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Scolded by the VW boss:
Herbert Diess recently found the "charging experience" at an Ionity fast charging station not at all exciting - and he is not alone in that
Photo: Stefan Sauer / picture alliance / dpa
Before the latest "car summit", the last of the Angela Merkel era, Federal Transport Minister
Andreas Scheuer
(46) once again
caught the attention
with full-bodied announcements: In order to make the mass switch to electric cars more attractive to Germans, the federal government wants to promote a dense network of fast charging stations.
In the "Germany network", as the CSU politician calls it not immodestly, the "next fast charging station should be reachable in ten minutes". Among other things, Scheuer is currently launching a tender for 1000 more fast charging locations with several charging points until 2023. It is also likely that the increased purchase premium for electric cars will be extended until the end of 2025. The funding recently led to a surge in new registrations for battery and plug-in vehicles.
At the auto summit, however, only the exact structure of the "future fund" was decided - the one billion euro additional funding is intended to advance the shift to electromobility and digitization and cushion it for the workforce, especially in the "auto regions" of the republic.
While the large car manufacturers are already earning very good money and are likely to manage the changeover without government aid, the grant is primarily intended for suppliers and medium-sized companies in the car regions.
More registrations: the number of e-cars is growing faster than the number of charging stations
The current tender for 1000 more fast charging stations should meanwhile help to achieve the ambitious European climate protection goals.
However, there is a lot going on with the charging stations in particular - and the situation is noticeably worsening with increasing e-car registrations.
For months,
Hildegard Müller
(54), the head of the Association of the German Automotive Industry,
has been warning
that on average more and more cars have to share a charging station - the expansion of the charging infrastructure is therefore lagging behind the number of approvals.
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53 e-cars already have to share a public fast charging station
Of course, it is also true that a large part of the charging processes for e-cars takes place in domestic garages, in company parking lots or at comparatively slow charging stations in urban areas. However, the car manufacturers, above all Tesla, offer a variety of models with larger batteries that can travel several hundred kilometers on one battery charge. This means that fast charging at charging stations along highways is becoming more and more important. Because e-cars will only prevail on a broad scale if they are not much more difficult to handle than traditional vehicles with internal combustion engines, even on vacation and leisure trips.
A study by Strategy &, the strategy consulting subsidiary of the auditing and management consulting firm PwC, shows how tense the situation is. As of April 1, 2021, just under 418,000 all-electric cars were registered in Germany. According to PwC calculations, 52.8 electric cars are currently sharing a public fast charging station. In 2020 there were still 41.5 vehicles - so the expansion of the charging structure has nowhere near kept pace with the number of new registrations.
The PwC experts are already calculating fairly generously, assuming a charging power of more than 22 kW for fast charging stations. To put that into perspective: At a 22 kW fast charging station, a Tesla Model S with a 100 kWh battery would need a good six hours to fully charge from 0 to 100 percent battery level. Modern e-models such as VW's ID.3, Mercedes' EQA, Audi's E-Tron GT or Volvo's XC40 Recharge can handle charging powers of over 100 kW. At correspondingly fast charging stations, they can be fully charged in half an hour to an hour.
A total of around 40,000 normal charging points and only 6,700 fast charging points are currently in operation in Germany, according to a current list by the Federal Network Agency.
So there is still plenty of room for improvement when it comes to fast charging.
According to PwC calculations, the number of charging stations would have to be increased by a factor of 20 in order to keep pace with the rise in registrations of all-electric cars.
So it's no longer about a thousand fast charging stations, but about tens of thousands.
The four largest charging station operators have a market share of less than 50 percent
And that will be anything but easy.
Because the market for charging station providers in Germany is very fragmented.
There are actually hundreds of charging station operators - from small municipal utilities to large food discounters.
The situation is currently somewhat clearer for the operators of rapid charging stations, as this graphic of the largest providers shows:
However, the four largest operators of fast charging stations, EnBW, Allego, Ionity and Charge-On, together have a market share of well below 50 percent.
And the data collected by PwC also relate to charging stations with an output of over 22 kW - only some of the stations they operate can fully charge high-performance e-cars in a short time.
How many so-called HPC charging stations, i.e. charging stations with over 100 kW charging power, there are currently in Germany - that is not exactly easy to determine.
The Federal Network Agency's detailed charging station register is anything but clear and is probably reserved for Excel fans.
Of course, there are also a number of apps that can be used to set the required minimum charging power.
But every app works with different column operators, so it is difficult to get a complete picture this way.
Which location problem some charging station specialists have
There are also other problems that are well known among electric car drivers: The billing systems of the individual operators and apps are different. Depending on the selected payment method, any operator subscription or third-party app, you can pay 50 cents per kilowatt hour or even over one euro per kilowatt hour to one and the same fast charging station.
Numerous fast charging stations are not exactly in particularly attractive locations, but often far away from truck stops, toilet facilities or roofs. Even VW boss Herbert Diess recently discovered this: "No toilet, no coffee, a column out of order / defective, sad affair. This is anything but a premium charging experience, IONITY!", Diess recently criticized via LinkedIn after he had charging problems on an e-car tour to Lake Garda. The joke: The fast charging provider Ionity is a joint venture between the car manufacturers BMW, Ford, Hyundai, Daimler and the Volkswagen Group.
Ionity currently has more than 360 fast charging stations in operation across Europe, offering up to 350 kW charging power per charging point.
But the VW luxury brands Audi and Porsche are said to be so dissatisfied with the joint venture that, according to manager magazin information, they are already planning their own network of super-fast chargers.
Obviously, it is difficult for fast-charging specialists such as the Dutch company Fastned to secure attractive places on the autobahn in Germany.
Because so far, the majority have been awarded by Tank & Rast GmbH, which has almost all German motorway service stations and petrol stations.
Fastned CEO Michiel Langezaal complained to manager magazin at the end of May which of the 360 locations on German autobahns will receive a charging infrastructure.
Now politicians have at least some understanding and want to release a good 200 locations on motorway parking lots for charging infrastructure operators.
The problem with this is that motorway parking spaces are unmanaged, which means that most of the toilets are not particularly luxurious.
Fastned & Co can hardly offer a hot coffee there for the loading break.
After all, e-car drivers will probably have another fast-charging option from the end of this year: Tesla boss Elon Musk recently announced that the electric car pioneer would also open its Supercharger fast-charging network to vehicles from other manufacturers.
How Tesla then wants to prevent longer queues at its fast charging stations is not yet known.
One thing is certain: Funding 1000 fast charging stations will at most bring about a small alleviation of the charging bottleneck - it will not solve it.
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