Charging

A BYD France engineer recorded 721.85 kW charging a Denza Z9 GT at an Atlante charger in Saint-Flour rated at 600 kW, going from 47% to 80% in four minutes. Europe's charging hardware now runs roughly three times ahead of what any Tesla can accept.

Tesla's Supercharger network scored 701 of 1,000 in J.D. Power's 2026 US public-charging study, down from 709, dropping from first to fourth behind IONNA (807), Mercedes-Benz (797) and Rivian (755). J.D. Power blames payment and cost factors, not reliability.

Ionity has opened its first London fast-charging hub at Greenwich Shopping Park: 12 bays rated up to 400 kW, live from 19 August 2026, with free charging for 24 hours from 21 August. It is the first of several the network plans for the capital. No Tesla can use the full 400 kW, so the value is bay count, not peak power.

A Close Brothers Motor Finance FOI of 17 English county councils found 39 of Hampshire's 157 public chargers unavailable — 27 switched off deliberately for low use — while Lancashire, West Sussex, Nottinghamshire and Essex hold no reliability data at all. Northumberland reports 97% uptime across 487 chargers, so the gap is management, not hardware.

A Tesla Model 3 at a Zunder site rated up to 400 kW in Villalpando, Spain sustained barely 50 kW on a hot day, peaking at 230 kW for seconds. Charger cabinets and cables derate to protect themselves when they run out of thermal headroom, Superchargers included, and Hungary's grid-side power caps are a separate squeeze on top.

Every Cadillac, Chevrolet and GMC electric vehicle will leave the factory with a native NACS port from the 2027 model year, ending the adapter requirement GM drivers have lived with since September 2024. Access covers more than 27,500 Superchargers. Nothing changes in Europe, where Tesla has always built to CCS2.

The Powered by E.ON Drive & Clever joint venture, 157 fast-charging points across 37 Nordic motorway sites, is being divided by country. Clever keeps Denmark, E.ON Drive Infrastructure takes Sweden and newcomer Uno-X Mobility takes Norway. From 1 September, Clever subscribers pay by card in Norway and Sweden.

ISO 15118-20 Amendment 1, published on 13 July 2026, finally specifies how a car's onboard charger can feed the grid in a grid-compliant way over AC. But the EU rule that makes ISO 15118-20 mandatory from 1 January 2027 was written before the amendment existed and cites the 2022 base version — and the German text of that rule mistranslates its scope as commercial vehicles only.

Claims are now open in a California class action over Supercharger idle fees billed to owners who had free lifetime Supercharging — including cases where Tesla disabled Supercharger access over the unpaid amounts. The deadline is 25 September 2026, and the settlement also commits Tesla to stop using charging access as a collection lever.

Fastned's H1 2026 results show charging revenue up 40% to €75.1 million, gross margin on charging up from 76% to 88%, and the net loss down 29% to €13 million. The Dutch operator now runs 434 stations in nine countries and says it is making more profit per kWh than a year ago — which is the number European drivers should watch, because it is the one their charging bills pay for.

Prague has pushed its streetlight-charging programme from the end of 2026 to 31 December 2028 after the first phase ran slower than planned and left money unspent. About 150 lamps get prepared this year, against roughly 4,500 charging points the city says it will need by 2030.

Bytom is the latest Polish Supercharger opened to non-Tesla EVs. The per-kWh price there depends on brand, a 50 zł monthly membership, the time of day and the site itself — a spread of roughly 1.1 to 2.4 zł/kWh.

A heatwave and a low Danube have cut output at Hungary's only nuclear plant, and MOL, E.ON, Shell and Metro are all limiting fast-charger power during the evening peak. Tesla instead cut Hungarian Supercharger prices to 80 Ft/kWh off-peak on 2 August — then quietly reverted to a 142 Ft/kWh peak structure a week later.

Hamburger Energiewerke Mobil has started deploying "Low-DC" chargers — Alpitronic Hypercharger 50 units delivering up to 50 kW — at street locations in Hamburg, with 13 more sites in planning or construction. According to NDR, they cost the same per kWh as AC charging, which makes them the best-value public charging in the city.

Dutch EV drivers are increasingly returning to public chargers to find their cable cut through. A replacement runs €300–400, while the copper inside is worth a few tens of euros to the thief — and nobody keeps national statistics.

All three opening rounds of Germany's heavy-truck charging subsidy were heavily oversubscribed: about €300 million on offer drew roughly 1,860 applications requesting over €1 billion. One round opened and closed on 5 June within hours, even after its budget was tripled from €50m to €150m the same day, and competition pushed approved rates to around half the €500-per-kW ceiling.

France ended July 2026 with 200,045 public charging points, or 297 per 100,000 inhabitants, according to the Avere-France barometer. The milestone comes with a warning: only 14,544 points were added in the first half of 2026 against 19,880 in the same period of 2025, and the 2030 target of 400,000 now needs more than 22,000 new points every six months.

A new map from Italian research body RSE finds just six operational heavy-vehicle charging sites in the whole country — two in Alto Adige, two in Emilia-Romagna, one in Veneto, one in Liguria — with nothing south of Emilia-Romagna and Sardinia absent entirely, against binding AFIR obligations.

Italy's Ministry of Culture is funding charge points at museums, libraries and monuments across seven southern regions, including CCS and MCS fast charging for tourist coaches and vehicle-to-grid units with solar and storage where the grid is weak. Submissions close 23 December 2026.

Since 1 August, Vattenfall InCharge has been installing 150 Dutch charge points whose parking bays are not reserved for electric cars — a deliberate trade of legal protection for a faster rollout.

DCI4Charge, a three-year German research project, has finished by demonstrating charging infrastructure connected straight into an industrial DC grid — cutting out conversion losses and letting parked fleet vehicles shave the site's consumption peaks.

The Adiconsum and TariffEV survey puts Italian public charging at €0.63/kWh on AC and €0.74/kWh on DC in July 2026. A reader who saw €30 taken for a 3 kWh session found out the hard way that the figure on the card is a pre-authorisation, not a price.

Automobile Propre spent a day counting real charging sessions at Montélimar on the A7 during France's holiday changeover. The average car pulled 81 kW for 29 minutes and took on 38 kWh — well below the headline peak power almost every one of them can accept.

From 1 September 2026, Italy's public charging service run by Enel X S.r.l. transfers to Enel Energia S.p.A. at unchanged prices. It closes out the Enel X Way plan for a separately listed e-mobility company, abandoned after Italian EV adoption stayed slow.