More public charging stations, please!
Electric cars can now manage long distances of more than 600 km (roughly 373 miles). To put this in perspective, that distance is the equivalent of driving from Berlin to Hamburg and back. But what if you wanted to drive the 600 km from Berlin to Munich? How easy is it to find public charging stations once you reach your destination? The German Federal Network Agency has the answer, as it runs the Charging Station Index for Germany. Translated into map format, the status quo in many federal states doesn’t look bad at all at first sight. When you zoom in on the charging stations, there are more than 2,200 in Bavaria, for example – not a bad number at all. If you consider the fact that Bavaria had around 1,680 filling stations in 2015 (and this number is in decline), then it’s a pretty good supply for electric car drivers. In Saxony-Anhalt, by contrast, there are just over 200 charging stations, which puts the brakes on the euphoria somewhat. We still have a long way to go. This is evidenced by the fact that there are currently around 14,000 public charging stations in Germany, despite the coalition agreement between the CDU/CSU and SPD aiming for at least 100,000 by 2020. Besides, rural areas are sparsely covered and tariffs are hardly transparent.
