Brussels and Beijing Agree. India Approved 6,562 Chargers, Built None.

The global view

Two of the world's largest regulators published their charging strategies within four days of each other this week, and they said almost the same thing: the car is a grid asset now. Brussels' Electrification Action Plan commits to proposing a bidirectional charging mandate for every new EV by end-2027. Beijing's 15th Five-Year Plan targets 50 GW of aggregated flexible charging capacity alongside 40 million charge points.

The difference is in the instrument. The EU is reaching for type-approval rules, binding smart meter targets and grid tariff reform — regulation as the lever. China is writing a cheque: more than 5 trillion yuan of grid investment, up over 80% on the previous plan period. Same destination, two very different theories of how you get there. After a month of watching countries strain against summer peak load, both answers amount to the same admission — you cannot build your way out of a flexibility problem.

Then there is India, where 6,562 public chargers have been sanctioned under PM E-DRIVE and precisely none installed, nearly two years after launch. Last week Florida decided its chargers were finished enough to fund flying taxis instead. This week India reminded everyone that an approval is not a charger, a budget line is not a bay, and the gap between the two is where most national EV strategies quietly go to die.

Europe

The European Commission's Electrification Action Plan is the most consequential document the charging industry has read this year, and most of it is not about chargers. It targets a 46% electricity share of final energy consumption by 2040, taxes electricity no higher than gas, and sets binding smart meter coverage of 50% by 2031 and 65% by 2034. The headline for CPOs: dynamic grid tariffs that reward off-peak charging are now official EU policy direction, not a pilot project.

The V2G mandate is the sharp end. The Commission will propose requiring smart bidirectional capability in all new EVs via type-approval rules by end-2027, backed by regulatory sandboxes and network codes. Transport & Environment's read is blunt: without mandated bidirectional onboard chargers, V2G does not scale. Two years of lead time is generous by Brussels standards and brutally short by automotive product-cycle standards.

There is also an AFIR review due by end-2026 and a de-risking mechanism for public truck charging — which matters, because grid connections are supposed to support electrifying 40% of the EU truck fleet by 2040. Last week MAN started series production of its MCS truck; this week it put a number on it. At 750 kW, an eTGX with a 534 kWh pack goes 20-80% in under 30 minutes, enabling daily ranges above 1,000 km, with first deliveries across nine European countries.

Britain, meanwhile, is running an experiment in how to tax your way out of your own targets. A ChargeUK-commissioned YouGov poll found the share of drivers likely to buy an EV would rise from 25% to 37% if public charging were cheaper than petrol — comfortably above the 33% ZEV mandate target for 2026. The mandate does not need weakening. The pricing does.

Which makes the VAT decision look worse by the week. From 1 October, domestic electricity drops to 0% VAT while public charging stays at 20%, handing the 9% of EV owners without a driveway a £172 million collective annual penalty and £216 each. Equalising the rates would cost the Treasury £120 million. The government is choosing to save £120 million by making its own ZEV mandate harder to hit.

North America

EVgo delivered the quarter that best explains why this industry is so hard to value. Charging network revenue hit $61 million, up 19% — an 18th consecutive quarter of double-digit growth — on 99 GWh of throughput across 5,380 stalls, up 24%. Total revenue fell 16% to $83 million as eXtend and autonomous-vehicle work shrank, net loss widened to $46.3 million, and adjusted EBITDA sat at -$10.6 million.

The more interesting number is the one EVgo did not report: what it costs to build a site versus what it costs to rent Tesla's. Under a new agreement, EVgo will deploy hundreds of EVgo-branded V4 Superchargers — up to 20 stalls, 500 kW, Magic Dock for both NACS and CCS — with EVgo owning the hardware, choosing sites and setting prices while Tesla builds and operates them. Construction starts this autumn.

Strip away the branding and this is a US CPO outsourcing deployment and operations to its largest competitor, and paying for the privilege of appearing in that competitor's in-car navigation. It is also, arguably, the most rational thing any American charging operator has done this year. As we argued in our work on CPO execution scores, the gap between operators is rarely hardware — it is site selection, uptime and cost per stall. EVgo just kept the first, and rented the rest.

