Nobody brought a ticket machine

The Thai internet has produced a new job title: นักสู้หน้าตู้ชาร์จ.

Fighter in front of the charging cabinet.

It arrived after footage circulated of EV drivers coming to blows at a public charging point: the dispute being, in its entirety, who had arrived first and therefore whose turn it was. One party said they were parked correctly. The other said they had been waiting longer. Bystanders separated them.

You can now buy a car sticker that says it. The country processed the incident into a decal faster than anybody installed a queueing system, which is both very funny and the actual subject of this article.

The thing Thailand is world-class at

Here is what makes this properly absurd rather than merely amusing.

Thailand is extremely good at queues.

Walk into a Thai bank branch and a machine gives you a number. Walk into a hospital, a district office, the transport department, a phone shop, a mall service counter — a number. There are screens, there are called turns, there are staff whose entire function is to hand you the right ticket for the right counter. On BTS platforms there are floor markings and, at busy stations, people standing on them making sure you use them.

The institutional knowledge is deep, it is everywhere, and it works. Article 115 The polite person finishes last argued that the reason Thai queues fail in the open street is that a queue is a rule with nothing attached to it: no fine, no registrar, no sanction beyond somebody objecting. The fix, everywhere Thailand has bothered, has been to attach something: a number, a screen, a member of staff.

That piece ended by saying the most useful unwritten article would be about queue design, that somebody in this country has already solved this repeatedly, inside specific buildings, and that was more use than any amount of commentary about manners.

And then this happened.

Four thousand stations, no numbers

Thailand has built public charging infrastructure very fast. The count everyone quotes comes from the Electric Vehicle Association of Thailand, which aggregates returns from the operators in its charging consortium, and as at 31 January 2026 it reported 4,643 locations with 13,977 connectors — up from 4,356 and 13,042 at the end of 2025. That is a substantial national build-out in about four years.

Three things about that number before it gets used for anything.

“Stations” is the wrong word and the association does not use it. Its column heading is locations — sites, not machines. A location may hold one connector or twenty.

The 13,977 connectors are not interchangeable. The same report breaks them down: 8,184 DC CCS2, 411 DC CHAdeMO and 5,382 AC Type 2. A DC connector refills a car in half an hour or so; an AC Type 2 connector takes hours, which is fine overnight in a car park and close to useless when three cars are waiting. The queue forms at the 8,595 DC connectors, not at 13,977 of anything.

And it is not a count of all public charging in Thailand. The report says so at the bottom: it excludes networks that serve only their own customers — a manufacturer’s own supercharger network, for instance. It is an industry association’s tally of its members, not a national statistic, and no government body appears to publish one.

Almost none of it has a queue system.

No ticket dispenser. No numbered order. No attendant. No standard reservation mechanism. In most cases there is no agreed way to indicate that you are waiting, and no way to establish who was waiting first.

Which means the arrangement at a Thai charging bay is precisely the one article 115 The polite person finishes last described as the failure case: a scarce resource, in a public place, with no mechanism attached, where the only available sanction is that somebody objects.

And then everybody was surprised when somebody objected.

The fight is not a fact about EV drivers. It is what that configuration produces, reliably, anywhere, with any population. Put the same people in a bank branch and they take a number and sit down, because in a bank branch the problem was solved before they arrived.

The knowledge existed. It just was not in the room when charging bays were being designed.

Why so many people need a public charger

Now the part that turns this from a joke into a finding, and it is not really about cars either.

The fuelling model for an electric car assumes a wall.

The entire economics (cheap overnight charging, waking up full, never queueing) depends on having a private parking space you control, with a power supply you can modify. In a Thai detached house that is straightforward.

In a condominium it very often is not.

And the first obstacle is not electrical, it is statutory. A condominium car park is common property, and section 48 of the Condominium Act B.E. 2522 (1979) requires a resolution of the general meeting of co-owners before common property is altered or added to — including where one co-owner wants to build something that affects it. That is not the manager’s decision and it is not the committee’s. It is a vote, of everyone, on a facility that benefits whoever has bought an electric car so far.

Then the electrical obstacles, which Thai installation guidance sets out consistently. You may hit a single-phase supply, or a meter that cannot take the load. You may hit the limits of the building’s transformer and main cabling, in which case the upgrade is a serious capital project with a serious price and a long lead time.

The utility’s own product line is the best evidence that this is systemic rather than anecdotal. The Metropolitan Electricity Authority sells a device specifically for office buildings and condominiums, marketed on the basis that such buildings have limited installation space and electrical-system constraints — one controller managing up to 32 AC charging points so that a building can add capacity without the supply upgrade. You do not build that product for a rare problem.

