Is it the slow charging gun insertion that causes the failure to charge? Owners of the Gold Label Volkswagen are in despair.

Spending over a hundred thousand yuan to buy an "electric ancestor" in China in 2025 that can't be charged even with seven or eight charging guns, stops charging halfway, and has an unstable charging speed - what kind of experience is this?

Reality is always more surreal than drama.

Recently, "Blue Whale News" reported a piece of news: Multiple owners of FAW-Volkswagen Anhui's Yuzhong 06 are collectively experiencing "charging difficulties", which can be described as a "primitive" charging nightmare.

When these owners go to charge their cars, they find that the success rate of charging their cars at third-party public fast chargers is extremely low. "It's like opening a blind box. It works sometimes and doesn't work sometimes. It all depends on luck." Owners need to "move their cars back and forth to try different guns" in a charging station and try multiple different charging piles to occasionally find one that works. More often, after inserting the gun and scanning the code, the indicator light of the charging pile (or the vehicle) turns red, indicating a charging failure.

A few owners also encountered the problem that the charging started after much trouble but stopped after a short while. Even one owner encountered charging problems "the day after picking up the car". Can you stand this?

After users' feedback and complaints, the "solutions" taught by some sales and after-sales personnel of Yuzhong are even more ridiculous - they suggest that owners "insert the gun at the fastest speed, all at once and without hesitation."

This has turned a simple "plug-and-play" action into a Western cowboy showdown of "hand speed".

What's even more frustrating is that the protagonist of this incident, the Yuzhong 06 of FAW-Volkswagen Anhui, is not some cheap and shoddy electric car. The identity of "FAW-Volkswagen Anhui" is very special. Different from traditional 50:50 joint ventures, it is the first joint-venture new energy vehicle enterprise in which Volkswagen Group holds a controlling stake (75%) in China. It is regarded as the bridgehead of Volkswagen's "in China, for China" strategy.

The "Yuzhong" (ID. UX) brand is not simply a rebadged version of the ID.4 or ID.6. It is a new high-end and intelligent brand series of FAW-Volkswagen Anhui. Its logo is even gold, so it is also called the "Golden Badge Volkswagen".

Therefore, since its birth, the Yuzhong 06 has been given the mission of being a "pioneer" and a "sharp knife" - it was supposed to be the main volume-selling model for Volkswagen to prove that it "understands China better" and has "reliable technology".

A "sharp knife" that was given such high hopes has stumbled on the most basic issue. Beyond technology, Volkswagen's own problems may be more worthy of in-depth consideration.

Difficult Charging

How did the Yuzhong 06 encounter charging difficulties in 2025? Before delving into this issue, perhaps we should first understand the six key steps of the standard charging process for pure electric vehicles.

Step 1: Physical connection and wake-up. When the owner inserts the charging gun into the vehicle's charging port, the signal line on the charging gun that transmits signals is connected to the vehicle. Once the gun is inserted, it will immediately wake up the vehicle's battery management system (BMS) and the vehicle control unit (VCU). The charging pile also detects the connection at the same time, and both sides are ready to start exchanging information.

Step 2: Protocol handshake. This is the most crucial step in the charging process. Just like business tycoons shake hands when they meet, the vehicle and the charging pile start to "negotiate" at this step.

The charging pile first asks, "Who are you? What's the situation of your battery?" At this time, the vehicle's BMS must immediately respond, "I'm a certain model. The total voltage of my battery is XX, the maximum allowable charging voltage is XX, the current battery level is 30%, the battery temperature is normal, and I request a charging current of XX amperes."

After receiving and confirming the information, the charging pile responds, "Received. The maximum current I can provide is A, and the maximum voltage is B. I'm ready."

Step 3: Insulation detection and charging preparation. After both sides reach an agreement, a safety check will be carried out before charging. The charging pile starts to conduct an insulation detection to ensure there is no risk of electric leakage. The vehicle's BMS also confirms again that the battery status is normal. When both sides are ready, they can "open the sluice" to start charging.

Step 4: Close the relay. At this step, the vehicle and the charging pile "open the sluice" at the same time. The charging pile outputs high voltage, and the current starts to be officially transmitted to the battery.

Step 5: Real-time monitoring and adjustment. Throughout the charging process, the vehicle's BMS always plays the role of the "brain" and the "commander". It will continuously send messages to the charging pile at a frequency as high as once every few hundred milliseconds, reporting in real-time, "My current voltage is X, current is Y, temperature is Z. Please adjust the current to A..." The charging pile then strictly adjusts the output power in real-time according to the instructions of the BMS.

Step 6: Charging ends. When the battery is fully charged or the owner actively stops charging, the BMS will send a "charging completed" or "stop charging" instruction. Both sides disconnect the high-voltage relay ("close the sluice"), the communication ends, and the charging gun is unlocked.

As we can see, in the entire charging process, the vehicle's BMS needs to exchange information and send messages with the charging pile all the time, and the communication time is in milliseconds. The "information symmetry" between the vehicle and the charging pile is the key.

