A regional court in Munich has told a charging operator that it cannot sell electricity to a roaming provider for more than it charges its own app customers. The judgment landed on 6 October 2026, and it is the first German decision to put a number on a rule European charging has been arguing about since 2024.
What the court decided
Landgericht München I, case 33 O 2062/25, ruled against EWE Go, a German charge point operator, in a suit brought by Digital Charging Solutions — the company behind the charging services BMW and Mercedes-Benz sell to their drivers.
The prices at issue, per kWh at the same EWE Go hardware:
| Buyer | Price per kWh |
|---|---|
| EWE Go's own contract customers | €0.52 |
| Ad-hoc payers at the stall | €0.79 |
| DCS, under the "Offer2All" wholesale tariff | €0.837 |
The court held that EWE Go must offer DCS the €0.52 contract-customer rate. It also struck down a separate blocking fee EWE Go applied to DCS sessions but not its own.
Two further points give the ruling teeth. The court found EWE Go liable in principle for damages running back to 13 April 2024 — the date the relevant obligation took effect — with the amount to be settled in follow-on proceedings. And the judgment is a first-instance decision, so it can be appealed.
The rule it interprets
The legal basis is Article 5(3) of AFIR, the EU's Alternative Fuels Infrastructure Regulation. It bars operators from discriminating between end users and mobility service providers through the prices they charge, and permits price differentiation only where it is proportionate and objectively justified.
Until now that sentence had never been tested in a German court. Operators read it as leaving room for a normal B2B margin. DCS argued it meant what it says. The court sided with DCS, and in doing so inverted the usual commercial logic: the wholesale buyer moving large volume had been paying more than the retail customer, not less.
Why a European Tesla owner should care
Most European Tesla owners charge on Superchargers, where Tesla is the operator and sets the price directly. The ruling does not touch that.
It touches everything else. The moment a Tesla leaves the Supercharger network — on a motorway where the Ionity or EnBW site is the one with a free stall, or abroad on a card rather than an app — it is charging through exactly this structure: an operator selling to a service provider, who adds a margin and bills the driver. This site has measured that margin before, at €0.10 to €0.40 per kWh in Germany. The judgment attacks it at the wholesale end, which is the end a driver cannot see or shop around.
The same structural gap showed up when a German magazine priced a year of public charging across providers and found an €809 spread between the cheapest and dearest way to buy the same electricity.
What actually changes, and when
Nothing at the stall this week. One first-instance judgment against one operator does not reprice German charging, and EWE Go can appeal.
What it does is move the argument's starting point. Every German operator running a wholesale tariff above its own consumer price now has a court saying that arrangement needs an objective justification, and a retroactive damages exposure dated to April 2024 if it does not have one. Roaming providers have an obvious incentive to send letters.
For drivers the plausible outcome is narrower roaming premiums rather than cheaper charging outright — operators can satisfy the ruling by raising their own app prices as easily as by cutting wholesale ones. Which direction they pick will be visible in the tariff tables, and it is worth watching alongside the AFIR card-reader retrofit deadline in January 2027, the other part of the same regulation that is about to change what a charging stop looks like.