What happened in Nanning
The footage was recorded on October 2, 2026, during China's National Day holiday, at an open-access charging forecourt in Nanning. The children held the charging guns and swung from the suspended liquid-cooled cables. Adults stood nearby and filmed. BYD confirmed on October 4 that maintenance personnel had been dispatched to inspect the station and that the company would tighten monitoring and physical inspections at its sites.
The overhead cable design
The terminal involved is the BYD Megawatt Flash Charger, presented in March 2025 alongside the Super e-Platform. It runs on a 1,000 V architecture, supports peak rates up to 10C for compatible passenger models, and delivers 1,000 kW (1 MW) at 1,000 V and 1,000 A. The theoretical hardware envelope reaches 1,500 kW at 1,500 A, according to CarNewsChina.
Liquid-cooled high-amperage lines are heavy, so BYD mounts the assembly on an overhead T-track with a spring-loaded retractor. The suspension carries the weight of the line, keeps the connector at chest level and stops the cable from dragging across wet or dirty ground. That same geometry behaves like a pendulum under a transverse load.
The numbers behind the swing
A connector gun weighs between 3.0 kg and 5.0 kg. Add a six-year-old of roughly 20 to 25 kg and the retractor holds around 25 to 30 kg at the lowest point of the arc, which is about 245 to 294 N of static load. Chinese standards GB/T 18487.1 and GB/T 20234 require linear tensile pulls of 200 N to 400 N and a 5,000 N vehicle drive-over compression test. A single child's body weight therefore already lands inside the low end of the tensile range, before any dynamic amplification at the bottom of the swing. Retractor arms, cable seals and connector strain-relief joints were designed for one-handed handling, not for repeated cyclic pendulum stress.
Electric shock was not the main hazard
Under the same Chinese conductive charging standards, the station's main DC contactors stay open and de-energised while the gun is docked. High-voltage energy engages only after the connector is physically coupled to a vehicle and the locking, control pilot and communication checks are complete. In standby, the children were not touching live conductors.
Inside a liquid-cooled cable
Beneath the outer jacket sits a multi-layer composite: flexible high-amperage copper conductors, communication lines and internal coolant channels. Repeated bending or transverse loading can damage those internal parts or the protective-earth conductor without leaving visible external marks. The failure would show up later, during a megawatt charging session, when the cable is carrying 1,000 A. The blunt-impact risk is simpler: a suspended gun of up to 5 kg that slips out of a small hand.
What the standards do not test
Existing mechanical checks cover defined static or impact conditions. They do not cover repeated, high-amplitude pendulum loading of an overhead suspension system, which is the gap the Nanning video exposes. High-power charging sites are increasingly open commercial spaces, and many add local battery energy storage to manage grid demand. Station hardware now shares space with the general public.
BYD's network and Europe
BYD has passed 10,000 operational Megawatt Flash Charging stations in China and is targeting 20,000 by the end of 2026. Abroad, the company plans 6,000 flash charging stations by the end of 2027, including 3,000 in the European Union and 300 in the United Kingdom. Cable management at that scale is a different problem from a single 400 kW highway park, as we described in our report on South Korea's 23 highway fast-charging parks at 400 kW and €0.19 per kWh. China is also where new EV formats tend to appear first, which we saw when Volkswagen's Jetta brand priced its first electric sedan from €10,600.
Cost context
Our supercharger database tracks 483 locations across Europe, with a cheapest-price list updated from published tariffs. BYD has not published European per-kWh pricing for flash charging. For scale: at the €0.19 per kWh reported at those South Korean 400 kW sites, a car using 18 kWh/100 km pays about €3.42 per 100 km. A diesel at 5.5 l/100 km and an assumed €1.50 per litre works out near €8.25 per 100 km. You can run your own numbers in the charging cost calculator.
What owners and operators can do
Keep children away from the overhead rail and the cable, not just from the plug. Before starting a session, look at the cable jacket and the strain relief where the line enters the connector and report any deformation or exposed inner layer. Operators of public sites can separate charging bays from pedestrian areas, add signage and keep camera monitoring on the retractor assembly, since internal damage will not be visible in a monthly walk-around. BYD said it would strengthen station monitoring and physical inspections. The company has not published what the Nanning inspection found.