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this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2026
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That’s just the perception of people who’ve never driven an electric car themselves in recent years.
The availability of charging stations in Germany has improved dramatically since 2023: from 10,000 to over 55,000 fast-charging stations. Whether at rest stops, supermarkets, public parking lots, or at work, you can find one just about anywhere. There are hardly any regions left where you can’t find a fast-charging station (≥ 150 kW) within 10 km.
After driving over 40,000 km in two years, I’ve never had to switch charging stations due to a technical malfunction.
And just like with cell phone plans, you only need to register for a charging card once, and it covers 99% of your needs. You don’t need a bunch of different providers, and you don’t have to use an app at all if you don’t want to.
As for prices: With a monthly base fee of 12 €, there are plans starting at 39 cents per kWh, and without a base fee, prices are around 50 cents per kWh, which I consider reasonable.
This base fee system is stupid af and should be made illegal. Charging stations should work like a petrol station, you charge, you tap your card (idc if its before or afterwards) and everyone pays the same. And at least with charging stations interday fluctuations can make sense.
I wouldn't say this should be illegal. What should be illegal is the huge difference between ad-hoc charging, registered, roamed and subscribed charging.
Could be that subscribed charging costs 0,35€, registered 0,45€, ad-hoc 0,49€ and roaming 0,78€ for some reason. A spread of 50% would be acceptable but not 222%.
But why? The subscription is only to force a vendor lock in and spy on me, it serves no purpose but to extract more value from me while simultaneously bothering me. There is no reason to allow such a system.
Good point. It allows lower prices and load distribution, e.g. how Tesla does it.
Maybe we could regulate it so that the roaming and ad-hoc price mustn't be different and mustn't be more than 150% of what the cheapest non-flatrate charging tariff would be?
I drove 60.000km in 2 years and I definitely had issues. Your account is highly anecdotal.
The charging infrastructure in Germany is awful.
Amid all these facts, you single out the one paragraph where I mentioned my personal experience and counter it with your own anecdotal evidence? Please try a little harder.
Try harder what? I just wanted to give a counterpoint to a single argument. Your miles driven don't say much. I don't care about the rest of your comment, at this time. That's a valid way to answer to a comment online, and it doesn't mean your whole post is wrong.
Not everyone is out to get you. Sometimes someone just points out your bias to you and you have to accept it. But yes, let me try harder.
This seems to suggest charging satisfaction is 87%, a few percentage points above average (82%) in Germany: https://www.rolandberger.com/en/Insights/Publications/EV-Charging-Index-Expert-insight-from-Germany.html
87% is still quite low. Bad even, in my opinion. Imagine, that means that every 8th charge has some issue. I have had way fewer issues on gas stations back when I still drove an ICE car. I'd say my gas station satisfaction rate with the tech is approximately 99.5%, and my satisfaction rate with EV chargers is approx. 80%. Approx. every fifth charge there's an issue. It's annoying.
I have written several emails and tickets and reported issues to charging providers. It got better compared to 2021-2022 (I'd say my satisfaction was about 70% then? Matches the linked article), even a lot better than in 2018 (jeez, every second charge then had an issue), but I'm still not happy with public infrastructure, by a long shot.
I'm driving in lots of different countries (FR, DK, CZ, PL) and Bundesländer (mainly BW, NRW, RP, BY, HE) though, which means I have lots of (12?) different apps and two contracts with monthly subscriptions (EnBW and MVV).
I wouldn't ever go back to an ICE car, and EVs are the future, but I would also not want to give any wrong impressions. Germany's charging network still has a long way to go. I'd say it has approx. 10 percentage points to go, anything more than every 20th charge having an issue (95% satisfaction) is unacceptable and German politicians should feel bad for that.
To be honest, I wasn't expecting such a nuanced answer. Thanks for that! It's much easier to just spout an opinion than to actually look up some facts.
When it comes to electric vehicles, I just get worked up really quickly because I keep hearing these statements that discourage others from trying it out for themselves. I especially wanted to set the record straight on these exaggerated claims:
Of course there is room for improvement but nowadays it's just not as bad as stated there.
You really do seem to be a power user, and I recognise that your experiences have been different from mine. It just surprises me that you seem to run into difficulties so often. It might be because I don’t see it as a big deal if, on very rare occasions, I have to switch to a charging point right next to it if the first one doesn’t work straight away. As long as I don’t have to drive to a completely different location, it’s no problem for me.
Regarding your satisfaction report: I couldn't find the exact questions that were asked. Therefore, I can't tell whether there were serious technical issues or if people simply said there could be more options for buying coffee nearby. (Actually, I can’t explain to myself why more businesses haven’t set up shop near charging points.)
I'm an electrical engineer and I don't have any tolerance for needing to climb up on a charging point at -10⁰C weather in the middle of the Black Forest to remove snow, so that the antenna of the thing can contact its mothership, to generously allow me to pay for their 0,53€/kWh juice to my nearly stranded car with 0% charge, and nobody around in a 5km radius at 4am.
My issue is not that it doesn't work every 8th or 10th charge. My issue is the aforementioned enshittification: that these things are totally preventable by better engineering, e.g. running cables from to the Telekom box in 100m distance, by using multiple modems and LoRA, by directly reporting faulty chargers to common backends, by standardising payment APIs, ...
Imagine a world where your route planner automatically includes charging stops for the most efficient use of your time with the most efficient uses of your subscriptions. Imagine autocharge when you plug in your car and it automatically selects the best charging tariff. Imagine a cap on energy prices so that you're not surprised by 0,80€ when you expected 0,40€. The technology is there! We could have that! But I'm pretty sure there will be an https://xkcd.com/927 situation for the next 20 years until some politician steps in and regulates this.
Idk. It's exaggerated but I generally agree with the sentiment. Let me try to fix it:
Third party chargers are partly enshittyfied in Germany, with high prices, a few dozen different providers, every other one coercing you to use their shitty app, often with slow charging and unreliable service.
That sounds much better to me. The other version just sounded like fear-mongering by the diesel lobby.