Standards & Implementation Guidance
Integrating Chinese vehicles and devices
Chinese-manufactured EVs and charging hardware are a growing share of the African market. Interoperability with them requires more than an OCPP connection.
Why this needs separate treatment
A meaningful and growing share of vehicles entering African markets — both new and used-import — are manufactured in China, and Chinese charging hardware is increasingly common in new site builds due to cost and availability. Treating this as "just another OCPP charger" or "just another CCS2 vehicle" misses real differences that show up as integration failures.
Connector and charging standard: GB/T
Most Chinese domestic-market EVs use the GB/T DC and AC charging standard rather than CCS2, CHAdeMO, or Type 2. GB/T is electrically and mechanically distinct — it is not adapter-solvable in the way voltage differences sometimes are. Two practical implications:
- A site expecting meaningful GB/T-equipped traffic needs GB/T connectors specified at hardware selection, not retrofitted later.
- GB/T's communication protocol (based on a CAN-bus handshake) differs from the CCS/PLC-based handshake, which affects how a charger's internal controller talks to the vehicle — this is a hardware and firmware decision, not a CPMS-layer one.
Where a market has a mixed vehicle population, dual-standard chargers (offering both a GB/T and a CCS2 connector) are frequently the more economical choice than running parallel site builds.
NEV telematics and data reporting
China's New Energy Vehicle (NEV) monitoring framework requires many domestically-sold vehicles to report telematics data (state of charge, location, battery health) to a national monitoring platform. Vehicles exported or grey-imported outside this framework may have this reporting disabled or absent, which has two consequences worth planning for:
- Do not assume vehicle-side telematics data will be available to a CPMS or fleet system for imported GB/T vehicles — session and charging data should be sourced from the charger, not assumed from the vehicle.
- Battery management behaviour (charge curve, thermal limits) calibrated for the NEV monitoring context may differ from what a non-domestic deployment expects — validate real-world charge curves during commissioning rather than relying on spec sheets.
Practical integration checklist
- Confirm connector standard needs (GB/T, CCS2, or both) against actual and projected vehicle population before hardware selection.
- For GB/T hardware, confirm OCPP conformance separately — GB/T support is often added by manufacturers as a variant of an existing CCS2 platform, and conformance can differ between variants.
- Do not rely on vehicle-reported telematics for imported vehicles; instrument the charger and CPMS as the source of truth.
- Validate real-world charge curves for the specific vehicle models expected on-site, especially for imported units, rather than assuming spec-sheet performance.
- Confirm payment and app integration handles the RFID/card conventions common on Chinese-manufactured hardware, which sometimes differ from CCS2-market defaults.