I have an EV in Europe and for my next car I’m seriously considering going back to ICE. I really like the car but the charging network is shit. Pretty much none if it accepts card payments, you have to give all your personal info to like 10 different operators to move around. The network looks fine on a map but when you’re actually trying to find a charger a lot of them are out of order. You can’t trust it so I always look for a backup but this really complicates planning trips and range anxiety is still a thing. If things don’t improve in the coming year I will just get a gasoline car and consider EV again some time in the future.
That was my experience renting an EV for a month in Sweden a few months ago. Charging stations everywhere, but 1/4 of them wouldn’t accept my payment methods (US and Swedish credit cards), 1/4 were too slow to be worthwhile and 1/4 didn’t work at all. Most of them required me to install an app on my phone to input my credit card details (really stupid). There were many times I needed to charge in an unfamiliar town and I had to try three charging stations before I found one that worked for me. Loved driving that car but I hated charging it.
According to EU laws since 2024 every charger above 47kW/h has to accept card payment. This is being slowly rolled out. I know that Spain now offers financing for charging station operators to do the necessary changes. I already saw some stations modified to accept credit card. They also rolled out public website with a map of charging stations which is also a big improvement. It’s slowly moving in the right direction and EU definitely has a good idea about how it should work. That’s why I’m still split. I will see what happens this year.
I have an idea to start scraping public data bout charger availability and provide some stats. Which operators are the least reliable, how long does it take to fix a charger on average, which chargers are broken most often and so on. This data in EU is public so it shouldn’t be that hard, I just have to finish another project first.
Blame das idiots at VW. Same problem in Canada with the Electrify network. If governments seriously want EVs, they need to get their thumbs out and treat charge infrastructure like they treated handicapped parking.
Overnight, under threat of real fines, handicapped parking was everywhere, and maintained.
In Spain the government straight out said that they don’t care about the network, that private companies should solve it. And they did, in the most corporate way possible, absolutely enshittified, terrible for users, great for profit. I really believe some of the companies keep their chargers as broken as possible to promote ICE cars.
EU passed some common sense laws (mandatory card payment, open APIs with availability info) but so far they were just ignored. There’s also mandatory chargers every 50km on some highways but the law was passed years ago and the Spanish government is just now planning to build 3 charging stations as a trial. And that’s the leftist government we’re talking about. I can’t wait what will happen when the right wing party takes over in a year or two.
It EV are supposed to be a tool to make as dependent on shitty corpos like Google (you need Android phone to use chargers) I don’t want it. But there’s still chance EU’s regulation will take effect and it will be usable. We’ll see.
In Spain the government straight out said that they don’t care about the network, that private companies should solve it.
They can still legislate minimum number charging stations in parking lots and fine for lack of function. Just use find and replace on handicap parking laws.
Chargers at parking lots are very common and it’s not the problem. When you’re driving on a highway you don’t want to go to a parking in the center of the city to charger there. You will loose 30-60 minutes just to get in and out of the town. Chargers are needed at service stations that are next to the highway. In places like that you usually can’t put a fast charger just like that, you first need to adapt the grid. So the grid operator has to do some work first. So it should be planned and coordinated so that the charging network grows in a way that makes sense. As far as I know this wasn’t done.
Yeah, I’d like to see so legislation that says public-facing EV chargers must accept payments at the charging site without additional fees or use of an app. Charging apps should be a quality of life thing, not a mandatory data scraping scheme.
EU has this legislation but so far operators just ignore it. I was thinking about filing non-compliance report to EC but I think at this point it will be counter productive. It looks like Spain is pushing operators to install those so it’s better if they spend money to finance this rather than on fines.
I have an EV in Europe and for my next car I’m seriously considering going back to ICE. I really like the car but the charging network is shit. Pretty much none if it accepts card payments, you have to give all your personal info to like 10 different operators to move around. The network looks fine on a map but when you’re actually trying to find a charger a lot of them are out of order. You can’t trust it so I always look for a backup but this really complicates planning trips and range anxiety is still a thing. If things don’t improve in the coming year I will just get a gasoline car and consider EV again some time in the future.
Does your health insurance cover mobility too?
/s yes I know it’s “card” but took a while
That was my experience renting an EV for a month in Sweden a few months ago. Charging stations everywhere, but 1/4 of them wouldn’t accept my payment methods (US and Swedish credit cards), 1/4 were too slow to be worthwhile and 1/4 didn’t work at all. Most of them required me to install an app on my phone to input my credit card details (really stupid). There were many times I needed to charge in an unfamiliar town and I had to try three charging stations before I found one that worked for me. Loved driving that car but I hated charging it.
needing an app on your phone to do anything should be illegal. it should be optional but all meters should take cash or e payments w/o a phone
According to EU laws since 2024 every charger above 47kW/h has to accept card payment. This is being slowly rolled out. I know that Spain now offers financing for charging station operators to do the necessary changes. I already saw some stations modified to accept credit card. They also rolled out public website with a map of charging stations which is also a big improvement. It’s slowly moving in the right direction and EU definitely has a good idea about how it should work. That’s why I’m still split. I will see what happens this year.
that’s good news.
I have an idea to start scraping public data bout charger availability and provide some stats. Which operators are the least reliable, how long does it take to fix a charger on average, which chargers are broken most often and so on. This data in EU is public so it shouldn’t be that hard, I just have to finish another project first.
Blame das idiots at VW. Same problem in Canada with the Electrify network. If governments seriously want EVs, they need to get their thumbs out and treat charge infrastructure like they treated handicapped parking.
Overnight, under threat of real fines, handicapped parking was everywhere, and maintained.
In Spain the government straight out said that they don’t care about the network, that private companies should solve it. And they did, in the most corporate way possible, absolutely enshittified, terrible for users, great for profit. I really believe some of the companies keep their chargers as broken as possible to promote ICE cars.
EU passed some common sense laws (mandatory card payment, open APIs with availability info) but so far they were just ignored. There’s also mandatory chargers every 50km on some highways but the law was passed years ago and the Spanish government is just now planning to build 3 charging stations as a trial. And that’s the leftist government we’re talking about. I can’t wait what will happen when the right wing party takes over in a year or two.
It EV are supposed to be a tool to make as dependent on shitty corpos like Google (you need Android phone to use chargers) I don’t want it. But there’s still chance EU’s regulation will take effect and it will be usable. We’ll see.
They can still legislate minimum number charging stations in parking lots and fine for lack of function. Just use find and replace on handicap parking laws.
Chargers at parking lots are very common and it’s not the problem. When you’re driving on a highway you don’t want to go to a parking in the center of the city to charger there. You will loose 30-60 minutes just to get in and out of the town. Chargers are needed at service stations that are next to the highway. In places like that you usually can’t put a fast charger just like that, you first need to adapt the grid. So the grid operator has to do some work first. So it should be planned and coordinated so that the charging network grows in a way that makes sense. As far as I know this wasn’t done.
Yeah, I’d like to see so legislation that says public-facing EV chargers must accept payments at the charging site without additional fees or use of an app. Charging apps should be a quality of life thing, not a mandatory data scraping scheme.
EU has this legislation but so far operators just ignore it. I was thinking about filing non-compliance report to EC but I think at this point it will be counter productive. It looks like Spain is pushing operators to install those so it’s better if they spend money to finance this rather than on fines.