Britain Blinked, France Got Robbed, China Culled the Cowboys

The global view

For three years this column has asked whether the chargers would get built. This week asked a colder question: whether they stay standing. Copper thieves have hit roughly 650 charge points in France since January — about 10% of the national network, €13 million in losses, for cable containing €20-30 of metal. Operators are now fitting GPS trackers and pressurised methylene blue to protect assets they were still congratulating themselves for installing.

The demand side wobbled at the same time. The UK opened a consultation on cutting its 2030 ZEV target from 80% to as low as 50%, three weeks after we watched Florida decide its charging corridors were finished enough to fund flying taxis. BEVs took 27% of UK July registrations and only 37% of the public wants the transition slowed. The mandate is being softened for a market that is not asking for it.

China went the other direction with a scalpel. From 1 August, every conductive charger sold in the country needs 3C certification — and an April spot check found 49.1% of tested models failing. Roughly 30% of small manufacturers are expected to disappear. Beijing is not arguing about how many chargers exist. It has moved on to arguing about which ones deserve to.

Europe

The week belonged to the UK Department for Transport, which launched a consultation running to 23 October on revising ZEV mandate targets for 2027-2035, with the 2030 car requirement potentially falling from 80% to 50%. Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander insists the 2035 ICE ban survives intact. The trajectory to it, apparently, is negotiable.

The charging industry's response was audibly through gritted teeth. ChargeUK, InstaVolt and Andersen EV warned that softening targets removes the one thing private capital was actually pricing: certainty about how many EVs will exist to charge. Fleet and leasing firms welcomed the flexibility, particularly on vans, where uptake sits below half the 24% target. Both sides are right, which is what makes it expensive.

France, meanwhile, is being physically disassembled. Around 650 charge points have been stripped of cable this year at €1,500 a replacement, with Charge France warning of higher prices and operator bankruptcies. Last week we noted France's install rate falling 27%. Losing 10% of the existing network to scrap value turns a slowdown into a net decline.

In Scandinavia, the eight-year 'Powered by E.ON Drive & Clever' joint venture dissolved, with 157 fast-charging points across 37 motorway sites split three ways: Clever takes Denmark, E.ON Drive Infrastructure takes the 19 Swedish sites, Uno-X Mobility takes Norway. It is the cleanest illustration yet of the pattern in our European M&A scorecard — nobody is buying networks, they are buying the pieces that fit their own footprint.

One quieter data point deserves attention. The eMobility Excellence Report 2026 found German charging prices down up to 10% year-on-year, with EnBW mobility+ topping independent MSPs and Ionity best for non-Tesla drivers. The most-cited user complaint was not price or coverage. It was inaccurate availability data — the same registry-quality problem we found underneath Europe's Plug&Charge rollout. The industry keeps solving hardware and losing to metadata.

North America

California approved $95.2 million in Clean Transportation Program funding: $48 million for light-duty charging, $30.2 million for medium- and heavy-duty, $15 million for hydrogen and $2 million for workforce training, with at least half required to benefit disadvantaged communities. The state now runs 216,445 public and shared ports, more than 20,000 of them DC fast.

The timing is the story. This is state money arriving after the federal EV tax credit repeal, alongside a $270 million MyFirstEV rebate programme. Sacramento has decided to underwrite a transition Washington stopped funding. Whether one state's balance sheet can carry that is a question for a future edition.

On the connector wars, GM confirmed native NACS ports across its entire 2027 lineup, giving Chevrolet, Cadillac and GMC drivers direct access to 27,500-plus Superchargers and retiring the $275 adapter. GM's Energy Pass app now spans Tesla, IONNA, Electrify America and ChargePoint, with EVgo pending — nearly 70% of US DC fast chargers behind one login. Two weeks ago we watched EVgo put its own branding on Tesla hardware. The pattern is now unmistakable: in North America, the network layer is software and the hardware layer is Tesla's.

Filed under things that do not add up: Einride ordered 500 Tesla Semis, the largest disclosed order yet, with deliveries starting in September across five states and Amazon named as a customer. The hardware bill runs $130-145 million. Einride holds $77 million in cash and describes the financing as third-party funded. Someone is taking on that residual risk, and it is worth knowing who.

