Charging

On 12 October 2026 Tesla Charging said its V4 Supercharger cabinets can now communicate directly with PG&E's systems over IEEE 2030.5, joining the utility's Flex Connect flexible-interconnection programme: sites open on existing grid capacity, run at full power when there is room and are de-rated in constrained hours set a day ahead. The 48-stall Santa Nella site has run this way since 2024; pilot sites open in October 2026 with a wider Northern California rollout to follow, and Tesla expects typical projects to open more than two years sooner. Grid connection is the same bottleneck in Europe.

Paren's third-quarter report, published on 13 October 2026, counts 4,106 new US fast-charging ports and a national total of 80,964. Tesla built more than any other network but its share of all ports slipped from 54.3% to 49.3% in a year, and Paren says Tesla alone accounts for the rise in the national average price: its non-member rate is up 15% to $0.569 per kWh and its member rate up 9% to $0.396, while non-Tesla networks have held near $0.533 for five quarters.

Mercedes-Benz opened its first bidirectional home-charging package in Germany on 12 October 2026. MB.CHARGE Home Pro Intelligent pairs an 11 kW DC ChargeLine Bidi wallbox from The Mobility House, EUR 1,990 for the first 500 customers until the end of March 2027 and EUR 2,990 after, with a fixed-price electricity contract that pays 11.75 cents for every hour the car is plugged in, about EUR 500 a year at twelve hours a day. The electric GLC and the new C-Class qualify first. The offer needs a smart meter, excludes homes that consume their own solar power for now, and has no equivalent on any Tesla sold in Europe.

Powerwall and Wall Connector firmware 26.34 adds Smart Charging. In Savings mode the Wall Connector charges from the cheapest energy; in Self-Powered mode it charges on surplus solar but still works to a charging target by your departure time, the floor that app strings pointed to in September.

E.ON Drive Infrastructure has taken over BP's former Dutch fast-charging network — 79 sites and 370 Alpitronic charge points of up to 300 kW, mostly at OK fuel stations — and runs it under the Essent brand. Essent card holders get 10 cents per kWh off for an unspecified launch period, and no standard tariff has been published.

ANWB's summer 2026 study of more than 600,000 charge cards and 4.8 million sessions finds charging abroad more predictable: sessions above €1 per kWh fell from 25% to 9% in Switzerland and from 16% to 9% in Austria, and Austrian blocking costs dropped 98% from 2024. Blocking fees remain common in France, Italy and Poland increasingly add parking charges, and one Paris session cost more than €400, mostly in blocking fees.

A USCALE survey of 2,507 German EV drivers who charge in public, published on 7 October 2026, finds 88% of Tesla drivers use the Supercharger network but only 13% of other drivers do, and just 3% use it as their preferred service. Major utilities such as EnBW hold 32% of non-Tesla drivers' preference, while Tesla's charging scores a net promoter score of 52, second of 17 services.

Ionity's Summer 2026 Hot List puts Affi, on the A22 at the southern end of the Brenner corridor near Lake Garda, top of its European network at an average 202 drivers a day and a 33-minute session. That is about 50% more daily drivers than the 2025 winner, and the top five are all on long-distance holiday routes rather than in cities.

Landgericht München I ruled on 6 October 2026 that EWE Go may not bill Digital Charging Solutions €0.837/kWh while charging its own contract customers €0.52. It is the first German judgment applying the AFIR non-discrimination rule to charging prices, it also voids a DCS-only blocking fee, and it opens damages back to 13 April 2024.

ChargePointRadar's Lademarkt-Report for Q3 2026, published on 6 October, counts about 24.5 million charging sessions across more than 175,000 German public charge points. Tesla is second in DC sessions on 15.2%, behind EnBW on 28.6%, and second in sessions per active charge point on 659.5.

A Tesla guide published on 1 October 2026 explains demand charges to Supercharger for Business hosts and says moving a stall from one session a day to five can cut average energy cost by more than half. The payback figures in Tesla's own April calculator already assume a busier site than that.

