Geely's 1,800 kW charger is three times Europe's 2027 legal minimum
Geely's 1,800 kW figure arrived with no timeline attached
Geely is developing an ultra-fast charging facility in China rated at 1,800 kW, its UK managing director Michael Yang told Autocar at the launch of the EX2 hatchback on 3 September. No date was offered for Britain, and none for anywhere else outside China. The number is specific, the schedule is not, and the distance between the two is where this story actually sits.
Michael Yang put completely solid-state cells a few months away
Yang described the charger as one piece of a stack. Completely solid-state batteries are a few months away in China, Zeekr already sells cars charging on 900V systems, and Britain sits high on the list of markets due to receive the technology because of its size. Geely's UK target is 5% market share by 2030, roughly 100,000 cars a year and more than ten times what the brand manages there today. The 1,000-volt architecture shown in August was the previous step on the same road.
BYD's Flash Charger is rated at 1,500 kW, and Europe is getting 3,000 sites
The target here is not subtle. BYD's Flash Charging system is rated at 1,500 kW and moves a compatible car from 10 to 70% in five minutes. BYD has begun rolling out the first of 3,000 Flash Charging locations across Europe, most of them open to any brand, and its Chinese network already draws a third of its users from rival badges. An 1,800 kW Geely station would sit 300 kW above the best number BYD quotes.
AFIR asks 400 kW of a motorway pool now and 600 kW from December 2027
European law does not count single chargers the way Chinese launches do. Regulation 2023/1804, the alternative fuels infrastructure regulation, requires a charging pool every 60 km along the TEN-T core network offering at least 400 kW in total, including one point of at least 150 kW. From 31 December 2027 that pool figure rises to 600 kW and two points of 150 kW. A single Geely station at 1,800 kW would be three of those pools standing on one forecourt.
1,800 kW is half of what a European truck pool must deliver in 2030
This is why such stations carry their own batteries. A 1.8 MW draw is far beyond the grid connection most European forecourts hold, so both Geely's system and BYD's Flash Charging sites buffer with on-site storage and recover between cars. The same European regulation asks truck charging pools on the TEN-T core network to deliver 3,600 kW by the end of 2030. Geely is describing half a truck pool, for one car.
The Geely E2 reaches Belgian showrooms on 11 September with 35 kWh
The car being launched in Britain as the EX2 is the same hatchback Geely sells on the continent as the E2 and in China as the Xingyuan. It landed at dealers in Bruges, Ostend and Roeselare last week ahead of Benelux deliveries from 11 September, and it starts at €19,490 in Belgium and Luxembourg with a 35 kWh battery for 252 km WLTP. Geely's European commitment is real enough elsewhere: it will build premium cars in Volvo's European factories from 2028. Nothing in the E2's specification asks for 1,800 kW.
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The 1,800 kW figure is not the claim worth testing. A buffered station can be rated at almost anything if the batteries behind it are large enough, and no car sold in Europe could take a fraction of it. The claim worth testing is the quieter one Yang made about ownership: that Geely will eventually run its own charging sites here, carrying its own badge and open to every brand, exactly as BYD does in China.
So here is the marker. If a Geely-branded, brand-agnostic charging site opens anywhere in western Europe before the end of 2028, the 1,800 kW talk was a preview and Europe's charging map starts being drawn by carmakers instead of operators. If it does not, then the fastest thing Geely brought to Europe this decade was a €19,490 hatchback with a 35 kWh battery, and a number quoted in Britain stayed a number about China.
