The unsung hero: Europe installs 2.5 million Type 2 chargers a year.

Until this month, the best-selling wallbox brand in Germany carried a Volkswagen badge. On 3 November Elli, VW’s charging arm, said it would stop selling it. Remaining stock will be sold off, no new orders taken, and talks with the works council have started. Elli’s chief executive was careful to say sales weren’t the problem. The problem, he told electrive, was that unidirectional wallboxes no longer fit “the desired scalability”.

A week later Zaptec, a company from Stavanger that has done nothing but chargers since 2016, announced its millionth installation. That’s the AC charger market in one fortnight: Europe’s biggest carmaker walks out, and a Norwegian specialist cuts the cake.

The Type 2 charger is the least glamorous object in the industry. It doesn’t do 400 kW, nobody opens one with a ribbon, and most of them hang on garage walls where no data feed will ever find them. It’s also where most of Europe’s charging actually happens. So we counted it: the public points in our own data, the private ones nobody registers, the companies that make them, and the ones that have stopped.

The short version

• The charger that does the work. Most European charging happens on AC, at home or at work. Four in five of the EU’s public charge points are AC as well, but public AC is mostly a parking product: a car is plugged into a Dutch public AC bay 21% of the month, and the bay turns over less than once a day.
• About 2.5 million a year. Our estimate puts 2025 AC installations in Europe at roughly 2.5 million, eleven private for every public one. LCP Delta’s independent count is 2.4 million sold. That’s a hardware market of €1.1–1.6 billion, and €3–6 billion once the electrician is included.
• Public AC has peaked. New public AC points in the EU fell from 193 000 in 2024 to 123 000 in 2025, while DC held steady. The growth has moved behind the front door and into car parks, where an EU deadline lands on 1 January 2027.
• China hasn’t won it. Chinese makers list a quarter of the AC models in our catalogue. Where registries name the installed hardware, they’re 7% of public AC points in Greece and under 1% in Norway, against 30% of Greek DC. All ten best-selling AC brands in Europe last year were European.
• The shakeout is European against European. A basic wallbox fell from €1 000 to €200–500 in a few years. Elli, EVBox, Pod Point, ABL and Compleo have since quit, been sold cheaply or been through insolvency. Zaptec and Easee are growing 30–40% a year.
• Our read: the box has become a commodity, and the winners sell everything around it: the installer network, load balancing for shared buildings, and the tariff. Elli kept the tariff. That tells you where it thinks the money is.

The full story

The charger that does the work

Ask German EV drivers where they charge most often and 63% say at home. Work comes next at 11%, then urban fast chargers at 10% and public AC points at 7% (E.ON and Civey, October 2026). Across the markets the IEA tracks, EV owners charge privately almost three-quarters of the time. Nearly all of that is AC: a wallbox in the garage, a post in the office car park, a socket in the shared basement.

On the public network AC wins the headcount and loses the workload. Four in five public charge points in the EU were AC in mid-2026, according to the Commission’s observatory. Yet in Germany’s third quarter, DC points handled 71% of all public sessions from about a third of the infrastructure, with 306 sessions per DC point against 60 per AC point (ChargePointRadar).

That isn’t AC failing. It’s a different product. A public AC bay sells a parking space with electricity attached, and its customer is usually asleep or at their desk. In September a car was plugged into the average Dutch public AC bay 21% of the time, more than twice the share at a Dutch DC bay. But the AC bay saw 0.66 sessions a day, each lasting almost eight hours. The DC bay saw four, each lasting about half an hour.

The long plug-in is what makes AC useful to everyone except the operator. It’s why AC suits a car that sits overnight, and why it’s the obvious place to start feeding the grid back from parked cars. It’s also why the business case for a public AC post leans on parking fees and city concessions, not kilowatt-hours.

About 2.5 million a year, and most of them behind a front door

Nobody counts private chargers. Germany has no register for them. Britain stopped counting when it stopped paying homeowners a grant in 2022. The Dutch figure is an estimate. So we built our own: new plug-in cars, times the share that get a home charger, plus workplaces and depots, plus the public points we can see.

