VM Survey: Yes to E-Mobility, but Charging Often Has Hiccups

What needed to be proven: Just the other night, the colleague wanted to charge the Mini Countryman SE at the Munich public utility charger. The charging process started, he was feeling optimistic and planned to unplug it four hours later to avoid blocking the station. The result: The charging process was aborted shortly after it started, apparently due to excessive network load. And after that, it didn’t start again. Frustrated, he gave up - and moved the charging attempt to the station at work. His conclusion: If you can't charge at home or at work, you're either reliant on very expensive (but quite reliable) HPC charging or unreliable (and also too expensive, too few, and unreliable) AC charging in public urban areas. Issues like these with the public charging infrastructure have been increasing in our experience recently. Therefore, we wanted to know: How do you find the charging connection? Only 43 percent said: “I have no major problems with charging, it usually or always works smoothly.” Almost a third said: “It often happens that the charging process only starts after several attempts or with different cards or apps.” And another third responded disillusionedly: “It almost never works smoothly. For me, this is a reason to switch back to a combustion engine.”

To prevent this from happening and to avoid stagnation due to mediocre charging experiences, city operators (mostly monopolists) urgently need to work on their offerings. Charging must become natural and simple, available at every lamppost (or curb!), ideally with "Plug & Charge".