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. As at 31 January 2569 there were 4,643 public charging stations with 13,977 connectors, up from 4,356 stations and 13,042 connectors at the end of 2568. That is a substantial national build-out in about four years.

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.

Thai installation guidance and contractor material set out the obstacles consistently. You need the juristic person’s consent, which means a committee, a manager and a set of residents who did not all buy electric cars. 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. And you are asking a building to spend common funds on a facility that benefits a minority of owners, which is a governance problem before it is an electrical one.

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 Sixty thousand empty 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.

You could take cumulative EV registrations — which by mid-2569 run to well over a million if you count everything with a battery in it, with battery-electric cars alone approaching half a million — and divide by roughly 14,000 connectors, and produce a dramatic ratio.

It would be meaningless. Hybrids do not plug in. A large share of BEV owners charge at home and touch a public charger a few times a year. Cumulative registrations include vehicles no longer on the road. 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 — Thai coverage describes waits of 90 to 120 minutes at busy stations during holidays and peak periods.

A ninety-minute wait with no ticket system is not a technology problem.

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. Ask the juristic person specifically: is there consent, is there capacity, what does installation 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.” You need juristic-person consent, and may face single-phase supply, meter limits, transformer and cabling capacity, and a committee vote on spending common funds for a minority.

“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.