A Munich Judge Read AFIR. The Roaming Markup Became Damages.

The global view

The number of the week is a wholesale price. On Monday the Regional Court of Munich I ruled that EWE Go may not charge roaming provider Digital Charging Solutions 0.84 €/kWh when its own app customers pay 0.52, and that the difference has been owed since AFIR took effect on 13 April 2024. It is the first court anywhere to interpret the regulation's non-discrimination clause, and the judgment is not final. It is also the first time a roaming markup has been reclassified as damages.

Vietnam made the same point by decree, ordering public chargers open to all compatible vehicles from 1 July 2027, then spent the rest of the week explaining what "open" means. Behind both stories sits a market that has stopped building for building's sake. Roland Berger's index found 1.1 million new public points in 2025 against 1.3 million in each of the two years before, while the electrified fleet grew 40% to 73 million. Last week we quoted China's 5-6% utilisation. Rationed capex is the consequence, and rationed capex is also how utilisation eventually climbs.

The megawatt, meanwhile, left the show floor. Siemens and OMV switched on the first Sicharge Flex on the Brenner, Voltix opened 1.5 MW bays at Vierzon, and Tesla's first Megacharger opened outside a Pilot in Georgia, all in the same week Brussels moved truck charging to the front of the funding queue. Three weeks ago Daimler's CEO said the chargers were missing. They are now arriving at roughly the places our truck map said they should.

Europe

Start with the courtroom. Case 33 O 2062/25 turned on a simple comparison: EWE Go billed DCS 83.7 cents per kWh plus a 10 cent per minute blocking fee, and billed its own app users 52 cents with no blocking fee. The court found no objective justification for the gap, barred the separate blocking fee, ordered disclosure and awarded damages retroactive to AFIR's entry into force, which could run to millions. EWE Go can appeal, and every German CPO's legal team read the judgment twice before lunch.

The market it lands in is maturing on schedule. Roland Berger counts more than half of Europe's fast chargers at 150 kW or above, and Spain, with a quarter of its public infrastructure fast and 13 electrified vehicles per point against a European average of 14, is no longer the laggard it was cast as. The UK added 8,686 devices in nine months, with ultra-rapid units up 39% to 15,335 and hubs past 1,070.

Brussels wants the next tranche of CEF and AFIF money pointed at trucks. Transport Commissioner Tzitzikostas put the gap at 40,000 registered electric trucks against about 3,000 suitable public points, citing banks' reluctance to finance heavy-duty sites, and promised at least 400 sites with 2,900 points on two TEN-T corridors. That is more plugs on two corridors than our model needs as megawatt bays across twenty roads by 2030, so the question is how many of those 2,900 will be MCS and how many will be 400 kW CCS wearing a hi-vis vest.

Two of them are already concrete. Siemens and OMV commissioned the first commercial Sicharge Flex at Kufstein on the Brenner, scaling from 480 kW to 1.68 MW with four MCS points of up to 1.2 MW to follow, and OMV has ordered more. Vinci's Voltix opened four 1.5 MW points at Vierzon, the first of a €90 million, 50-site network across France, Germany and Spain by 2028, co-financed by the same AFIF pot Brussels is now topping up.

One story for the risk register. German security firm Fuzzware compromised a Tesla wallbox in 45 seconds through the charging cable's data link, and at Pwn2Own in Tokyo also cracked chargers from Alpitronic, Autel and ChargePoint for $215,500 in prize money. Tesla patched the first bug without knowing it; a second, in the radio chip's boot ROM, is believed unfixable. When we wrote in August that a relay attack on ISO 15118 was heading to USENIX, this is the industry it was heading into.

North America

Three weeks after Tesla priced a Megacharger at €163,000 in Hanover, the first one opened to the public outside a Pilot travel centre in Ellabell, Georgia: six stalls on V4 cabinets at up to 1.2 MW, enough for a Semi to take on 60% in half an hour. Twelve more sites are under construction across California, Texas, Nevada and Indiana, three of them nearly finished. Tesla is putting its trucks where its chargers are, which is the opposite of the European sequence and arguably the right one.

Federal money is still mostly a rumour. Two years after Oregon was awarded $52 million under NEVI, not one federally funded fast charger is open, and none is operating anywhere on the West Coast after the six-month freeze and a proposed 100% American-made components rule. Construction on the first Oregon sites is expected to begin this month, which is what was expected last month.

California answered by legislating around Washington. Governor Newsom signed a package that speeds charger permitting, cuts barriers at apartment buildings and clarifies HOA liability, alongside a $600 million Cap-and-Invest package with instant rebates of up to $3,500. Zero-emission truck makers must publish prices to qualify for subsidies, a transparency rule the European truck market could borrow.

China

National Day is China's version of our August stress test, and the grid passed with room to spare. Highway chargers logged 6.71 million sessions and 163 GWh over the seven days, up 51% year on year, with a record 28 GWh on 1 October alone. Yet the number of heavily congested service-area sites fell 17% despite 35% more EV traffic. The network reached 24.2 million connectors by August, up 40%, which is the same arithmetic that produces 5-6% utilisation the other 51 weeks of the year.

