Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

In Northeast China, electric-vehicle taxi drivers keep the battery swapping system running by clearing ice, recalibrating range displays, and enduring long queues. This ethnography shows infrastructure is sustained through pragmatic moral negotiation between transition ideals and making a living.

Paper long abstract

China’s electric vehicles and battery-swapping infrastructure are promoted as a replicable pathway for clean mobility through standardized batteries and swapping networks. Yet in wintertime Northeast China, sharp range loss, equipment failures, and hours-long queues reveal the infrastructure’s conditionality and render its reliability on frontline taxi drivers. Drivers absorb friction at the intersection of national climate goals, local economic survival, and everyday environmental uncertainty, navigating moral expectations to enact the energy transition while earning a living. Based on fieldwork in Changchun, this paper examines how EV taxi drivers keep the battery-swapping system running through everyday maintenance. Drawing on journey logs co-produced with drivers and field observations, the paper adopts a fragmented narrative form to convey the intermittency of breakdowns and the fractured temporality of waiting. The analysis conceptualises these maintenance practices as pragmatic upkeep through which drivers navigate polarised moral claims in the energy transition. In doing so, they sustain the system’s everyday usability and infrastructural continuity while continually accounting for compromises between environmental ideals and economic survival. From within this maintenance work, broader frictions become legible: between state infrastructure and private survival, between national climate goals and regional material conditions, and between inherited practices and uncertain futures. These lived negotiations complicate binary moral framings by showing how collective aspirations are realised through individual endurance. I therefore argue for an ethics of care that acknowledges embodied costs, attends to precarity, and rethinks how responsibility and response-ability are distributed across the frontlines of transition.