A trip across Europe in an electric car, one charge at a time

This article is part of The New Commute, a special report on urban mobility in Europe from POLITICO’s Global Policy Lab: Living Cities. Sign up here.
We stood by the charger discussing the correct order of things: Do you charge the payment card and then plug in the cord? Or does the cord go in first?
My new friends — or rather, a couple kind enough to help me — and I were struggling to get an electric charger to function in the middle-of-nowhere Czech Republic.
I was on Day Four of my road trip from Brussels to Budapest, and this was the first broken charger I had encountered.
Next to my rented Polestar 2, the couple’s Tesla Model Y was charging with no issues.
“You can use it after us,” Daniel Janina sheepishly said.
Janina, 31, and his partner Kristina Pokryvkova, 30, bought the Tesla a year ago, taking advantage of incentives in Slovenia, where EV buyers could get a subsidy of up to €6,500. The couple is from Slovakia, but that country does not offer EV subsidies.
We were the only EV drivers at the truck stop 21 kilometers outside Brno. While it had two chargers, the stop was designed with combustion engines and truckers in mind. It had a hotel for those looking for a night in a real bed and a restaurant, along with a snack shop and plenty of gas pumps.
The couple was on the last leg of their road trip home after driving to Denmark on holiday. They’ve taken multiple such trips since buying the EV, and they’re not looking back.
As part of its market rollout, Tesla is installing a network of ultra-fast chargers with up to 350 kilowatts of power — so-called superchargers — which Pokryvkova credits for making such adventures fun instead of a chore.
“You have to stop anyway to use the bathroom or to eat something, so it’s pretty easy to just plug in the car and go do what you want,” she said.
It’s also saved them money: Janina estimates the Renault they owned before cost about €10 per 100 kilometers. While he uses the more expensive superchargers on longer trips, he said charging at the office for his regular commute has lowered that price to €3 per 100 kilometers.
I bid them farewell, grabbed a snack and waited for the car to recharge after draining the battery to 9 percent. Nearly two hours later, the battery finally hit 100 percent.
This was not one of Tesla’s fancy superchargers — it was a 33-kilowatt one run by one of the many companies getting into the charging business. At nearly every stop, I had to sign up for a new service, download some app or scan yet another QR code to access the power. (One of the spots along the way didn’t take Belgian numbers when signing up for an account.)
Despite a perceived lack of EV-charging infrastructure dominating discussions, the biggest obstacle along the drive was time spent charging — not the availability of charging points themselves.
Ultra-fast chargers, also called DC chargers, are less widely available across the bloc. An analysis by car lobby ACEA found that only 1 in 8 chargers across the EU are DC chargers.
“If we want to convince Europeans to make the switch to electric vehicles, charging should be as easy as refueling is today,” Sigrid de Vries, ACEA’s director general, said in a press statement.
Filling up a gas tank takes five to 10 minutes. Recharging an EV battery can take anywhere from 20 minutes to four hours — it all depends on the type of charger and how much power is coming through.
Such time commitments may not matter on a leisurely road trip but can cause for stress or tardiness if you’re trying to make a business meeting.
Much has also been made of the West-East divide in charger availability and infrastructure; there is some truth to it.
During a trip from Budapest to Debrecen and back on Day Five, I ran low on power halfway between the two cities. After finding a nearby charger on a routing map, I pulled into a quiet neighborhood, bordering a massive cornfield. Next to the last house, with a view of the sprawling corn stalks, sat an EV charger.
It was broken.
Germany had the most robust charging infrastructure, even incorporating it into signage along highways with a charging icon next to the traditional gas pump.
On Day Seven, I found the charging station mecca: Located off the highway between Munich and Stuttgart, the rest stop was built entirely around electric transport — buses, cars and trucks.
Along with a restaurant, brand-new bathrooms and free WiFi, the stop had 12 Tesla superchargers, almost two dozen 33-kilowatt chargers and six larger spots for buses, pumping out 300 kilowatts of power. German public transportation firm AVV had one of its electric buses charging just a few meters away from my Polestar.
A coffee and three-quarters of an hour later, I was back on the road, headed toward home after driving more than 3,800 kilometers, including 18 charging stops.