EV Charging Report 2023

Norway is in a league of its own.

Norway. Norway is in a league of its own when it comes to e-mobility. The Scandinavian country has 538 CPs per 100,000 inhabitants. That’s 228 or 74% more than Luxembourg, the country ranking second with 310 CPs per 100,000 people. When it comes to EV adoption, Norway also compares to the rest of Europe like Haaland compares to the rest of the Premier League. In Norway, there are 11,197 EVs per 100,000 inhabitants. Again Luxembourg follows in second place and again the difference is huge – Luxembourg counts 2,262 EVs per 100,000 inhabitants.

Innovators. While far behind Norway, the innovators (Luxembourg, Sweden and the Netherlands) still have a notable lead on the rest of Europe. All three countries count between 1,819 (Netherlands) and 2,262 (Luxembourg) EVs per 100,000 inhabitants and also have a well-developed public charging infrastructure with 265 (Sweden) to 310 (Luxembourg) chargers per 100,000 people.

Early adopters. The early adopters have made some progress towards electrified transport. Denmark, for example, reports 1,930 EVs per 100,000 inhabitants – more than the Netherland’s 1,819 – but lags behind in terms of charging infrastructure, with just 156 CPs per 100,000 people (the Netherlands has 279).

Early majority. Electrification is underway but doesn’t quite match up with the previous categories. Germany, for example, ranks well for EV adoption (6th) but only comes 11th for CPs per capita.

Late majority. Just ahead of the laggards, e-mobility is just emerging in the late majority.

Laggards. With 12 countries, the laggards are  by far the biggest group and show delayed e-mobility progress. None of them count more than 283 EVs or 59 CPs per 100,000 inhabitants. Interestingly, all countries in this group are either in the east or south of Europe.

Capacity varies significantly across the continent

Norway’s undisputed lead distorted the scale so much here that we had to adjust it slightly to make comparisons more apparent:

• There are notable differences within countries. There is a lot of variety even within countries: Austrian charging infrastructure is far denser in the west; Switzerland has more capacity per capita in the south; Scotland differs notably from the rest of the UK; and the northern Belgium region, Flanders, is notably darker than the rest of the country. Germany and France also have high variances, however, there appears to be no obvious pattern to it.
• Capitals are no good for charging. The capital regions in France, Belgium, the UK, Sweden, Switzerland and Germany all rank last for charging capacity per capita in their country, making them unideal locations for public charging.
• Eastern Europe lags behind. While Czechia, Slovakia, Slovenia and Hungary fall in the middle range, Poland, Bulgaria and Romania are significantly lighter. In fact, out of the 58 regions that have less than 100 kW of charging capacity per 100,000 inhabitants, 19 are in Romania, 18 in Poland, nine in Bulgaria, seven in Greece and two in Croatia, two in the UK (both in London – see previous point) and one in Lithuania.

Different charging operators have different focuses

The charging speeds between operators vary significantly. Three distinct groups are apparent in the violin plot:

• HPC focus: IONITY and Aral Pulse have a strong – if not sole – focus on HPC. More than 80% of their chargers supply 100 kW or more.
• Mixed: Tesla and EnBW have a diverse portfolio of chargers in their networks. They each have notable  clusters  of slow medium and fast chargers, with a relatively even spread below and above 100 kW. Almost half of of Tesla’s chargers (48%) and a third of EnBW’s (34%) are HPC points.
• Destination focus: In the other networks lower power chargers dominate. The share of HPC points ranges from 15% (Recharge) to 1% (Enel X).