The public charging network for electric cars is growing and continues to grow. In cities as well as along highways. Sometimes faster, sometimes slower. A recent report from Elvah shows where charging takes place particularly frequently and in large quantities – and what still needs to be improved.
In total, e-car drivers started more than 21 million public charging processes in the first half of 2024, filling their cars' batteries with 482 GWh of electricity. Almost a fifth – 90 GWh – of the total charging current was charged into e-cars at locations along the highways. The Eon subsidiary says it evaluated more than half a billion publicly available data for its analysis.
There is a clear market leader in fast charging using DC charging with more than 50 kW charging power: EnBW is in first place with a market share of 31 percent, which is mainly due to the fact that the company from Baden-Württemberg entered the charging market early and set up attractive locations along the motorways and near retailers. EnBW is even the market leader in DC charging in all 16 federal states. Aral Pulse (10 percent), Ionity (9 percent) and EWE Go (7 percent) are well behind. Among the 5 percent brands, Allego, Aldi Süd, Pfalzwerke, Eon, Fastned and Lidl complete the top ten.
The AC area with charging speeds below 22 kW is much more homogeneous, with regionally rooted municipal utilities and energy suppliers dominating due to the concept. Compleo leads the AC ranking with a market share of almost 9 percent, followed by Hamburger Energiewerke with 5 percent and EnBW with 4 percent. They are followed by Stadtwerke München, Berliner Stadtwerke, Ladeverbund+, Stadtwerke Düsseldorf, Lichtblick, TankE and Lidl.
Some people are sure to miss popular providers such as Tesla (more than 2,500 fast-charging points in Germany) and Shell (more than 400 fast-charging points) in the lists. Elvah points out that the two companies could not be considered in the report due to a lack of or difficulty in providing data. The authors assume that Tesla would rank between 3rd and 5th place and Shell between 8th and 10th place.
“To be honest, this is a real disgrace”
However, there is still room for improvement in terms of reliability: the fact that 11 percent of charging processes fail, or more than one in ten, should be remedied as soon as possible. However, the actual number of failed charging processes is likely to be significantly higher: failed charging processes in which the station does not respond at all are not included in these statistics, as Elvah explains.To be honest, this is a real disgrace. I would have thought that things would have improved significantly by now. This is something that needs to be worked on urgently so as not to play into the hands of those who are skeptical about electric cars.“, Dr. Till Gnann from the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research ISI is quoted as saying in the report.
E-car journalist Robin Engelhardt believes the crux of the matter lies primarily in the software.The cars are rarely the problem, it is more often the column that breaks down. It is rarely a real physical error, most of the time there is a problem somewhere in the software when paying.“Contactless payment by credit card, as now required by the AFIR, provides a solution here.
If you look at the charging processes per inhabitant of a federal state, the city state of Hamburg, which promotes e-mobility in many ways, is clearly ahead with 0.43 charging processes per inhabitant, followed by Baden-Württemberg, which is just ahead of Bavaria. The states at the bottom of the list in terms of per capita charging processes are Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt.
The most successful charging locations are also listed in the ranking, and some people might already have guessed who is at the top here – there are two locations of major car manufacturers, each with hundreds of AC charging points in one place: At the FIZ, BMW's research and innovation center in Munich, 881 MWh of electricity were charged into the batteries of electric cars. At Volkswagen AG's main location in Wolfsburg, the figure was only slightly lower at 876 MWh. In third place is Germany's most popular motorway location, and here too, some people may have a premonition: It is the charging park at the Hilden junction near Düsseldorf, where electric car drivers charged 739 MWh of energy.
An interesting point in Elvah's report is an operator's effectiveness factor. It shows how much the charge point operator (CPO) gets out of their charging infrastructure. The market share of charging processes is compared to the market share of the charging infrastructure. A value of more than 1 indicates that the market share of charging processes is higher than the market share of the charging infrastructure.
At the top of this effectiveness ranking is Ionity, which quickly handles 9 percent of charging processes with 3 percent of DC charging points, thus achieving an effectiveness factor of 3.1. Aldi Süd follows with an effectiveness factor of 2.2, Fastned achieves a factor of 1.9. Market leader EnBW has an efficiency factor of 1.6.
“There are no subscriptions at combustion engine filling stations either”
In the expert conclusion, e-car journalist Engelhardt criticizes the “CPO's 'lock-in' efforts through subscription models“, which in return for a monthly basic fee offer reduced kWh prices for subscribers. These are “from the point of view of companies, a sensible strategy, but in the long term a distortion of competition, which leads to the concentration of market power in the hands of a few large players“ Engelhardt would like to see it in the spirit of e-mobility “Welcome if the basic fees are generously buried again. There are no subscriptions at combustion engine filling stations.”
In its report, Elvah presents many other exciting insights into the German charging markets, such as detailed analyses for individual federal states and the ten motorways where the most energy was charged, also with detailed results. The charging market report is available to download free of charge from Elvah.
Source: Elvah – Charging Market Report
