The German magazine connect and the engineering consultancy umlaut published their eighth annual charging test on 1 October 2026. Test teams drove roughly 6,700 kilometres between late July and early September, assessed fast-charging sites from 17 providers across Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and priced every tariff as it stood on 18 September.
Tesla is not in the results — despite operating around 240 Supercharger sites with about 3,500 charge points in Germany, and having opened most of them to other brands. On the Bundesnetzagentur's own count that makes it the third-largest charging network in the country.
Why Tesla was not rated
The reason is access, not charging quality. Older Superchargers are built around Tesla's own cars: a driver of another brand has to start the session in the Tesla app, and pays more than a Tesla owner does. Only the newest generation of sites supports ad-hoc payment at the stall itself — which is the baseline the test applies to every other operator. On that basis the testers concluded Tesla's network cannot be fully compared with conventional charge point operators, and left it unscored.
That is a defensible call, and it is also a finding in its own right. Card and ad-hoc payment at the stall is not a reviewer's preference; it is what the AFIR retrofit deadline makes law across the EU in January 2027. A network that cannot be benchmarked today on that criterion has a date by which it must satisfy it anyway.
Who won
| Category | Winner | Score |
|---|---|---|
| Charge point operators (Germany) | Aral Pulse | 853/1000, "very good" — fourth win in a row |
| Charging services and apps | EnBW Mobility+ | 851/1000, "very good" — eighth win in a row |
| Austria | Smatrics EnBW | — |
| Switzerland | Ionity | — |
For spontaneous AC charging without a contract, Aldi Sued, Kaufland and Lidl finished level, with Aldi Sued also leading on spontaneous HPC — the same supermarket price pressure visible in Lidl's 59p rapid tariff in Great Britain.
There is no single best tariff
The sharper half of the test is the pricing analysis, and its central conclusion is that the right contract depends entirely on how you charge.
| Driver profile | Cheapest tariff, cost per year | Most expensive tariff, cost per year |
|---|---|---|
| Street parker, no home charging | Mercedes MB.Charge Public L — EUR 1,043 | Vattenfall — EUR 1,852 |
| Average driver | EWE Go — EUR 372 | — |
| High-mileage driver | Mercedes MB.Charge Public M — EUR 1,790 | ADAC eCharge — EUR 2,425 |
The EUR 809 headline is the spread for one profile only: a driver with no home charger, paying EUR 1,043 on the best contract and EUR 1,852 on the worst. Note also that the two Mercedes wins are different tariffs — the L plan suits the street parker, the M plan the high-mileage driver. One brand does not win across the board; one product never does.
connect has not published the mileage or kWh assumptions behind each profile, so treat the absolute figures as the test's own model rather than a quote for your driving.
What this means for a Tesla owner in Germany
If you charge mostly at home and use Superchargers on trips, none of this changes your bill. If you have no home charger, it may well be the most useful table you read this year — and the relevant comparison is not Supercharger against Supercharger, but your current roaming contract against the cheapest one for your pattern. Tesla's absence from the ranking means the test cannot tell you how the Supercharger network itself scores on reliability or payment; our survey of German charging-hub pricing covers the cost side of that question.