Gasgoo Munich- This National Day holiday, scenes at service areas along the G7 Beijing-Xinjiang Expressway looked like this: people pulling quilts from trunks to air them out, others reclining rear seats to nap to the sound of wind outside the window.
Long-distance travel by electric vehicle is shifting from a novelty to a routine.
Meanwhile, automakers have taken the concept of "home" in their launch events to another dimension—front trunks that hold fish, onboard freezers for candied hawthorn, rear rows that transform into cinemas.
Is the "home" on stage the same as the "home" on the G7?
Perhaps we need a calmer look: which features are actually changing travel, and which are just spectacle for the cameras?
The Contrast on the G7
The G7 Beijing-Xinjiang Expressway stretches 2,540 kilometers from Beijing to Urumqi, crossing the Ulan Buh and Tengger deserts and hundreds of kilometers of uninhabited Gobi.
This route has two traits: it's long, and service areas are far apart—some gaps exceed 100 kilometers.
In the internal combustion engine era, that meant calculating every drop of fuel.
This National Day, I drove a pure electric SUV along this route from Beijing.
Two scenes left a lasting impression:
First, the density of EVs. Xiaomi SU7s, Tesla Model Ys, NIO ES6s, SAIC Maxus MIFAs, Denza D9s, and plenty of Li Autos and AITOs. Half the cars queued at chargers were family EVs costing 200,000 to 300,000 yuan—not modified off-road enthusiasts.
Second, the quilts drying in the sun. At the Ejin Banner service area, a couple with two children hauled their bedding out to drape over the railing. Coincidentally, I had brought a quilt too: with the rear seats folded down at night, the car becomes an instant bedroom. Even with the Gobi's wild temperature swings, staying under the quilt with the AC on felt cozy.
A rough estimate: at a few degrees below zero overnight, running the AC all night drained about 10% of the battery.
This would be unimaginable in a gas car—idling all night for AC causes carbon buildup, burns fuel, and risks exhaust fumes seeping in. But in an EV, it happens naturally.
Image Source: Gasgoo
This proves one thing: pure electric long-distance road trips have moved from a niche experiment for geeks to a genuine mass behavior.
Yet, having actually lived in the car for a few days, I'm skeptical of the recent "mobile home" fervor at launch events. Are the features they're fighting over really the same as what we use on the road?
Scanning recent launch events, the slogan "the car is a mobile home" has reached absurd levels. The industry has a reason: in the third year of the price war, core specs like batteries, autonomous driving, and range are homogenizing. Automakers need "visual hammers" for short videos—memorable moments that stick.
Beds, fridges, and front trunks are exactly what look good on camera.
At the Onvo L80 launch in April, William Li opened the rear door and lay down next to President Qin Lihong on a "three-section contoured bed," demonstrating the fit with pillows onstage.
Before the laughter faded, he tied on an apron and squatted by the front trunk to chop carrots—using the 240-liter frunk as an outdoor kitchen.
Thirty minutes later, the pre-sale price was announced: starting at 245,800 yuan. A family SUV launch spent half its time looking like a lifestyle vlog.
This isn't an isolated case; it's an industry-wide arms race.
Voyah Zhuiguang S highlighted an 80-liter drainable front trunk at the Guangzhou Auto Show with the pitch: "Toss in wet swimsuits or dirty sneakers, rinse at home." Fang Cheng Bao Ti 3 offers a 151-liter electric frunk and a fridge adjustable from -6°C to 50°C, promising "ice-cold cola in summer, hot milk tea in winter." Leapmotor C16 folds its rear seats into a bed and stuffs its fridge with beer.
The new Li Auto L9 continued to hammer the "fridge, TV, sofa" scenario in May. Onvo L80 went further, hiding a deep-freeze unit in the trunk's recessed space and integrating a mobile kitchen island with a sink and induction cooker in the frunk. As for the front trunk, marketing has evolved to Onvo L90's "fishing frunk"—insulation, drainage, odor blocking, stacking features like a car cooler catalog.
However, comparing these signature launch features with my real experience on the G7, the gap is stark.
The fold-flat bed is a genuine necessity. Skipping the restaurant at midday, pulling the sunshade, and lying down for an hour is the pure electric platform's biggest dividend—you can run the AC without worrying about fuel cost, carbon buildup, or exhaust.
Tray tables are also high-frequency items—kids doing homework, eating while charging, even processing work emails. Vehicle-to-load (V2L) power is useful for camping, though not daily on a transit route like the G7.
But those "star features" highlighted at launches mostly became props on the road. The onboard fridge usually held two bottles of water. If I really wanted an ice-cold cola in the Gobi, the service area supermarket sells them for three yuan—hardly worth waiting overnight for the fridge to cool them down.
The front trunk is just an extra storage bin for charging cables or backpacks. Across the whole G7 trip, I didn't see a single person put a fish in one, nor stuff wet swimsuits inside.
Roof-mounted bikes and integrated kitchen kits are conversation starters when parked, but when rushing to the next stop, owners just want to charge and go—no time to unpack.
