccing a new site or reviewing existing infrastructure, I am happy to talk through the specifics. The constraints are always different, and a generic brochure is rarely the most useful starting point.
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FAQ
Q1: What is on the go EV charging and how is it different from public or fleet charging?
On the go charging refers specifically to en-route charging — sites where drivers stop to add range during a journey rather than to park at a destination or return to a depot. The key difference is dwell time. En-route drivers typically have 15 to 45 minutes, which means throughput speed and charger reliability matter far more than they do at a shopping centre car park or overnight fleet depot. Infrastructure designed for destination charging will underperform at a motorway service area, particularly during peak demand.
Q2: Why do en-route charging stations underperform at peak times even with high installed capacity?
The most common cause is fixed power allocation. Conventional DC chargers lock a set amount of power to each bay regardless of what the vehicle connected to it is actually drawing. When an EV tapers its charge rate near full battery, that undrawn power is wasted — it cannot reach a high-demand vehicle on another bay. A distributed architecture like HanYuan eliminates this by pooling all available power and dynamically directing it to wherever demand is highest, allowing a site’s actual output to approach its theoretical grid capacity rather than falling well short of it.
Q3: How does the Hanhui 480 reduce charger downtime at remote motorway sites?
The Hanhui 480’s integrated Programmable Power Controller replaces the complex wiring arrangement of a conventional DC charger — reducing internal connections by 90%. This makes the hardware far less prone to faults in normal operation. When a fault does occur, the system diagnoses it remotely in under 10 minutes and the repair is a single component swap that any competent technician can complete on-site in 15 minutes without specialist high-voltage qualifications. Total recovery time is typically under four hours including travel, compared to up to ten days with a conventional unit.
Q4: Do I need proprietary software to manage dynamic load balancing at a highway charging site?
No. Dynamic Load Management is a native capability of OCPP 2.0.1, the open industry protocol that both HanYuan and Hanhui 480 comply with. It continuously monitors real-time site demand and automatically prevents total output from exceeding your grid capacity threshold — protecting you from demand charge penalties without any proprietary software subscription. The same protocol handles scheduled charging windows and integrates with any existing CPO back-office platform.
Q5: Can a HanYuan system handle simultaneous charging of different vehicle types — passenger EVs, coaches, and HGVs?
Yes, and this is where the distributed architecture is most valuable. Because HanYuan treats all power modules across all cabinets as a single coordinated pool, it can simultaneously allocate 50kW to a city car drawing near its onboard limit, 150kW to an SUV, and the maximum available remaining capacity to an HGV — all dynamically adjusted in real time as each vehicle’s demand changes. No fixed allocation means no vehicle is artificially capped by a bay’s preset limit when capacity is available elsewhere in the system.
Q6: Is HanYuan or Hanhui 480 more appropriate for a new motorway service area site?
The two products serve complementary roles. HanYuan is the better fit for high-throughput sites where maximising power utilisation across multiple bays is the priority — its distributed architecture delivers the greatest benefit when there are four or more charging positions and significant variation in simultaneous vehicle demand. Hanhui 480 is the right choice where uptime assurance and serviceability at a remote location are the primary concern. Most high-capacity motorway sites deploy both: HanYuan for the power layer and Hanhui 480 units where integrated, fast-service hardware is needed.
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