Carmakers Are Still Sorting Out Europe’s Charger Shortcomings

(Bloomberg) -- Automakers bringing new electric vehicles to market in Europe are virtually united in common gripes — not about consumer demand or government subsidies, but about issues with plugs.

Ford Motor Co., for instance, is rolling out an all-electric Explorer model manufactured in Cologne, Germany. “There is one thing I am really concerned about,” Martin Sander, the head of the company’s EV business in Europe, said in an interview: getting the grid ready to receive EVs from Norway in the north, to the Italian island of Sicily in the south.

“It needs to speed up drastically,” Sander said of permitting processes and charging infrastructure implementation. “If this doesn’t happen, then customers will not have the possibility in 2035 to drive electric vehicles everywhere in Europe, because it just won’t be practical.”

Similarly, Renault SA later this year will start selling the R5 E-Tech, priced to start around €25,000 ($27,300). While one of the features Chief Executive Officer Luca de Meo eagerly touts is bidirectional charging — meaning, the car will be able to return energy back to the grid, or to one’s home or appliances — it will work only with a Renault-designed charger, and with certain electricity providers the company has agreements with.

“That’s a little bit of a limit, right?” de Meo said last week in a conversation with the head of Eurelectric, an association that represents Europe’s electricity industry. “Interoperability, and finding a way to make all cars to be able to get energy back into the system, wherever it comes from — it’s a discussion you should have.”

The comments Sander and de Meo made last week at events in Brussels — where the European Commission has set a target to eliminate emissions from new vehicles sold just over a decade from now — speak to anxieties that have flown under the radar relative to the race to lower costs and increase battery range. These are among the more nuanced complications that the industry and regulators have little time to resolve.

The EU should take inspiration from the region’s efforts to develop a European standard for mobile phone telecommunications, which led to the creation of the Global System for Mobile Communication, or GSM, de Meo said.

“In Europe, we invented the GSM standard, and this thing was copied everywhere,” he said.

Regulators don’t necessarily see a role for themselves in this process. Klaus Müller, president of Germany’s Bundesnetzagentur, which oversees the country’s electricity and telecommunications markets, believes that setting a common EV charging standard in the EU isn’t a job for the bloc’s 27 regulators, but one “for the car producers and their self-governing bodies.”

“It’s more practical to rely on industry standardization,” he said in an interview this week.

One automaker that hasn’t been complaining about charging infrastructure is Tesla Inc. The manufacturer led by Elon Musk has the largest ultra-fast charger network in Europe, with 12,200 superchargers in the region, more than three times as many as the No. 2 operator, Germany’s EnBW, according to recent BNEF estimates.

Tesla has continued to pad its lead in ultra-fast charging installations even as other automakers unite to share the burden of building out a charging network. Ford, BMW AG and its German peers, and South Korea’s Hyundai Motor Group have a joint venture called Ionity GmbH with about 600 stations and more than 3,300 high-power charging points in 24 European countries as of January.

Some past criticism of Ionity reflects German automakers’ view that charging infrastructure remains a weak link in their efforts to catch up to Tesla.

Even in countries where heavy investment in EV charging infrastructure has been made — such as France — big holes remain.

“Highway stations in France have 100% electric recharge stations that are reliable, of quality and working,” Vincent Salimon, the CEO of BMW France, said in an interview. “In Paris, there also is charging infrastructure that works well. Where there is a big problem, and where the government needs to speed up, is in semi-urban areas, in departmental roads, on national roads. There’s nothing there.”

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