The hinge is how many new plug-in cars get a home charger. In Britain, 353 000 home chargers went in last year against 698 000 new plug-in cars, almost exactly one for two (Barbour ABI). In the Netherlands it was 185 000 against 230 000, helped by company cars that come with a charger. One in two is our working ratio for Europe, lower in countries where most people live in flats.

The answer for 2025 is about 2.5 million AC charge points, somewhere between 1.9 and 3.1 million. Almost four in five went into homes, one in seven into workplaces and depots, and fewer than one in ten onto the public network. LCP Delta, which collects manufacturers’ sales figures, puts 2025 at 2.4 million sold, close enough that we sleep fine.

Germany is the largest home market at roughly 385 000 a year, then Britain at about 355 000, France at 220 000 and the Netherlands at 185 000. At €450–650 per box at the factory gate, Europe’s AC chargers make a hardware market of €1.1–1.6 billion a year. Add cabling, labour and the occasional new fuse box, and the bill reaches €3–6 billion. It’s a market of millions of small sales rather than thousands of big ones, which is exactly the kind of market that ends in a price war.

Public AC peaked in 2024

The public part is the one we can measure, and it has turned. Net additions of public AC points in the EU climbed every year to 193 000 in 2024, then fell to 123 000 in 2025. DC additions held at 56 000 in both years. In 2021 the EU added fourteen AC points for every DC point. In 2025 it added two.

Germany’s national register shows the same turn in slow motion. AC made up 81% of the public points commissioned there in 2022 and 60% of those commissioned in 2025, as public money followed the motorway targets and private money followed the 150 kW business case. Poland, Italy, Britain and Portugal have tilted the same way.

Two countries are holding the line. The Netherlands and Belgium delivered 52% of the EU’s new public AC points in the first half of 2026. Both let drivers without a driveway ask for a charger near home, and both have cities that tender the kerb in bulk. Public AC hasn’t stopped growing. It now grows mainly where the street is the driveway.

The kerb has landlords

Where public AC is a kerbside business, it’s a concentrated one, because cities hand out concessions by district and the winner gets the whole street. Vattenfall operates 28% of the Netherlands’ public AC points in our data, and the top five operators 68%, against 55% for Dutch DC. In Italy, Enel X and Be Charge together hold 59% of public AC. Nearly half of France’s public AC points stand on the street itself, against a fifth of its DC.

Germany is the exception. Its public AC grew out of hundreds of municipal utilities, retailers and hotel car parks, and the top five operators hold 17.5% of it, half their share of German DC. If you want to buy a German AC network, you’ll be buying it one Stadtwerk at a time.

The map shows how differently countries have settled the question of where a car sleeps. The Netherlands has 3.8 battery-electric cars per public AC point. Norway has 72, and that isn’t Norway falling behind: three in four Norwegian homes are detached houses, so the AC charger is in the garage. Britain sits at 27, with off-street parking for two households in three and lamp-posts for the rest.

Even the hardware has a national accent. 22 kW three-phase is the European default, 60% of the public AC points in our data with a known rating. The Netherlands and Austria standardised on 11 kW. Britain, wired mostly single-phase, runs 74% of its public AC at 7.4 kW. And 94% of Europe’s public AC points are sockets, so you bring your own cable, an etiquette that still baffles American visitors.

The China question

We wrote last month that Chinese charging is arriving in boxes, not buyouts, and that Chinese makers already supply a third of the high-power charger models in our catalogue. AC ought to be easier for them. It needs no power modules or grid studies, and the box ships in a carton. Somehow, it hasn’t happened.

In our catalogue, companies headquartered in China list 25% of AC models, less than their 30% of DC models. In the registries that record what has actually been installed, the gap widens. Greece’s public registry names the maker for two-thirds of its charge points. Chinese brands are 30% of its DC points and 7% of its AC points. In Norway, where operators have named the maker on about 2 400 public AC points, the only Chinese brand is EN+, at under 1%.