Florida's $197 million NEVI-to-vertiport pivot, which we covered last week, drew fresh scrutiny as national outlets picked up the Miami Herald's records request. The detail worth repeating: no eVTOL operator currently holds FAA approval to carry paying passengers. Florida has the second-highest EV count in the country and below-average chargers per vehicle, and is spending $6 million a pad on a service that is not yet legal to sell.

China

The 15th Five-Year Plan for the new power system is the most detailed charging roadmap any government has published, and it is not primarily a charging document. It targets more than 40 million charge points by 2030, including roughly 300,000 high-power units, sufficient to serve over 110 million EVs. China ended 2025 with 20.09 million points and reached 23.06 million by end-June, so the target is essentially a doubling in under five years.

Read alongside the grid numbers, the intent is clear: charging is being conscripted into the power system. The plan pairs its charging targets with 300 GW of new energy storage, 160 GW of pumped hydro, 50% non-fossil generation, 420 GW of west-to-east transmission and 50 GW of aggregated flexible charging capacity via smart and bidirectional charging. Chinese operators were already pivoting from selling electrons to selling grid services out of margin desperation. Now it is state policy.

There is also a build-out mandate that Western regulators have shied away from: full public charging coverage in rural counties and townships, upgraded highway service-area chargers, a higher fast-charging share, and megawatt-class heavy-truck charging along major freight corridors. Beijing has decided the low-utilisation rural sites nobody wants to own are a public obligation, not a business case.

Quality control arrived the same week, and the numbers behind it are ugly. China will require mandatory 3C certification for charging equipment after a 2025 inspection found 49.1% of 112 batches of online-sold home chargers failed testing. Existing installations are exempt, which is either pragmatic or alarming depending on how many of those units are already on walls. Expect consolidation among the long tail of hardware makers and modest price increases — on top of the 15% module price hike we flagged in July.

And NIO quietly passed a milestone that its critics said it never would: 120 million cumulative swaps, with the 4,000th Chinese station going live as the first fifth-generation site serving NIO, Onvo and Firefly. The company is leaning on partners like Zhongan Energy to add over 1,000 stations this year. Swapping remains uneconomic almost everywhere else on earth, and increasingly normal here.

India

India's Ministry of Heavy Industries told Parliament this week that of 6,562 public chargers sanctioned under the ₹10,900 crore PM E-DRIVE scheme, none had been installed as of 22 July 2026. Rs 688.84 crore has been sanctioned against those chargers and not a rupee spent. The predecessor FAME-II scheme, for all its faults, installed 9,583 stations.

The vehicle side of the same scheme has worked well enough — 2.65 million EV sales supported, overwhelmingly two-wheelers, led by Maharashtra with 428,000 units. The heavy segment has not. Against a target of 5,643 electric trucks, 55 have been supported, and e-ambulances are at zero against a target of 3,811. Subsidising demand is easy. Subsidising the assets that make demand usable is apparently harder.

The market is not waiting for the Centre. Public charge points grew from about 5,000 in 2022 to over 29,000 by early 2026, though the charger-to-EV ratio of roughly 1:235 remains an outlier against global benchmarks of 1:6 to 1:20. Tellingly, investors are reportedly shifting focus from deployment volume to utilisation, grid readiness and site economics — the same maturation curve that produced our location scoring work in Europe.

States continue to outpace the centre. Tamil Nadu announced 20,000 public charging stations over five years under a PPP model, with about Rs 50 crore this financial year and Rs 5 crore in subsidies for resident welfare associations wiring up apartment blocks, targeting 1,000 stations in phase one.

Which brings us to the most quietly important story of the week. A Greater Noida resident has taken his housing society to the Supreme Court after being repeatedly refused an NOC to install a certified charger in his own parking space. His 4,000-flat complex has 56 EVs and two shared charge points. The 2024 Ministry of Power guidelines exist but carry no binding enforcement — and a national precedent here would do more for Indian charging than several thousand sanctioned chargers that nobody builds.

Rest of Asia

South Korea restructured public charging tariffs from two tiers to five, and the direction of travel is unmistakable. AC slow charging under 30 kW fell 9.1% to 295.0 won/kWh while ultra-fast above 200 kW rose 13.2% to 393.1 won/kWh. Slow-charging users save roughly 100,000 won a year; frequent highway ultra-fast users pay about 160,000 won more.

That is a regulator explicitly pricing convenience, and it arrives while five of the six largest Korean operators remain lossmaking. Time-of-use pricing linked to renewable output, mandatory price signage and real-time availability data are next. Korea is doing in one tariff order what Europe has been debating in committee for three years.