China

The regulatory news is the news. Since 1 August, uncertified charging equipment cannot be sold, imported, pass grid acceptance or connect to an operating platform in China. The trigger was an April spot check in which 24 charger models were tested and 49.1% failed. Roughly 30% of small manufacturers are not expected to clear certification in time; units installed before the deadline are grandfathered.

Read that against the market we described three weeks ago, where operators were surviving on margins as thin as 0.04 yuan per kilowatt-hour. Beijing has just removed the cheapest tier of the supply chain from a sector already competing itself to death. This is industrial policy as controlled demolition, and Western hardware buyers sourcing from the survivors should expect prices to stop falling.

The headline connector count — 23.057 million, up 43.2% year-on-year — recirculated again this week; we covered it in July and the number has not moved. What is new is the granularity beneath it. Hebei upgraded charging in 1,082 older residential compounds, covered all 1,233 townships, and cut average expressway holiday waits from 25 minutes to 15 with 4,453 service-area bays. Province-level throughput management, not port counts.

And a useful cold shower on bidirectional charging, which Brussels committed to mandating by end-2027 in the Electrification Action Plan we covered on 7 August. Adoption remains marginal: 57 of 186 ISO 15118-20 parameters are still optional, Germany's smart meter gateway rollout sits at 5.5%, and battery warranty risk deters owners even at €720 a year. Fleets first, and possibly not at scale until 2030. Same optionality problem that broke Plug&Charge, one standard later.

India

India finally produced a number that measures electrons rather than announcements. The Central Electricity Authority reports public charging consumption rising from 848 million units in FY25 to 1,460 million in FY26, up 72%. Maharashtra (378 MU) and Delhi (359 MU) lead, and the dataset excludes several states whose discoms did not report.

The composition matters more than the growth. Heavy-duty vehicles — e-buses and trucks — account for 74% of that consumption. Two weeks ago we noted that PM E-DRIVE had sanctioned 6,562 public chargers and installed none. India's charging market is running without the retail network the policy was designed to fund, because fleets built their own.

Which is exactly what happened again this week: ChargeZone and Fresh Bus expanded to 500 intercity electric buses across four southern states, adding 30 MW to reach 40 MW dedicated to a single fleet within 15 months. Bain Capital is separately in talks to put up to ₹2,850 crore into JBM Auto's EV arm, which holds 79% of India's electric tarmac bus market. Capital is following utilisation, not subsidy.

On the hardware side, Exicom began commercial production of liquid-cooled AC and DC power modules in Hyderabad, built over two years for about $3.5 million on technology from its 2024 Tritium acquisition. They hit nearly 99% efficiency against 95-96% for air-cooled, carry a ten-year warranty, and are being exported to North America and Europe before serving the domestic market. India is now a component supplier to the markets it is behind.

Rest of Asia

Korea consolidated. Hyundai Engineering's board approved the absorption merger of Korea Electric Vehicle Charging Service, effective 1 November at a 1:0.3132476 exchange ratio, combining roughly 12,000 installed chargers and a control centre with KEVCS's 4,000 chargers and 240,000 members. The stated ambition is to become Korea's largest CPO; the actual ambition is the platform layer — V2G, VPP, second-life battery ESS and renewable-linked sites. Same pivot from selling electrons to selling flexibility that China's operators made in July.

Vietnam delivered on schedule, which is rarer than it should be. On 31 July we reported Hanoi ordering national charging standards by 30 September. Three weeks later the Ministry of Industry and Trade has published the draft QCVN, unifying rules currently scattered across electricity, construction, fire, metrology and consumer-protection law.

The draft is unusually physical for a first pass: minimum 2.5m x 5.0m bays, 3.5m lane widths, residual current and surge protection, emergency shutdown, metering and data logging, plus conformity declarations for domestic chargers and quality inspection for imports, effective 1 July 2027. It arrives after roughly 150,000 ports up to 360 kW are already in the ground — mostly one network's. Writing the rulebook around an incumbent's existing estate is a choice, and Vietnam has made it.

