Europe Needs 35,000 Truck Chargers. It Has 730.

The global view

This was the week the electric truck stopped being a vehicle problem and became an arithmetic problem. Germany's VDA put the European requirement at around 35,000 public megawatt-charging points by 2030, against roughly 730 dedicated points above 350 kW across the entire EU in July. Our arithmetic on that gap: about 150 new heavy-duty charge points a week, every week, for four years.

America is worse off and dreaming bigger. The Electrification Coalition put US medium- and heavy-duty needs at 134,000 to 429,000 charge points by 2030, against 20 dedicated truck sites and at least 368 points operating in April. Three days later, five governments from British Columbia to Baja California announced a 2,222 km freight corridor with twenty charging stations on it and no confirmed funding.

Then there is China, which spent the week doing the opposite of announcing things. New public charger additions fell 43.5% year on year while charging electricity consumption rose 50.3%. Everyone else is counting what they need to build. China has started counting what its existing sockets actually deliver — which, as we have argued since we published the execution score, is the only count that pays.

Europe

Start in Germany, because Germany is where the truck story is being lost most expensively. The VDA says just 88 sites with 355 charge points for heavy commercial vehicles were operating in July, under a tenth of the 4,200 points the national roadmap wants by 2030. Grid connections for depot charging, the association notes, can take up to ten years — which is longer than the deadline.

Three weeks ago we watched Berlin put EUR 1 billion behind truck charging and saw the first call oversubscribed five times over. So this is not a capital problem, and it is not a demand problem either. It is a queue at the distribution network operator, and no cheque clears that faster.

The Europe-wide number depends on who is counting: VDA logs about 730 public points above 350 kW in July 2026, while a separate analysis this week put roughly 1,100 at the end of 2025. Both cannot be right, and neither is within two orders of magnitude of 35,000. Müller's ask — an earlier review of the 2027 CO2 fleet regulation and no manufacturer penalties while infrastructure lags — is the sound a target makes when it starts to bend.

In M&A, Austrian utility EVN agreed to buy 100% of BayWa Mobility Charging: 170 HPC points at 30 mostly Bavarian sites, growing to 306 points by 2027, sold out of BayWa's restructuring. Note the direction of travel. Our M&A scorecard called utilities as sellers and funds and fuel retailers as buyers; this is a utility buying a distressed parent's carve-out, and it is the second exception we have logged this quarter.

Quieter, and more consequential: Ubitricity and Deftpower are rolling out OCPI 2.2.1 charging profiles across 1,500 Dutch public charge points, with cashback for off-peak sessions managed at the charger itself. Brussels' Electrification Action Plan promised flexibility as policy; this is 1,500 points of it in production. Meanwhile England scrapped planning permission for chargepoint installation entirely — useful, free, and irrelevant to anyone still waiting on a grid connection.

North America

The J.D. Power 2026 US charging study landed with a result worth sitting with: Ionna took first place at 807 points out of 1,000, pushing Tesla's Supercharger network to fourth at 701. All four top-scoring fast networks are OEM-affiliated. Fast-charger failure rates hit study lows, while Level 2 satisfaction fell 12 points — chiefly because free charging dropped from 60% of visits in 2023 to 34%. Reliability improved; the free lunch ended.

ChargePoint had the week its shareholders have waited five years for. Q2 revenue of USD 116.1 million beat a USD 105 million consensus, adjusted EBITDA loss narrowed 78% to USD 4.8 million, and the stock rose 53%. Read the gross margin carefully: 38% is a record, and four of those points are a tariff refund. Fastned reported 48% station-level margins last month and moved 9.6%; a company approaching breakeven moved 53%. The market is pricing relief, not performance.

Which makes last week's episode funnier. ChargePoint's CEO spent late August calling the megawatt race overblown while promising 525 kW cabinets for 2027; this week he called a 50% pop the beginning of the momentum. Net losses did fall from USD 125.3 million to USD 35.6 million year on year. That is real. It is also the third consecutive year the phrase has been deployed.

The most instructive American build-out is not a charging company at all. Walmart now runs 838 own-brand ports at 100 stores with 100 more under construction, and last month grew faster than any US network except Tesla's. Flat pricing, 400 kW dual-cable, 10% off for Walmart Plus. When we scored Lidl against McDonald's against the Autobahn, the finding was that retail already owns the best charging real estate. Walmart appears to have read it.

And the corridor. California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia and Baja California launched BC2BC, a 2,222 km I-5 freight route carrying nearly 10,000 trucks a day, with 20 electric and three hydrogen stations in the initial build. Shared siting standards across five jurisdictions is genuinely hard work, done well. Funding levels remain undetermined amid federal challenges to NEVI, which is the part that decides whether any of it exists in 2030.

China

China's charging fleet reached 23.68 million connectors by end-July, up 41.8% year on year — while new public charger additions fell 43.5%. Average public output sits at 48.4 kW, with 200,000 units above 250 kW. The build is not stalling; it is being redirected from sockets to kilowatts.

The number underneath it is the one to watch: charging electricity consumption rose 50.3% year on year to 16.4 billion kWh, driven by heavy trucks, ride-hailing and passenger cars. Demand growing faster than supply is the condition every other market in this article is trying to manufacture. Two weeks ago Beijing deleted a third of its charger manufacturers by certification decree; this is the same policy in a different costume.