Malaysia, which declined to regulate charging prices last week, has decided to regulate something else instead: EV buyers. The government is studying a levy on every EV sold to fund a dedicated public charging pot, after four years of CBU import, excise and sales tax exemptions cost RM3.3 billion in forgone revenue and delivered far less charging investment than promised. CBU exemptions end; CKD exemptions survive to 31 December 2027.

It is a candid admission that tax breaks for vehicles do not automatically produce chargers — and an unusually direct answer to the question of who pays. Vietnam, meanwhile, is discovering the same gap between mandate and metal. Just four of 21 rest stops on the North-South Expressway have even partially operational charging, with eight under development, two weeks after Hanoi ordered national technical standards for every station by 30 September. The deadline for the rest stops is 1 January 2027.

Oceania

New South Wales published its answer to the kerbside ownership fight we covered last week, and it is a firm no. A Legislative Assembly committee warned that letting Ausgrid, Endeavour Energy and Essential Energy lead public charger deployment risks creating a monopoly that raises electricity bills for everyone. Networks should act only as provider of last resort in regional areas — awkward timing for Essential Energy, which is seeking a ring-fencing waiver to build 300 regional kerbside chargers.

The full report runs to 18 recommendations across reliability, pricing transparency, signage, apartment charging, workforce training and standardised grid connection processes. Almost all of it exists somewhere else already. Grid connection delay remains the binding constraint, and no amount of signage policy fixes that.

The commercial case, by contrast, is getting embarrassingly clear. JET Charge analysis suggests a 100-vehicle heavy fleet spending A$5.8 million a year on diesel could cut fuel costs by A$4.5 million through electric depot charging. IKEA spent A$4.5 million across seven Australian sites and went from 5% to 83% zero-emission deliveries in three years. The obstacles are grid connections and a shortage of trained electricians and EV truck mechanics — not economics.

Victoria took the least glamorous and possibly most useful action of the week, publishing a 34-page EV-ready guide for owners corporations covering load management, cost allocation, approvals, insurance and countering fire misinformation. Meanwhile thieves keep cutting cables for copper, with NSW police charging one man over vandalism at 11 charging sites. Uptime, it turns out, has a physical security dimension nobody modelled.

South America

A quiet week, with one data point worth logging. Charging stations in Ribeirão Preto grew 24% between February and June, against 1,011 electric and plug-in hybrid registrations in the city from January to May, with a new seven-charger hub opening in July at 22 kW to 60 kW.

Those power ratings tell you where Brazil's secondary cities actually are: destination charging in retail catchments, not highway ultra-fast. Drivers cite operating cost as the reason for switching, which is the only adoption driver that survives a currency wobble. Modest numbers, but the growth rate is running ahead of the fleet — which is the right order for once.

Africa

South Africa's GridCars is running the most interesting pricing experiment on the continent. Its new subscription credits drivers R1 in public charging rewards for every verified kWh charged at home, including self-generated solar, at R299 a month and R99 for the first six months for August sign-ups. It is a loyalty scheme that pays customers for not using your network — which only makes sense if you believe occasional public sessions are where the margin lives.

The hardware is moving too. GridCars is replacing first-generation units with 120 kW dual-connector DC chargers spanning 150V-1,000V architectures, and reconfiguring sites with longer bays and wider turning areas for electrified delivery fleets. Designing for light commercial vehicles before the passenger market matures is a deliberate bet, and probably the correct one.

Nigeria produced the week's largest African deal: a $50 million EPC agreement between P-GAT Industries and China's DESUNERGY to build charging and battery-swapping stations across Adamawa and the North East, phase one of a plan for at least 150 stations in three years. The target customer is the commercial tricycle operator squeezed by petrol prices — a use case with daily mileage, predictable routes and genuine payback.

Regulation is catching up unevenly. Zimbabwe issued binding rules on charger importation, installation and use, mandating dedicated sub-circuits, RCD protection and earth continuity monitoring, with breaches carrying fines or up to six months' imprisonment. Nigeria's NADDC is still drafting standards for chargers, batteries, connectors and swapping while asking private capital to fund the network. Given that China just failed half its own home chargers on safety testing, importing markets writing certification rules early is not paranoia — it is arithmetic.