So a product whose fuelling model assumes a private wall was sold, very successfully and very quickly, into a country where an enormous share of urban buyers live in condominiums. Article 43 Empty by the hundred thousand counted the empty ones; there are a great many occupied ones too.

Everybody who cannot install at home is permanently in the public queue. Not occasionally, on a road trip — every week, forever, for the life of the car.

That is who is standing in the forecourt. Not enthusiasts caught short. People whose only refuelling option is a shared resource with no queue discipline.

The number I am not going to give you

There is an obvious calculation available here and I am going to decline it, because it is the kind of arithmetic that looks like rigour and isn’t.

The Department of Land Transport publishes cumulative registrations by fuel type, and at 28 February 2026 they read:

Something over 1.1 million vehicles with a battery in them, and you could divide that by roughly 14,000 connectors and produce a dramatic ratio.

It would be meaningless, and the table shows why. The largest group does not plug in at all — a conventional hybrid never sees a charger. And of the 419,410 pure-electric vehicles, 89,163 are motorcycles, which charge from an ordinary socket and are not queueing behind anybody. The battery-electric car population is 317,268, not the half-million the headline number suggests and not the 1.1 million the “EVs on the road” framing implies.

Cumulative registrations also include vehicles no longer on the road, and a large share of car owners charge at home and touch a public charger a few times a year. The two figures measure different things and dividing them would tell you nothing except that I wanted a big number.

What can be said without inventing anything: the build-out has been fast, the demand on it is concentrated among people with no alternative, and it is heavily peaked.

On how long the peaks actually are, I have less than I would like. Thai coverage describes waits of 90 to 120 minutes at busy stations during holidays. Nobody appears to publish queue times — not the association, not the operators, not any government body — so that range is press reporting of particular days rather than a measured series, and this article treats it as an illustration rather than a statistic.

A ninety-minute wait with no ticket system is not a technology problem — and the absence of any published waiting-time data is itself the same finding one level up. You cannot manage a queue nobody measures.

What would fix it, and it is almost embarrassing

A number.

Not more chargers, more chargers would help and are coming anyway, and they will not solve this, because a queue with no order in it produces disputes at any level of supply. The intervention is the one Thai banks made decades ago.

A dispenser, or an app-based position, or a marked waiting bay with a clear order, or a member of staff at high-traffic sites. Any mechanism that converts “who was here first” from a matter of opinion into a matter of record.

Article 81’s finding, one more time, in a new setting: the rule is not the problem. The rule has nothing attached to it.

And the sanction is already there: the whole reason article 115’s equilibrium is so hard to escape is that nobody wants to be the person who objects. A ticket machine means nobody has to be.

Practically

If you are buying an EV and live in a condominium, resolve the charging question before you buy the car, not after. And ask the right question: not whether the manager agrees, but whether a general meeting of co-owners has passed a resolution, because under section 48 of the Condominium Act that is what altering common property requires. Then ask about capacity, cost and who pays. The answer determines whether you own a convenient car or a weekly errand.

At a busy charger, make your position visible and agreed — where the operator provides an app queue, use it; where they do not, say plainly to whoever is there who arrived when. Most disputes are about ambiguity rather than about entitlement.

Charge before you need to, not when you need to. The arriving-on-8% driver is the one with no negotiating room, and the person who cannot wait is the person who ends up in a clip.

And do not buy the sticker. It is very funny and it is an announcement.

Common misconceptions

“Thai people can’t queue.” Thai institutions run some of the most disciplined queueing systems anywhere — numbered tickets, screens, staff. The failure happens where no mechanism was installed.

“It’s an EV driver problem.” It is a configuration problem. A scarce shared resource with no queue mechanism produces disputes with any population.

“More chargers will fix it.” More chargers help. A queue with no order in it generates disputes at any level of supply.

“You can just install a charger at your condo.” A car park is common property, and section 48 of the Condominium Act requires a resolution of the general meeting of co-owners before it is altered. Beyond that you may face single-phase supply, meter limits, and transformer and cabling capacity.

“There are nearly 14,000 chargers, so there’s plenty.” 13,977 is connectors, of which 5,382 are AC Type 2 and take hours. The fast-charging capacity people queue for is 8,595 DC connectors, and the count excludes networks that serve only their own customers.

“Public charging is a road-trip thing.” For owners who cannot install at home it is the entire refuelling model, every week, for the life of the car.