This Week in Charging — 25-31 July 2026. A weekly round-up of the stories shaping the global EV charging industry.
The global view
This was the week the charging industry stopped arguing about how many chargers to build and started arguing about who gets to write the rules. Vietnam ordered national technical standards for every charging station in the country by 30 September. Malaysia decided the opposite, leaving pricing entirely to operators. Australia's grid companies asked regulators for permission to own the kerbside. Three countries, three completely different theories of the same market.
Florida answered a different question entirely. The state wants to redirect $197 million in federal NEVI funding away from EV chargers and towards 32 landing pads for battery-powered flying taxis, on the grounds that its highway corridors are finished. Apartment and condo residents, who still have nowhere to charge, may find the logic novel.
Underneath the policy noise, the hardware kept settling. MAN began series production of MCS-equipped electric trucks a week after Tesla fired up its first 1.2 MW Megacharger, and China reported 23.057 million charging connectors, up 43.2% year on year. Meanwhile US fast-charging utilisation reached just 15.8%. The plug problem is solved. The yield problem, as we've argued for years, is not.
Europe
MAN Truck & Bus rolled the first series-built Megawatt Charging System truck off its Munich line this week, claiming a European first. The eTGX and eTGS charge at up to 750 kW — 1,000 A at 750 V — taking a 534 kWh pack from 20 to 80% in under half an hour, versus 375 kW on CCS. Deliveries begin in nine countries, with CCS retained as an option for the transition years.
That lands one week after Tesla's 1.2 MW Megacharger opened in California, which is the point: the vehicles and the chargers are now arriving in the same quarter rather than three years apart. Germany's Deutschlandnetz heavy-duty awards, which we covered in early July, suddenly look less like a bet and more like a schedule.
Whether MCS is the last word is already being questioned. akroVA has demonstrated six megawatts through a manually operated plug, and Fraunhofer IVI is working on automated connection for depot and industrial environments. Both are technically impressive and commercially irrelevant unless they win standards bodies, which MCS already has.
Hyundai Motor Group launched AllDayEnergy, a global V2X brand bundling smart charging, vehicle-to-grid and vehicle-to-home, debuting in the UK via the Kia app in H2. The smart charging tier works today. The V2G tier — the one that actually pays drivers — is stuck because no CCS-compatible bidirectional charger has cleared UK grid certification. A product launch waiting on a certificate is a very 2026 kind of bottleneck.
The Dutch, characteristically, skipped the branding and went straight to the mechanism. Liander's Gelderland pilot covers 12,000 public charge points and pays drivers roughly a 10% rebate for shifting sessions away from congested hours, running to January 2027 as a blueprint for a distributed flexibility market. Public charge points as a grid asset rather than a retail outlet — that is a different demand curve, and a different business.
North America
Florida's Department of Transportation wants to move $197 million in NEVI money into 32 charging, takeoff and landing sites for electric air taxis, arguing the state's highway charging corridors are sufficiently built out. Advocates point to the unmet need at apartments and condominiums, where a meaningful share of Florida drivers park. It is the most creative reallocation of charging funds we've seen since the One Big Beautiful Bill started cancelling projects outright.
The Q2 numbers gave the "Charging 2.0" thesis we flagged on 17 July another data point. US public fast-charging utilisation hit 15.8% across 46 million sessions, with 4,382 new DC ports added — 10% fewer than a year earlier. NACS made up 22.9% of new non-Tesla connectors. Canada, meanwhile, slipped to 9.5% utilisation, which is a long way from any breakeven line.
Walmart is quietly building the counterweight. The retailer opened roughly 46 fast-charging sites with 380 connectors through June, with about 300 more under construction and pricing below market. When a company already owns the parking lot, the traffic and the in-store margin, the charging economics look nothing like a standalone CPO's — a point our retail location scoring has been making for a while.
China
The National Energy Administration put the number on the board: 23.057 million charging connectors at the end of June, up 43.2% year on year. That splits into 5.009 million public and 18.048 million private, with county-level coverage at 98.61%. For context, the entire EU public network would be a rounding error in the private column.
Quality is now moving too, not just quantity. More than 180,000 high-power connectors are in operation, and a ten-agency implementation plan will build energy-replenishment corridors for new-energy heavy trucks along the national transport network, with targeted distribution-grid upgrades attached. Beijing has read the same memo Europe has: the truck segment is where the megawatts and the margins are.
The averages still tell the harder story. Public connectors average 49.35 kW each, and highway charging peaked at 94.93 GWh over the May Day holiday. Nothing in this week's data addresses the pricing chaos we reported last week — the opaque fees and duelling QR codes across those five million public guns. Building 43% more connectors per year does not fix a billing layer nobody trusts.
India
Delhi adopted a $1.5 billion EV policy aiming for most newly registered vehicles to be electric by 2027, with mandatory electrification of new three-wheelers and small trucks from 2027 and two-wheelers from 2028. This is the full version of the autorickshaw restrictions we covered on 3 July, now with purchase subsidies, scrappage incentives and a 150 billion-rupee commitment behind it.
The scepticism is well-aimed. Analysts warn the target lives or dies on charging: grid upgrades, battery storage, time-of-day pricing and enough renewable supply to make the emissions maths work, particularly for fast-charging buses and cargo fleets. Motorists, meanwhile, are worried about the ordinary things — will there be a working charger, and will the vehicle last.