Roadchef and bp agreed on 30 September 2026 to put bp pulse ultra-rapid charging at more than 30 UK motorway service areas from 2027, with Roadchef taking over 12 bp forecourts. Neither party has said what happens to GRIDSERVE, its charging partner since 2023.

Honda R&D, with Taisei Corporation and Taisei Rotec, announced an in-motion wireless charging road on 5 October 2026 delivering up to 150 kW. It claims the world's first ground unit integrating inverter and coil, linked by DC distribution and designed to retrofit into milled existing pavement rated for 20-tonne trucks. Public-road demonstrations start in Japan's 2027 fiscal year.

Vattenfall InCharge says the energy drawn from its German public network is up about 65% since January, and that its fast chargers passed 10 GWh by the end of August, roughly 47% more than the whole of 2025. The company used the figures to argue against a German fuel rebate. What it did not publish is how many charge points it now runs, which is what separates busier chargers from more chargers.

E.Leclerc cuts AC charging to €0.17/kWh from Monday 5 October 2026, one cent below Lidl, at 22 kW points in 330 French stores via the Charge E-Lec app with no subscription. The rate excludes rapid charging and covers a minority of Leclerc's 3,000-plus charge points, and a European Model 3 or Model Y can draw only 11 kW from a 22 kW post.

Polestar launched two Polestar Charge subscriptions on 2 October 2026: Plus at EUR 7.99 a month for 15 per cent off fast charging at EnBW, Shell Recharge, Vattenfall, Mer and Fastned, and Pro at EUR 14.99 for 30 per cent plus Ionity and Allego. The discounts cover 104,000 and 118,000 points in Europe, out of a 1.25 million-point roaming network that includes Tesla Superchargers at no discount on any tier.

Siemens and OMV commissioned the first SICHARGE FLEX system on 29 September 2026 at an OMV station in Kufstein, Austria, on the Brenner corridor. Six DC points are live — four for cars, two for trucks, each up to 400 kW — with four Megawatt Charging System points at 600 to 1,200 kW to follow in a later, undated phase.

connect and umlaut published their eighth annual charging test on 1 October 2026, covering 17 providers across Germany, Austria and Switzerland over about 6,700 km. Tesla's roughly 3,500 German charge points were not rated, because older Superchargers still require the Tesla app for other brands. On tariffs, the gap between the best and worst contract reaches EUR 809 a year.

From 15 October 2026 GreenWay charges according to the country you are charging in, not the country your account is registered in. Slovak-registered accounts lose a roughly 14% advantage at Polish ultra-fast chargers, where they had been paying 2.58 PLN/kWh against a local 2.99 PLN/kWh.

Tesla's Q3 2026 charging update reports 69 million Supercharger sessions and 2.4 TWh delivered, both up 29% year on year, with about 2,700 new stalls and 28.9 TWh delivered all-time. The 7.0 GWh it broke out for the Robotaxi fleet is 0.29% of the quarter - but Tesla's own comparison to 146,000 Cybercab charges implies a pack of roughly 48 kWh.

Tesla has launched Emergency Drive Away in firmware 2026.38.3, letting drivers pull out of a Supercharger bay with the cable still attached. It works by accepting damage to the car and the charger rather than by speeding up a safe disconnect, it uploads camera footage to Tesla, and it is US-only for now.

From 1 October 2026, Energie 360° Mobilität, Gofast, Swisscharge and Move Mobility merge into Joya Mobility AG — 7,500 public charging points including more than 1,800 fast chargers, making it Switzerland's biggest CPO from day one. Plug & Charge is promised by 2027 and cross-border roaming has no date.

Ladesonne's charging park at the Autohof Schwarmstedt on the A7 prices electricity at 29 ct/kWh whenever an adjacent 4.6 MWp solar park is supplying it, and follows the spot market when it is not. That is about half Germany's 59-cent median for public DC charging.

Two Tesla patents published on 1 October 2026, filed in March, cover foreign-object detection on an inductive charging pad — one using embedded temperature sensors, the other reading resonant-frequency shifts to tell a dropped coin apart from a warm day. The target is the Cybercab, not customer cars.