Plugged in, priced out: how to make public charging of EVs work for consumers

Consumer-friendly charging is instrumental for the mass adoption of electric vehicles (EVs). As well as binding deployment targets for public charging infrastructure, the EU’s Alternative Fuels Infrastructure Regulation (AFIR) includes important requirements on price transparency and payment methods.

However, despite these requirements, public charging across Europe still has structural problems that undermine consumer trust: an opaque, multi-layered pricing system hindering comparison, billing complexity that makes costs impossible to predict, local monopolies and payment methods that remain inaccessible to many.

BEUC calls on the European Commission and co-legislators to close AFIR regulatory gaps and address the underlying market failures, including market concentration, that keep public charging expensive and difficult to use.