Lidl France Cut AC Charging to 18 Cents a kWh. A Tesla Can Only Take Half the Power.

Lidl cut the price of alternating-current charging at its French stores to €0.18/kWh on 18 September, down from €0.29. That is a 38% reduction and, on the French trade press's reading, the cheapest public charging rate in the country. It needs the Lidl Plus app; without it the old €0.29 still applies.

What the tariff looks like now

Lidl's published base tariff — what anyone pays walking up with a roaming card — is unchanged at €0.29 AC and €0.39 DC. What moved is the app price. The network runs to more than 5500 charging points across more than 1000 French stores, and billing is per kWh only: no session fee, no connection fee, no idle fee.

What a Tesla actually gets out of it

Less than the headline suggests, and this is worth understanding before driving to a Lidl for it.

A 22 kW AC post delivers 22 kW only to a car that can take it. European Model 3 and Model Y ship with an 11 kW onboard charger, so 11 kW is the ceiling — the post's remaining capacity is unreachable. Older Model S and Model X cars with the 16.5 kW charger do somewhat better.

At 11 kW and €0.18/kWh, a half-hour shop adds roughly 5.5 kWh for about one euro. That is a genuinely cheap top-up and a useless way to fill a car: adding 50 kWh would take four and a half hours.

So the honest use case is incidental rather than planned. An hour-long weekly shop is about 11 kWh for €2, against roughly €6.50 for the same energy at a French Ionity post, where the rate is €0.59/kWh. It is not a Supercharger substitute on a long drive, and for most owners it will not beat charging at home overnight.

The same playbook in two markets

France is the second Lidl network to cut prices this month. In Britain, Lidl dropped rapid charging to 59p/kWh on 9 September on the same app-only basis. Both cuts share a structure: a headline rate gated behind Lidl Plus, with the walk-up price left exactly where it was. The app is the product being priced, not only the electricity.

The French move is the more aggressive of the two in relative terms, and it is the AC rate rather than the DC rate that moved — which is consistent with a grocery network pricing for dwell time rather than competing with motorway charging.

What is not settled

Availability varies. Not every French Lidl has chargers, and the app shows whether a post is free but does not let anyone reserve one.

Nor has Lidl said whether €0.18 is permanent. There is precedent for it not being: an earlier Lidl France discount that took DC charging from €0.39 to €0.29 ran for a fixed window, 24 March to 17 April 2026, and then expired. The September announcement carries no end date, but it carries no commitment either. Anyone planning around the rate should treat it as the current price rather than a standing one.