Germany counts its charge points obsessively and its charging sessions far less often. A quarterly report published on 6 October 2026 does the second thing, and it rearranges the league table.
ChargePointRadar's Lademarkt-Report for the third quarter of 2026 evaluates status data from more than 175,000 publicly accessible AC and DC charge points in Germany, capturing roughly 24.5 million charging sessions between July and September.
Direct current does the work
The headline finding is a ratio. DC accounts for about a third of German charging infrastructure and 70.9% of all sessions.
| Measure | DC | AC |
|---|---|---|
| Share of sessions | 70.9% | 29.1% |
| Average sessions per charge point, Q3 | 305.5 | 59.9 |
That is roughly five times the throughput per point. The two curves are moving differently, though: AC sessions grew from 2.19 million in July to 2.56 million in September, up 17.1%, while DC peaked in August at 5.90 million and slipped 4.6% by September — a summer-travel pattern rather than a structural turn.
Who handles the DC sessions
| Operator | Share of DC sessions | Sessions per active charge point |
|---|---|---|
| EnBW | 28.6% | 513.0 |
| Tesla | 15.2% | 659.5 |
| Ionity | 8.1% | 894.1 |
EnBW ran about 4.95 million sessions, nearly double Tesla's. The top five operators together handled 63% of DC sessions. But the right-hand column ranks differently from the left: Ionity leads on intensity, Tesla is second, and EnBW — first by volume — is fourth.
The number that makes this a Tesla story
Divide Tesla's share by its per-point figure and the network behind it falls out. Tesla's 15.2% of roughly 17.4 million DC sessions is about 2.6 million; at 659.5 sessions per active point, that implies somewhere near 4,000 active DC points.
That matches the German regulator's register almost exactly. The Bundesnetzagentur count TeslAnt reported in September put Tesla third among 12,914 registered operators with 3,951 publicly accessible points, behind EnBW mobility+ on 12,464 and E.ON Drive on 4,942.
So compare like with like. That register, read on 1 August 2026, counted 55,665 DC points above 22 kW out of 212,064 public points nationally. Tesla's 3,951 — effectively all of them Superchargers — is 7.1% of Germany's fast-charging hardware, and this report credits it with 15.2% of the fast-charging sessions. Roughly one DC point in fourteen, better than one DC session in seven.
Why the intensity ranking looks like that
The three operators at the top of the per-point column have little else in common, which is the useful part. Ionity is a motorway-corridor network with few sites and high dwell pressure on each one — the siting strategy that produces the highest sessions-per-point figure, and also the pricing complaints TeslAnt documented in a 47% gap between two Ionity sites in different countries. EnBW has built hardest into urban sites, where a point serves fewer long-distance drivers.
Tesla sits between them with a corridor-first network that has been opening to non-Tesla drivers across Germany for years. Utilisation of that kind is what Tesla's own charging business says keeps a site cheap to run — the company published guidance to its Supercharger for Business hosts on exactly that mechanism five days before this report landed.
One caveat on the quarter-on-quarter reading
ChargePointRadar's second-quarter cut covered about 13.7 million transactions at DC points of at least 100 kW, and put EnBW on 27.2% and Tesla Deutschland on 13.4%. The Q3 figures sit on a broader DC pool. The two quarters are close enough to suggest Tesla gained ground, but they are not a like-for-like series, and a one-to-two-point share move is inside the margin that the change of scope alone could explain.
What it means for a European driver
The practical reading is simpler than the tables. The Supercharger network is a small fraction of Germany's charge points and a large fraction of the charging that actually happens at speed — and on this data it works its hardware harder than the operator with three times as much of it. A network that busy is also, on Tesla's own account of site economics, the kind that stays cheap to run.