However, the biggest challenge of this "information symmetry" is that there are hundreds of charging pile operators in China, such as Tecland and Xingxing Charging. Although the message "dialogue" format stipulated by the national standard (GB/T) related to the charging protocol is a unified "standard Mandarin", each enterprise will have a little "accent" or "dialect" when implementing it. For example, there are slight differences in the timeout settings of the "dialogue".

Automobile enterprises like AITO, XPeng, and BYD, which have excellent compatibility between the vehicle and the gun, will conduct a large number of on-site tests in a "ground promotion" way to make their BMS learn to understand almost all the "dialects" in China, ensuring that they can "charge anywhere". So, could the "charging difficulties" of the Yuzhong 06 be related to "not understanding the dialects"?

Actually, the "temporary solutions" given by Yuzhong's after-sales and sales departments, such as going to specific brands of charging piles like Tecland and Xingxing Charging and the "fast gun insertion method", have already revealed the mystery.

The Truth Behind the "Charging Difficulties"

The "charging difficulties" of the Yuzhong 06 may not be very complicated. The more likely truth is - a software "timing bug" (Timing Issue).

In the original report of "Blue Whale News", an owner posted a screenshot showing that the reason for the charging failure was: Timed out waiting to receive the vehicle-side BRM message, which is very close to the answer.

Actually, the charging pile is an "impatient" one. After connecting the charging gun, it sends a message asking, "Who are you?" in a very short time.

According to the requirements of the current national standard GB/T 27930 - 2023 (Digital communication protocol between off-board conductive chargers and BMS), during the charging handshake and parameter configuration stages, if the correct response is not received within 0.25s after some messages are sent, it is determined that the response has timed out.

But as mentioned above, there are differences in "accents" and "dialects" among different brands of charging piles. During the handshake, configuration, and charging stages, the timeout of individual messages will be changed to 0.1s or 0.2s or even shorter to quickly detect abnormalities and restart the handshake, reducing the queuing time.

If the Yuzhong 06 still designs the message sending time according to the national standard of a maximum of 0.25s, it becomes a "slow-paced" car. For example, if a certain key message is not sent within 0.2s, the charging pile will report an error and stop in advance, while the vehicle thinks it is still in the "waiting" state, so both sides will light up the red light at the same time.

To put it simply, this error is that the car and the charging pile are "talking past each other" and not on the same page, so they naturally don't "click".

In addition, the "trick" of "inserting the gun quickly" and "inserting it all the way" points to another key manifestation of the Yuzhong 06's "timing bug": The system's judgment of the "timing" is extremely strict. It doesn't seem to leave any reasonable "time window" for physical operations.

In a well-designed charging system, the speed of inserting the gun should not have any impact. Because when inserting a physical plug, there must be an extremely short "jitter period" (Jitter) before the metal contacts are completely in contact. The signal may flash quickly between "off" and "on" several times.

A normal software will take the "time difference" into account and have a built-in "de-jitter" logic. The core of this logic is "waiting". It will deliberately wait for dozens to a hundred milliseconds to ensure that the signal is completely stable in "time" before starting the next handshake.

Just like the startup interface of Nokia, the two hands hold each other tightly, and then they can start to transmit data to each other.

The software logic of the Yuzhong 06 may have "jumped the gun": It doesn't have that "waiting" step. It samples the physical signal when it is still "jittering" and unstable, and immediately determines that it is an "invalid connection", then locks the program.

Therefore, when the owner inserts the gun "slowly", the duration of the physical "jitter period" is much longer than the reaction time of the software bug, causing the detection program to almost always report an error before the charging gun is properly inserted.

Inserting the gun at the "fastest speed" is to artificially compress the duration of the "jitter period" to the shortest. If the owner's hand speed is fast enough to make the plug reach the "physically stable" state before the "jumping-the-gun" software bug starts the detection, making the physical stability of the inserted gun faster than the detection program, thus "tricking" the bug.

This is also a typical manifestation of the "timing bug": The system makes a wrong (or overly sensitive) judgment at the wrong time point. In fact, the owner is using their "hand speed" to make up for the few lines of "fault-tolerant" code that the engineer should have written in the software.

One piece of evidence is the official customer service commitment of Yuzhong. Since the "charging difficulties" can be solved through software OTA in the future, it indirectly confirms that the so-called "charging difficulties" are neither the fault of the charging pile nor a hardware failure of the vehicle, but a software problem.

It seems that the software team of FAW-Volkswagen Anhui did not thoroughly study China's huge and complex third-party charging network before the product was launched.

A Critical Setback

Behind this charging storm, an embarrassing reality is exposed.

Currently, the new energy market in China has already entered a crazy "arms race" of the "800V high-voltage platform", silicon carbide, and "charging for 5 minutes and getting a range of 200 kilometers". However, the Yuzhong 06, a model positioned as an entry-level vehicle aiming to boost sales, has stumbled at the "starting line" due to the most basic compatibility issue of "unable to start charging".

Any local Chinese software team would, on the day they receive user feedback on such an obvious and low-level error, have engineers rush to the scene for on-site troubleshooting