Why Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure Is Years Behind the Cars
June 29, 2026 · Frisian News
Governments subsidized electric cars into affordability but left charging infrastructure to private companies pursuing profit. The result: thousands of vehicles waiting for a handful of public chargers.
Norway has a large fleet of electric vehicles relative to its public charging infrastructure, a ratio that forces drivers into long waits. Meanwhile, Germany sells large numbers of EVs annually but chargers concentrate in cities. Rural areas go without.
Governments spent heavily on EV subsidies over the last decade, making cars cheaper. They spent a fraction of that on charging stations. The bet was that private companies would build the infrastructure once demand existed. That bet failed. Shell, BP, and domestic network operators have no incentive to build chargers in small towns where profit margins are thin.
Tesla built its own Supercharger network and walled it off from other brands until last year. Legacy automakers planned to share infrastructure but spend more time fighting over standards than installing cables. Siemens and ABB, which make charging hardware, profit from fragmented networks where cities and regions buy different systems that don't communicate with each other.
A real EV owner in rural France reported that the nearest working charger is far away. In Poland, chargers often sit idle while waiting lists form elsewhere. Stockholm installed far more chargers than Warsaw by 2024. The problem isn't technology. It's that public money funded the cars while private companies control where the charge points go.
Governments created this mess by asking consumers to switch technology while leaving the infrastructure to whoever could profit. The cars arrived on time. Everything else is still catching up, and nobody is in a hurry to fix it.
Published June 29, 2026 · Frisian News