Last week we reported Geely taking 30% of NIO Power. The terms are now public: Geely contributes all of E-Energee plus RMB 640 million, NIO takes 10% of Geely's Haohan Energy, and the networks become fully interoperable. Geely plans 22,000 stations and 100,000 guns by end-2027; NIO logged a record 183,600 swaps on 5 October. Analysts are calling it a blueprint for consolidating China's charging infrastructure. We called it the pieces thesis with Chinese characteristics.

Geely is also shopping abroad. In Raunheim it announced it is seeking German partners for 1,000 kW stations built on the system that took a Lynk & Co 10 from 10 to 70% in four and a half minutes. On Tuesday we published our answer: on Europe's fast chargers the average session lasts 27 minutes and draws about 60 kW, whatever the cabinet is rated. A megawatt saves minutes nobody has priced and costs grid capacity everybody has.

The V2G target we reported on 18 September, 50 GW by 2030, now has a ceiling attached. State Grid estimates that 10% EV participation would yield 86 GW of regulation capacity, more than all of China's pumped hydro, from 32 pilots in nine cities paying owners about 30 yuan a day. That is a better daily rate than we measured in Europe, and it relies on a price spread that grows narrower the more cars chase it.

India

Our March thesis said fuel retailers would buy charging networks. In India the fuel retailer is the state, and it builds instead. HPCL's network grew to 5,826 charging facilities across its 25,238 retail outlets, about 11% of India's 52,718 public points, and is now placing 240 kW units for trucks and buses on 50 highway corridors under PM E-DRIVE, with battery-swap tie-ups from Honda to V-Green on the side.

Delhi got central approval for 382 of 456 proposed charging sites, with tenders for the first 160 to 180 grid-ready locations imminent and KPMG running the project office. The deadlines are what give it teeth: 100% electric three-wheeler and light commercial registrations from January 2027 and a petrol two-wheeler registration ban from April 2028. Fifteen months to build a network for a city of 30 million is not generous. It is, however, a date, which is more than most European cities have.

Rest of Asia

Vietnam issued Circular 61 and a national technical regulation requiring public charging stations to be open to all compatible vehicles from 1 July 2027, with price transparency, certified metering, automatic fire and flood cut-offs and transition periods of six to 24 months for existing sites. The target is obvious: VinFast's V-Green runs 155,000 ports, most of them closed to other brands, in a market the World Bank says needs $2.2 billion of charging investment by 2030.

Then the ministry clarified. The rules are technical specifications only and do not oblige operators to serve other brands; network sharing remains a commercial matter. So the connector must fit and the software must not block a declared-compatible car, but nobody has to sign the roaming contract. Munich spent this week showing what happens when a regulator writes "must" and leaves the price to a judge. Hanoi has written "can" and left the price to VinFast.

In Japan, Honda, Taisei and Taisei Rotec are developing dynamic wireless charging for trucks up to 20 tonnes, targeting 150 kW from road-embedded coils with public-road trials from fiscal 2027. File it next to the megawatt: another answer to the question of where trucks stop, this one being "they don't".

Oceania

Ampol's A$225 million purchase of Evie, which we covered last week, came with a line we rarely see in a CPO deal announcement: a breakeven date. The fully debt-funded acquisition targets A$30 million of annualised EBITDA within three years and EBITDA breakeven in 2028, with ACCC clearance expected in the first half of 2027. Ampol says sessions rose 116% and energy delivered 120% year on year, on record Australian BEV sales of 103,716 in the first half. The profitability maths has not changed. The willingness to publish it has.

Evie's last act as an independent was to sign a letter. Tesla, AGL, EnergyAustralia, Engie and Evie are opposing an AEMC decision that lets monopoly distributors install 14,000 pole-mounted kerbside chargers and recover 70% of the cost from every electricity bill, about A$1 a year by the regulator's estimate. The distributors are not waiting: CitiPower, Powercor and United Energy have 34 of 100 Victorian kerbside units live already. Munich argued about who pays for roaming. Australia is arguing about who pays for the kerb.

The hinterland tells a different story. Western Australia's 110-point, 7,000 km electric highway is drawing complaints of broken chargers and long waits, and the Electric Vehicle Council scored the state government 3 out of 10. Tesla, for its part, passed 85,000 Supercharger stalls worldwide and plans a 24-stall site at Yass to retake the Australian size record from bp pulse, while New Zealand is preparing a larger bidirectional charging trial aimed at household bills.

South America

Peru and South Korea are launching a solar-powered charging pilot for 2026-2028 that includes the donation of one electric vehicle and two charging stations. A sample size of one will not trouble the statisticians. The useful part is in the fine print: standardisation, metrology and conformity assessment with Peru's Inacal, which is the boring institutional plumbing that Vietnam just spent a week legislating and Ghana is about to.

Africa

The African argument this week was about the tariff, not the charger. At Africa E-Mobility Week, Cape Town's Golden Arrow, running 120 electric buses, called for a dedicated EV electricity tariff after a 25% off-peak price hike hit its depot bill. Kenya already has one, at KSh 8-16 per kWh against 20-30 standard, and has just lifted the 15,000 kWh monthly cap that was squeezing fleet and swap operators. With Eskom's sales down more than 6%, a utility losing volume has every reason to want buses on its night-time load curve.

Ghana's Energy Commission has finalised regulations for charging stations and battery swapping, now awaiting parliament, with mandatory battery collection and recycling obligations attached. Regulating the end of the battery's life before the market has built the start of it is unusual, and probably wise.