Nationally, the ratio improved. India now has 52,718 public stations including 16,561 fast chargers, moving from one charger per 250 EVs to one per 175 in a year, funded by ₹912.5 crore under FAME-II and ₹2,000 crore under PM E-DRIVE. We noted India crossing 52,000 last week; the density number is the more useful one.
Density is also where the gap shows. One analysis puts India at one public charger per 135 EVs against a global benchmark of 6-20, with 3.9 million stations needed by 2030. The builders are scaling into it: Tata Power across 700+ cities, and Exicom's EVSE revenue up 72% to ₹509 crore with a new Hyderabad plant.
Rest of Asia
Vietnam gave itself a deadline. The Ministry of Industry and Trade must issue national technical standards (QCVN) for charging stations under expedited procedure before 30 September, covering design, grid connection, metering, operations and safety. Businesses say nationwide projects are shovel-ready and waiting only on the rules — a market worth $81.7 million in 2025 and forecast at $459.5 million by 2034.
The scale behind that paperwork is real. VinFast delivered a record 115,916 EVs in H1, V-Green has pledged 10 trillion VND for 99 highway super-stations against a 500,000-port ambition, and TMT EGreen is targeting 30,000 chargers by 2030. Yet drivers still face offline units, fragmented apps and prices ranging from VND3,651 to VND7,436 per kWh. Standardising the plug is the easy half.
Malaysia took the opposite view on exactly that question, confirming it will leave charging tariffs to operators on the grounds that market pricing attracts investment. With 6,416 public chargers including 2,143 DC units, that is a defensible bet at this stage of the curve. China's experience suggests the bill for unregulated pricing arrives later, and in the form of consumer trust.
Oceania
Australia's EV market has arrived faster than its infrastructure. One in four new cars sold in June was electric, and industry estimates put the required investment at up to $5 billion over five years. The binding constraint is not capital but connection: grid hookups are running 18 months to two years.
That delay is fuelling a genuine structural fight. Energy Networks Australia has asked the AEMC to change market rules so regulated distribution networks can own and maintain open-access kerbside chargers, with retailers competing for the customer on top. CPOs, unsurprisingly, want the regulated monopoly nowhere near the competitive layer. Australia is now running the same ownership argument Europe settled a decade ago — and reaching a different answer.
At the building level, NSW's proposed Right to Charge reforms would simplify approvals for chargers in apartments and strata schemes. Schneider Electric and Electrify EV caution that capital costs, electrician shortages and the need for dynamic load management mean the permission is necessary but nowhere near sufficient.
Retail is filling the gap in the meantime. Coles signed a two-year deal with Evie Networks for fast charging at up to 30 supermarkets in Victoria and Queensland, using 200 kW Kempower dual-plug units with dynamic power sharing, aimed squarely at the quarter of households without home charging. Evie already runs over 1,000 fast chargers across 340 sites — the kind of location portfolio that decides who prints money.
Off-road, Fortescue reported that the excavator fleet at one Pilbara iron ore mine is fully electric and commissioned its first in-house fast chargers for heavy haul trucks. When a miner builds its own megawatt-class charging because nobody else will, that is a market signal.
South America
DP World is electrifying its terminal at Brazil's Port of Santos, deploying 15 battery-electric terminal trucks and three electric reach stackers as part of a 1.6 billion BRL expansion. By 2027 the site should run 44 electric tractors alongside electric quay and gantry cranes. Comparable sites cut diesel use by 29.2%.
Ports are the quiet heavy-duty charging market: fixed routes, predictable duty cycles, a single owner controlling both vehicle and charger. No roaming, no billing disputes, no location gamble. It is the closest thing to a solved charging business anyone has found.
On the financing side, Bernstein named EDP, Terna, Redeia, REN and Elia as its picks for the 2026 buildout, on the thesis that distribution networks capture the value of charging capex. Given Australia's two-year connection queues, it's hard to argue the grid isn't the scarce asset.
Africa
GridCars, South Africa's largest public operator, is spending R40 million refreshing more than 40 sites and adding new ones, with the programme due to be 90% complete within the week. The old units are being swapped for modular 120 kW dual-CCS2 chargers supporting 150 V to 1,000 V architectures, up from a 500 V ceiling.
The more interesting detail is the civil work. GridCars is reconfiguring bays with longer cable reach for delivery vans, buses and eventually electric trucks. That is a first-generation network — 445 sites and 650 chargers in January — being rebuilt for commercial vehicles rather than early-adopter hatchbacks. Refresh capex is the unglamorous line item every network eventually meets.
Someone pays for it. In the Eastern Cape, a 50c per kWh increase took effect on 1 July, lifting the Rhodes University tariff to R7.50, with operator AIDC-EC citing national electricity tariff adjustments and infrastructure sustainability. Straightforward cost pass-through, and a reminder that charging margins in emerging markets are wholesale-price plus very little.
Two smaller notes with outsized implications: Algeria's Sonelgaz has begun exporting 200 charging stations to Portugal from its El Eulma plant, and India's EKA Mobility will supply 35 electric buses to Zanzibar with a further 115 expected. African charging manufacture heading north, Asian buses heading south. The trade map is getting less predictable.
This Week in Charging is published every Friday. It summarises the most significant EV charging infrastructure news from the past seven days, sourced from our global news intelligence feed. Register for your free 7-day trial to get your daily personal newsletter as well as all the other goodies on our site.