Automakers struggle with Europe’s EV charging issues

The comments Sander and de Meo made last week at events in Brussels — where the European Commission has set a target to eliminate emissions from new vehicles sold just over a decade from now — speak to anxieties that have flown under the radar relative to the race to lower costs and increase battery range. These are among the more nuanced complications that the industry and regulators have little time to resolve.

The EU should take inspiration from the region’s efforts to develop a European standard for mobile phone telecommunications, which led to the creation of the Global System for Mobile Communication, or GSM, de Meo said.

“In Europe, we invented the GSM standard, and this thing was copied everywhere,” he said.

Regulators do not necessarily see a role for themselves in this process. Klaus Müller, president of Germany’s Bundesnetzagentur, who oversees the country’s electricity and telecommunications markets, believes that setting a common EV charging standard in the EU is not a job for the bloc’s 27 regulators, but one “for the car producers and their self-governing bodies.”

“It’s more practical to rely on industry standardization,” he said in an interview this week.

One automaker that hasn’t complained about charging infrastructure is Tesla. The automaker led by Elon Musk has the largest ultra-fast charger network in Europe, with 12,200 superchargers in the region, more than three times as many as the No. 2 operators, Germany’s EnBW, according to recent BNEF estimates.

Tesla has continued to pad its lead in ultra-fast charging installations even as other automakers unite to share the burden of building out a charging network.

Ford, BMW and its German peers, and South Korea’s Hyundai have a joint venture called Ionity with about 600 stations and more than 3,300 high-power charging points in 24 European countries as of January.

Some past criticism of Ionity reflects German automakers’ view that charging infrastructure remains a weak link in their efforts to catch up to Tesla.

Even in countries where heavy investment in EV charging infrastructure has been made — such as France — big holes remain.
“Highway stations in France have 100 percent electric recharge stations that are reliable, of quality and working,” Vincent Salimon, the CEO of BMW France, said in an interview.

“In Paris, there is also charging infrastructure that works well. Where there is a big problem, and where the government needs to speed up, is in semi-urban areas, in departmental roads, on national roads. There is nothing there.”