A provider of an app for easy charging of electric vehicles is appalled: In an evaluation of numerous data from German charging points, the experts found that many charging stations are permanently unreliable.

According to the coalition agreement, there should be around 15 million electric vehicles and one million charging points in Germany by 2030. However, there is still a long way to go, as the start-up elvah explains to the star. Because: Of the currently only 70,000 charging points in Germany, around eight to ten percent, i.e. 5,600 to 7,000 units, do not work properly in the long term. Things are not looking much better in neighboring countries: Luxembourg leads the ranking with a failure rate of five to seven percent, while in France up to 20 percent of the active charging stations are unavailable. The experts warn: This is a big problem for traveling with the electric car and the reputation of environmentally friendly mobility.

How is the mobility turnaround supposed to succeed?

The start-up elvah offers an app that can be used to find functioning, free charging stations and where you can fill up with electricity in connection with a flat-rate “energy account”. In order to offer reliable data, the provider must therefore monitor where there are defective charging points that cannot be recommended to travelers. Of course, you also evaluate the feedback and behavior of the users. The result is illustrated in the app with the so-called elvah score, which, in addition to reliability, also measures the popularity and convenience of each charging station.

The reliability score evaluates how reliable the stations are. The start-up not only determines whether a station has an error at the start, but also whether it was ultimately possible to draw energy despite multiple failed attempts. The scale of the score goes from 0 to 10. But: According to the experts, even a value of 8.8 is not good, because it means that the charging process is far from 100% reliable.

“It is questionable how the new government wants to get 15 million e-car drivers on the streets under such omens,” criticizes the start-up. Serious problems with the supply of electric cars are looming, especially in metropolitan areas, it seems. According to the data from elvah, the most frequented charging points in the country are in Hamburg and Berlin. Both cities show weaknesses in reliability with scores of 8.14 (Berlin) and 8.39 (Hamburg). It doesn’t help much that the number of visitors to the pillars is increasing sharply from month to month, in some areas of the country even by more than 20 percent from month to month.

There is a need to catch up

An unreliable charging infrastructure harms this development, because the so-called “range anxiety” continues to play a major role among electric newcomers. Drivers are therefore afraid that their battery will run out of breath and that they will not be able to find a charging station to charge the battery – and in the end they will not get to their destination. A failure rate of up to ten percent is therefore unacceptable, the experts summarized in an interview with the star. An interim conclusion: “If you transfer that to gas stations, you can imagine the uprising that would arise.”

The start-up figures also show where there are apparently hardly any electric cars on the road. Bavaria is at the bottom with several districts. Accordingly, for example, in the districts of Freyung-Grafenau, Tirschenreuth, Dingolfing-Landau, Regen and Straubing-Bogen, hardly any vehicles head for the columns. Surprisingly, Leverkusen was the last to lead this ranking in a city comparison, ahead of Hamburg, Potsdam, Bremerhaven and Berlin. Ironic: With over 13,500 charging stations, Bavaria offers the most contact points. The city state of Bremen brings up the bottom of all federal states with just over 300 columns and Saarland with a good 500. The developers behind elvah agree: There is a need to catch up here.