Simply put, what the launch camera focuses on is not what the driver relies on.
The bed William Li lay on is a real need, but the frunk where he chopped carrots and the box of candied hawthorn he showed off were mostly props designed for media buzz.
Image Source: Onvo
Then again, the G7 is just one scenario.
On this road, the car is a transit tool; fridges, frunks, and kitchens are useless. But switch the scene—a weekend family camping trip in the suburbs, or driving back home for Spring Festival and stopping for a meal—those features mocked as "props" might become genuine conveniences.
Data Tells a Different Story
Beyond anecdote, macro data points the same way: demand for pure electric long-distance travel is exploding. The cause isn't that someone added a fridge, though.
Data from the National Energy Administration on October 8 shows that during the 7-day National Day holiday, the 62,700 highway chargers monitored logged 6.711 million charging sessions. Total energy hit 163 million kWh, with a daily average of 23.26 million kWh—up 51.42% year-on-year.
On October 1 alone, volume reached 28.05 million kWh, a new holiday high. Last year's National Day saw just 17.49 million kWh—a jump of over 60% in a year.
For comparison, highway charging sessions during the 2026 Spring Festival holiday totaled 6.021 million. This National Day, that number rose to 6.71 million.
That means even though Spring Festival is China's most important travel period, National Day demand for EV long-distance travel has already surpassed it.
Traffic data from the Ministry of Transport is even clearer: daily highway passage of new energy vehicles averaged about 16.4 million during the holiday, up 32.7%. The peak on the first day neared 17.8 million—1.8 times the usual volume and accounting for roughly 27% of total traffic. By the end of September 2026, the country's NEV fleet reached 48.97 million.
On the supply side, only about 85,400 charging piles have been built in highway service areas nationwide, leaving a car-to-pile ratio still above 500:1. This contradiction was amplified to the extreme during the holiday:
At Zaoyang North service area in Hubei, nearly 200 cars queued at once, with some waiting over five hours. On the G65 Baomao Expressway at Dazhou North, an EV with 1% battery died hundreds of meters from a charger, requiring staff and other drivers to push it to the spot. The State Grid had to deploy 435 emergency chargers at congestion-prone sites.
Putting this data together, the conclusion is clear: demand has exploded to the point of straining the charging network, yet the supply side's attention hasn't fully focused on this most urgent problem.
Image Source: Li Auto
Drivers sunbathing quilts or napping on beds aren't relying on flashy features, but on the convergence of three underlying capabilities of the pure electric platform:
First, you can run the AC while parked for hours without worry—the prerequisite for "overnighting." Second, the pure electric platform lacks an engine and driveshaft, creating a flat floor where folded rear seats form a complete bed. Third, the highway charging network has actually expanded. The G7 is viable not because a specific car has long range, but because the chargers on this line have become denser.
These three factors are what truly sparked this wave of long-distance travel demand.
Beds, fridges, and front trunks are the skin growing from these roots, not the roots themselves.
Next Steps for the Industry
When William Li lay on that bed, it was a performance. The family drying quilts at the G7 service area was living real life.
Both are real, but they carry different weight.
The phrase "car is a mobile home" has been used for a decade, but this year it finally has a real user base. Not because an automaker put a fish in a frunk, but because the pure electric platform finally turned "sleeping in the car" from a gimmick into a daily routine.
The industry has indeed taken this step, and it deserves recognition.
In the ICE era, "mobile home" was mostly sales talk: adjust the seat, make the trunk bigger, add a panoramic sunroof, and you dared to write "mobile home" on a PPT. Actually staying the night meant dealing with idling carbon buildup, exhaust risks, no external power, and a floor intruded upon by drive shafts—none of which could support the word "home."
It is the fundamental change of the pure electric platform that gave this term substance for the first time.
But when every new car has a bed, fridge, and frunk, these configs will quickly become standard equipment, no longer a differentiator.
The owner who waited five hours to charge probably doesn't care if your fridge hits -18°C. They want to know if the next service area has a spot, if an 800V platform can save them ten minutes, and if opening the navigation shows which charger ahead is free.
So the next question might be: once the battle over "home appliances" is played out, will the industry's next competitive dimension shift back to "how smooth the road is"?
For automakers, this means shifting the focus of product definition from "in-car life scenarios" toward "long-distance charging experience."
The adoption speed of 800V high-voltage platforms, the depth of cooperation with charging operators, and even whether the infotainment navigation integrates real-time charger status—these things are hard to demo on stage and maybe a bit boring, but they are exactly what drivers on long routes like the G7 are willing to pay for.
After all, even the most comfortable bed requires electricity to lie on.
For charging operators, the lesson from the G7 is that layout shouldn't just look at total highway traffic, but at the direction of self-driving routes. Which routes are becoming hot EV destinations? Which service areas are high-frequency overnight spots? This data is more instructive than just "is traffic high?"
Only when the industry solidifies these "boring but reliable" details will the slogan "car is a mobile home" truly land on solid ground.