Battery swapping remains the exception that refuses to work. NIO leads with roughly 4,000 stations and CATL added 2,000 in the first half, yet only about 20% of swap stations are profitable. Set that against BYD's flash-charging network, which we covered last week and which now spans 325 cities: when a five-minute charge is available at a Sinopec forecourt, a swap station's four-minute advantage stops being an advantage.

India

India's public network has grown sixfold since 2022 to 29,151 stations across more than 200 CPOs, with 67,657 charge points in total. CII estimates the country needs 1.32 million by 2030. About 73% of what exists is rated below 30 kW.

Now the number that makes the target surreal: capacity utilisation is running at 1 to 5 per cent, with state tariffs between Rs 6 and 12 per kWh crushing operator economics. A country is being told to multiply a network twenty-fold while the network it already has sits idle. This is precisely the failure mode we described in our work on location scoring: the count was never the constraint, the siting was.

Then the audit. The Ministry of Heavy Industries found nearly half of mapped charging stations non-functional and now wants automakers to take direct ownership of 60 priority corridors, divided among OEMs via SIAM and backed by a Rs 2,000 crore corpus. Handing the asset to whoever sells the car is what Ionna did in America, and Ionna just won J.D. Power. It is not a bad instinct. It is an admission.

A month ago we reported that 6,562 chargers had been sanctioned under PM E-DRIVE and none installed. That is still true; the scheme has simply been extended to March 2028. Karnataka meanwhile approved 515 of 687 surveyed sites toward 1,250 stations, with BESCOM on 10-year operate-and-maintain agreements — the first structure we have seen in India that budgets for the decade after the ribbon-cutting. And for trucks: of 67,657 public chargers, 534 are rated 121-240 kW and nine exceed 240 kW.

Rest of Asia

South Korea is running the cleanest demand-shifting experiment in the world right now. The Climate Ministry will discount public charging by up to 32% between 11am and 2pm on 21 weekend and holiday dates through October, targeting the hours when solar output peaks, ahead of a full seasonal time-of-use tariff. KEPCO halves the energy charge; 19 private operators including EverOn, Chaevi and SK Eleclink are passing it through.

The spring pilot, at half the discount, lifted average daily sessions 9.2%. Doubling the incentive to measure the elasticity is what a regulator does when it intends to price rather than preach. Critics are right that a three-hour window with discounts ranging from 11% to 32% is a blunt instrument — but a blunt instrument that generates real data beats a smart one that generates a consultation.

On the hardware side, Chaevi won preferred-bidder status from Korea Expressway Corporation for 131 chargers at 29 motorway service areas, 118 of them 200 kW. Eighty-two will carry NACS connectors at up to 250 amps. A state motorway operator putting Tesla's plug on more than half a national tender is a standards decision dressed as a procurement.

Oceania

Queensland's LNP government announced a "Better Bus Build" for up to 630 buses and made clear they will not be electric, with the transport minister calling battery buses "big, expensive paperweights" and a "fanciful pipe-dream". The state's own transport department website still promises every new South East Queensland bus will be zero-emission from 2025. NSW, Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia are all still building depots.

The sentiment data suggests Queensland is reading its electorate accurately. McKinsey's 30,000-person Mobility Consumer Pulse found 49% of Australian electrified-vehicle owners would consider going back to combustion — the highest of 15 countries, against 46% in the US, 28% in China and 24% in Germany. Running costs led the reasons at 47%; inadequate charging came second at 27%.

A UNSW study offered the constructive version, arguing kerbside charging should be planned like traffic lights rather than street lighting — placed against measured local demand, not spread evenly for coverage. It also found pole-mounted 50 kW DC units deliver far more energy than typical 22 kW AC posts, which is the same lesson our Erlang analysis of 8,966 European sites produced from the other direction: uniform coverage is the most expensive way to be useless.

South America

São Paulo signed two loans of USD 248.3 million each with the IDB and the World Bank's IBRD, USD 496.6 million in total, potentially financing more than 1,100 electric buses. The city already runs 1,759, the largest e-bus fleet in Brazil.

The detail that matters is buried in the terms: IDB disbursement is tied to outcomes and requires a charging infrastructure action plan. Development banks have spent a decade funding vehicles and discovering depots too late. Someone finally wrote the depot into the covenant — in the same week Queensland decided the buses were paperweights.

Africa

Following up on last week's coverage of Ghana's blown transformers: the picture got more specific and no more comfortable. Energy Minister John Abdulai Jinapor's bill requiring Energy Commission approval for every charging site still awaits the Attorney-General's sign-off, while the country's reserve margin is projected to stay below the recommended 18% for eleven months of 2026. Ghana registered more than 1,200 EVs by October 2025, up from under 200 in 2022. That is the scale at which the grid is already complaining.

South Africa published the workaround. Zero Carbon Charge is doubling both its off-grid N3 hubs from 360 kW to 720 kW, three months after opening — solar from 280 to 470 kWp, storage from 645 kWh to 1.4 MWh, with up to 600 kW available to a single connector. Building the generation and the charger as one asset is slower and more capital-intensive per bay. It is also the only version of this that does not need a transformer nobody is going to fund.

And Malawi, with roughly 30 registered EVs and 280 electric motorcycles, revised its fuel retail guidelines to require at least one fast charger at designated stations in major cities — selected sites, not a blanket mandate, with no tariff framework and no deadline. Writing the rule before the fleet arrives is cheap. Ghana is currently demonstrating the price of the alternative.