Our read: AC rewards a different kind of company. A public AC point in Germany has to bill to calibration law, and European models in our catalogue are more than twice as likely to advertise a MID-certified meter (40% against 17%). A wallbox in a Norwegian housing co-op has to share one building’s connection with dozens of neighbours. And almost every home charger is sold through an electrician who wants to fit the box they fitted last week. None of that gets solved by a lower price.

One caveat matters. A brand is not a factory. Our catalogue lists European resellers selling Chinese-made boxes under their own names, and Chinese makers openly offer private-label wallboxes, certificates included. So 7% is a floor for Chinese hardware, not a ceiling. Customs won’t settle it either: EV chargers share an import code with every other battery charger, from e-bikes to forklifts. Nor is there an EU trade case on chargers to force the question.

The shakeout is European against European

If China isn’t winning AC, who is losing? Mostly Europeans, to other Europeans.

LCP Delta’s 2025 ranking of AC brands by units sold reads like a European league table: two from Norway, two from Britain, two from Austria, two from the Netherlands and two from Germany. The top ten sold 49% of the market. The other half is a long tail of brands with a few percent or less each, and that’s where the price war lives.

The ADAC tested ten budget wallboxes in October 2024 and found prices of €199–499. A few years earlier, it noted, €1 000 or more was normal (ADAC). Germany’s 2021 subsidy, €900 for each of 690 000 home charge points, pulled two years of demand forward and left wholesalers’ shelves full when it ended. Wholesale wallbox sales fell 70% in early 2023. Cheaper components rescued margins but not revenue: Alfen’s charging gross margin rose from 36% to 43% in 2025 while its charging revenue fell 21%.

Our read on why the Norwegians win: they sell a system, not a box. Zaptec and Easee grew up in a country where nine in ten EV owners can charge at home and housing co-ops hit the shared-building problem years before anyone else. Their products are built around balancing many chargers on one connection, and around the electrician who fits them. LCP Delta puts Zaptec first in multi-user AC, the apartment blocks and car parks that EU rules are about to fill.

Elli’s exit tells the same story from the other side. It keeps the charging card, the electricity tariff and the bidirectional services, and walks away from the box. In Britain, where Ohme leads the market, the wallbox already sells as the front end of a cheap overnight tariff, and E.ON Next cut its overnight EV rate to 6.5p/kWh this month. The margin moved from the hardware to the bill.

Where demand goes next

The next five years of AC will be decided in car parks, in flats and in the south. None of it needs a faster charger.

• The car-park deadline. From 1 January 2027, existing non-residential buildings with more than 20 parking spaces must have one charge point per ten spaces under the EU’s buildings directive, or ducting for half of them, which many countries will accept instead. New offices need one point per two spaces, and tenants get a “right to plug”. In our estimate workplace and depot installs grow by more than half between 2025 and 2027, much faster than homes.
• The flat. About 70% of German households live in multi-unit buildings, mostly rented (Fraunhofer ISI). That’s the largest unserved AC market in Europe, and the reason Germany’s home-charger ratio trails Britain’s. In France, the number of apartment buildings with charging rose 43% in 2025.
• The south. Spain’s plug-in hybrid registrations rose 112% in 2025 and Italy’s 87%. Easee says it had over 1 000 chargers installed in Spain, Portugal and Italy before it had a sales team there. “That tells us something about the potential,” it said in October.
• The second direction. Bidirectional charging will arrive mostly where cars sit for twelve hours, which means the home and the office. We worked out what a parked car is worth in September.

What we’re watching

• Which wallbox VW dealers recommend next, and whether Elli’s German installer network goes with it.
• Wallbox’s fourth quarter, guided at €29–31m of revenue, against €10.4m of cash.
• How member states write the car-park rule: how many let building owners lay ducting instead of installing chargers.
• Whether the Norwegians keep growing as they move south, where flats are the norm and installers don’t know their names yet.

The Type 2 charger will never get a ribbon-cutting. It does most of the work anyway, and most of the names on it are still European. The fight over the box is nearly done. The next one, over the tariff and the car park, has barely started.

Sources