Friday, March 29

The electric car has another problem in Spain: there are no ultra-fast plugs and the ones that exist are useless


with each new Electromobility Barometer published by Anfac arrive new and worrying data on the situation of the electric car in Spain. Especially if we talk about the density of plugs on public roads and, more specifically, those with the capacity to carry out really fast charges.


The quarterly study that the manufacturers’ association carries out periodically analyzes the health of the electric car in our country from different angles. Together they create a one to 100 point ranking that estimates where each country is compared to what would be a perfect environment.

And here Spain has slowed down its growth in general photography, which, furthermore, was already far from the European average. Spain currently has 14.2 points and has grown by 0.9 points compared to the previous report. Europe has grown by 1.1 points on average and now stands at 29.1 points (34.7 points if the EU-14 is taken as a reference). Germany (45.4 points) or France (31.9 points) are already far behind and are growing at much higher rates.

Where do I charge my electric car?

One of the big problems of the electric car in Spain is that there are few plugs and, for the most part, they are very slow. It is a problem that we already pointed to a few months ago, when we told that Spain was trusting the takeoff of the electric car to the purchase and the problem was much deeper.

If we talk about recharging infrastructure, Spain obtains 5.6 points out of 100 available. The European average is 10.8 points (15.1 points for the EU-14), France is at 11.5 points and Germany is at 18.1 points. Once again, the growth of these countries quarter by quarter is much higher than that of Spain.

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Source: ANFAC

But what is this data based on? In which in Spain there is 15,772 charging points for all of Spain, with an increase of 1,528 points in the last quarter but, however, they are insufficient for long trips. This is because only 17% of them have powers greater than 22 kW. In other words, not two out of every 10 plugs in our country provide loads that reduce downtime below three hours.

The data is even poorer when we go to the upper range of powers. There are barely 131 charging points available throughout Spain with powers between 150 and 250 kW. In Galicia or Aragón there is only one charging point of this type and in Asturias and Castilla y León they remain at four. In addition, in the last quarter the available plugs have been expanded in 95 new sockets, but most of them are due to unlocking for use by any user and not to new installations, Anfac points out.

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It is striking that there are more charging points with powers greater than 250 kW, until adding a total of 151 points of this type. They are places where an electric car could recharge up to 80% in just 10 or 15 minutes. Of these, Extremadura barely has two locations, the same as the Balearic Islands. In Castilla-La Mancha, Asturias or Murcia they barely have four charging points of this type.

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Lots of power and little car

These 250 kW charging points have another added problem: there are hardly any cars take advantage of its full power. Over time they will reach our market but the vehicles that exceed this power can be counted on the fingers of the hand, so they are not able to take full advantage of this system.

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A Kia EV6, for example, can stay close with recharging powers of up to 240 kW, but to exceed these limits we will have to go to options such as the Hyundai Ioniq 5, or the Ioniq 6 that are yet to come. The Porsche Taycan, the Audi e-tron GT or the Tesla Model Y also reach this power.

The electric car market is filling up with expensive cars.  Spain prefers one of 20,000 euros

Other of the most advanced models on the market also reach very high figures, but they will not be able to profit to everything the charging point can deliver. A BMW i7 will stay just below 200 kW of power and a Mercedes EQE only reaches 170 kW. Even some models, like the Tesla Model 3, that can reach this power are also not guaranteed to charge faster at 250kW plugs than at 200kW.

Without leaving Tesla, a Model S is capable of charging at 200 kW and a Model X at 225 kW, so they are also very close to taking full advantage of these plugs. In summary, the installation of these points and their growth is always good news, as models will be arriving that can take full advantage of them but, for now, they are not enough and we cannot use them at their maximum power.

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