Siemens and OMV put the first SICHARGE FLEX charging system into service on 29 September 2026, at an OMV station in Kufstein, Austria. It is a shared car-and-truck site on the Brenner route, and it is the first time Siemens' modular high-power platform has run at a public station anywhere.
The headline figure attached to it is 1.2 megawatts. That number is real, but it is not what opened this week.
What is actually built
| Now | After expansion | |
|---|---|---|
| Points for cars | 4, up to 400 kW | 4 |
| Points for trucks | 2, up to 400 kW | 2, plus 4 MCS points |
| Truck peak power | 400 kW | 600 to 1,200 kW |
| Standard | CCS | CCS, plus Megawatt Charging System |
Six DC points are live, four of them for passenger cars, each rated to 400 kW. The four Megawatt Charging System points that carry the 1.2 MW number are a later phase, they are for trucks, and Siemens has not dated them. Its worked example is a 620 kWh truck battery going from 20 to 80 per cent in about 45 minutes.
SICHARGE FLEX itself spans 480 kW to 1.68 MW depending on how a site is configured — the point of the product is that an operator can add power to an existing cabinet rather than rebuild the site. "SICHARGE FLEX is a scalable solution that can be precisely configured for a variety of use cases," said Markus Mildner, CEO of Siemens eMobility. OMV has ordered more systems for other Austrian locations, with commissioning over the coming months, and it runs networks in Austria, Hungary, Slovakia and Romania.
400 kW is more than your car will take
This is the part to be honest about. A Model 3 or Model Y peaks at around 250 kW, and only briefly, at a low state of charge and a warm battery. Four hundred kilowatts at the stall does not make a Tesla charge faster than 250 kW — the car is the limit, not the post. We made the same point about Czechia's first 600 kW charger at the Austrian border.
What a headroom figure does buy is behaviour under load. A 400 kW cabinet feeding a car asking for 250 kW is not straining, so the session is less likely to be throttled when the stall next door is busy — which on a transit corridor in August is the failure mode that actually costs time.
Why Kufstein
Kufstein sits on the A12 just inside Austria from the German border, on the road every German and Dutch driver takes to Italy. It is the approach to the Brenner, one of the busiest freight crossings in the Alps, and the single stretch where holiday traffic and heavy goods traffic compete for the same chargers.
That combination is the argument for a shared site. It is also the argument for the MCS phase: the Brenner is exactly the kind of route Tesla's European Semi plans will need megawatt charging on, and Tesla has so far framed its own European Semi charging as a business offering rather than public infrastructure. Megawatt hardware arriving on a public forecourt, from a fuel retailer, is a different model — and it is ahead of the trucks that would use it.
What a European driver should take from this
If you are driving to Italy, there are now four 400 kW stalls at Kufstein that are not a Supercharger, take CCS, and sit at a staffed fuel station. Note the thing the test teams keep raising: ad-hoc card payment at the stall becomes a legal requirement across the EU under the AFIR retrofit deadline in January 2027, and new-build sites are where that gets easy.
The megawatt number is a promise about trucks. The 400 kW is a fact about this week.