A spotty vehicle charging network across the continent poses a big challenge for convincing drivers to switch from petrol to electric cars, a key piece of the EU’s net zero climate plans.
Better battery technology might have eased “range anxiety,” but charging deserts with few plugs for Teslas or Polestars remain a real concern.
GridX counted 882,020 charging stations in total across the European Union, a far cry from the Commission’s goal to install a total 3.5 million charging points by 2030.
The report counted another 138,429 chargers in Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
“Reaching [the EU] target would mean installing around 410,000 public charging points per year – almost three times the latest annual installation rate,” warns the report from gridX.
The dearth of chargers means a trans-European road trip from, say, sunny Lisbon to the Polish city of Białystok by electric car remains a logistically complicated endeavour.
Car batteries have improved – the report calculates the average range of a fully charged European BEV at 389.3 km – but the charging network lags behind.
Driving the 3,550 km route from Portugal to Poland would require at least 10 charging stops along the way – if the chargers were conveniently located and optimally spaced.
Anyone actually planning such a trip and venturing away from the main motorways, however, would be well-advised to plot charging stops in advance.
Need for speed in buildout
Even hitting the EU’s 3.5 million target might not be enough to enable a full transition to electric vehicles. ACEA, an industry group for carmakers, contends that the number of charging points needed to meet decarbonisation targets could be as high as 8.8 million by 2030.
European countries recorded an overall 37% year-on-year increase in chargers from 2024 to 2025, although progress in building out charger infrastructure remains wildly uneven between different parts of Europe.
Congested power grids in many parts of Europe and the lack of a singular EU-wide authorisation process for installing vehicle chargers make it unlikely that the EU will come close to the industry touted figure by 2030.
“Grid connection delays, high costs and interoperability issues remain key hurdles throughout the continent”, hampering the expansion of public charging infrastructure, the energy management company gridX states.
GridX’s 2025 report, released on Monday, is based on recent public data as well as a survey of 200 drivers in Germany, the country with the highest number of high-speed charge points in Europe.
Vast differences in charging net density
Parts of Eastern and Southern Europe “showed significant growth” on expanding fast-charging infrastructure, according to the report. But those regions are also the parts of Europe that currently have the thinnest networks and the most catching up to do.
The Netherlands, Germany and France might be “well ahead of the rest of Europe” in terms of the overall number of charging points and growth, the report found, but Germany and France are only middle of the pack when it comes to metrics like charging points per capita or per 100 km of highway.
The Nordic countries come out on top by those metrics.
On average across Europe, there are now 12 chargers available per kilometre, but the density of charging infrastructure can be very unequally distributed even within a single country – something the European Commission acknowledged in its Automotive Action Plan.
Electric drivers tend toward short trips
The problem of “range anxiety” on battery capacity and charging deserts appears to be a chicken-and-egg problem for EVs, where both factors reinforce each other in the minds of potential owners.
The report’s survey found 73% of respondents use their electric cars mostly for short city trips, and nearly as many (70%) plan charging stops in advance. More than half of the respondents prefer to charge their car only at home, citing concerns over the cost of charging stations and other barriers to using charger networks such as subscriptions or tariffs.
(bts, jp)