Oceania

Australia's demand curve has gone vertical: battery EVs took 23.4% of new car sales in the first half of 2026, up from 8.4% in January, with Coles/Evie, Ampol, BP and the NRMA scrambling to build. Researchers flag two structural problems: Chargefox aggregates hardware it does not own while controlling 83% of Tasmania's public chargers and 58% of WA's, and councils have quietly decommissioned abandoned RAC Electric Highway units.

Their proposed fix — federal minimum uptime standards extended to privately funded chargers, plus performance-linked funding — is the right instrument. It is also the argument we have made repeatedly: what a network delivers matters more than what it installed, which is the whole premise of our CPO execution score.

Three weeks ago Australia's grid companies were fighting over who owns the kerb. This week Melbourne's City of Port Phillip answered by charging residents close to A$1,000 in permits on top of A$2,000-7,000 of hardware, plus A$20 million of public liability cover at A$750-2,500 a year — and you may only use it when parked directly beside it. The council is simultaneously consulting on 32 pole-mounted public sites. One of these two approaches will scale.

Heavy duty moved too. Construction began on Australia's first dedicated heavy-truck charging hub in Melbourne, while BHP will commission Caterpillar's Dynamic Energy Transfer rail for haul trucks at Jimblebar this year. The same miner collected an estimated A$548 million in fuel tax credits in FY26 as diesel use rose to 1.25 billion litres. Trials are cheap when the alternative is subsidised.

South America

The regional story is freight, and it is being written elsewhere. ICCT data shows global electric truck and bus sales up 86% to roughly half a million units in 2025, with China taking nearly 90% of volume and almost 30% of its heavy trucks now fully electric. Brazil posted double-digit growth alongside the EU, India and the UK, driven almost entirely by buses, which are now 17% of global bus sales.

Daimler Truck CEO Karin Rådström named the constraints: charging gaps, route planning uncertainty and no cost parity with diesel. For South America, only one of those three is solvable with a policy signature, and it is not the cheap one.

On the commercial side, Chinese hardware keeps arriving quietly. Zhida Technology reported overseas revenue up 73.2% to RMB 101 million, with Brazilian unit sales up 48.5% and its overseas share of revenue doubling to 29.7% across 28 markets. GM, meanwhile, extended free dealer charging to Chevrolet buyers in Peru, where electrified sales grew more than 86% in the first half. Free charging is a customer acquisition cost, not an infrastructure strategy — but in a market with no network, it is the only lever an OEM controls.

And then Cuba, which opened its first fast and ultra-fast charging station near Santa Clara — solar-powered, completely off-grid, built by a private micro-enterprise, with multi-standard connectors and free phone charging on the side. Villa Clara has added two more off-grid 'solineras' during the island's worst energy crisis in decades. When the grid is the problem, the battery buffer stops being an optimisation and becomes the entire business model.

Africa

South Africa's Zero Carbon Charge is doubling its two off-grid solar hubs on the Johannesburg-Durban N3 corridor from 360 kW to 720 kW, three months after opening. Solar rises from 280 kWp to 470 kWp per site and storage more than doubles to 1.4 MWh, enabling six vehicles at 120 kW or up to 600 kW into a single connector for 800V cars and trucks. The R100m DBSA-backed operator says its next N1 corridor will be built for megawatt charging from day one.

Doubling capacity within a quarter of launch is the utilisation signal every European CPO spent this year hunting for, achieved on a continent with no mandate and no subsidy — because the sites were placed where the traffic already was. Our location score work keeps arriving at the same conclusion from far more expensive data.

Nigeria shows the other path. Tax exemptions covered nearly 4,000 EVs in the first half of 2026 after VAT was scrapped and import duties cut to zero, but a 4,000 MW grid serving over 200 million people and around 50 public charge points is pushing buyers towards battery swapping, range extenders and Chinese hybrids. You cannot subsidise your way past a generation deficit.

Elsewhere, Uganda's state-owned Kiira Motors announced a ten-year, $9 billion plan built around an 80 GWh battery plant at Nakasongola, 100 DC fast chargers by December and 260 within three years — plus a request for an e-mobility tariff exempt from demand charges. In Zimbabwe, Tsapo Group wants charging made mandatory at every fuel station. Both are asking governments to solve the economics. Zero Carbon Charge simply built the generation into the site.