EVwire newsletter #161: EV industry news roundup

Listening to history’s greatest founders* has taught me one core thing about building my business: relentlessly pursue hiring only A-players.

And that is what I have done.

It took me five years to get here with EVwire, but I've found the right guy at the right moment.

Meet EVwire’s first full-time team member: Simon Alvarez.

You've actually seen his work before:

He was the main writer of Teslarati for the past 8 years, writing 7,940+ articles, or about 31%, of Teslarati’s entire 25,000-ish archive.

He has also trained the other writers there and built up the site's trust over time, to ~2M monthly visitors.

Simon now stepped out of Teslarati and goes all-in to cover Tesla & EV news daily at EVwire.com. While the initial focus is also on Tesla-related articles (that’s why there’s more than usual Tesla articles in this newsletter, too), we’re gradually expanding the scope back to the rest of the industry.

We’ve also got Michael, whom I’ve introduced you to before, who brings in a unique perspective from Canada, just a bit less often for now.

Personally, I’ll still be neck-deep in everything we make and will put together these newsletters myself.

Simon’s addition to the team takes EVwire to a new level — I reckon we’re about 5% done in my grand master plan of what our platform will look like. 😉

PS, make sure to go and connect with Simon on socials:
X account here | LinkedIn account here

* on the greatest founders thing: I only have one single podcast that I recommend to anyone remotely interested in building something for the world.
It’s called “Founders” by David Senra. Thank me later.

Now, I really love it when we can figure out win-wins with our EVwire b2b partners for the whole EV world. I mean, that’s the whole goal, isn’t it? to provide value, to you.

This report that we made with Eleport certainly is one of those wins.

I spent about two months digging into the charging landscape of every European country with one sole purpose: to map out what the fast charging networks in each country charge EV owners.

It had never been done before at this scale, and that baffled me.
I soon learned why — it is ridiculously difficult 😂.

Before us, there was just this one try at this by Visual Capitalist, which really had a viral run a year before with their chart. It even caused headlines in my own national media with “Estonia’s fast charging prices are among the highest in Europe”.

But I knew their ranking was false.
Now, I’ve proved it.

I started digging deeper, and I had some good help from the charging price platform Chargeprice.net (look for their apps for comparing charging prices on your phone). There were also some country-specific comparison tools I used (like in Austria), but a lot of Europe is just quite the black box when it comes to comparing CPO prices online.

But we put some work in and now… this exists:

The full report is here, and I’ll give you the best bits also below:

I started going country by country, researching each ≥50kW fast charging operator for each. Countless websites, translating one by one. With that, I created a leaderboard for each of them, showing the ad-hoc pricing (which you get at the charger without any commitment), the free app/subscription pricing, and the paid subscription pricing.

I arrived at tables ranking all CPOs like this for each country. There are 29 of these.

The charging networks are ranked based on the cheapest available ad-hoc or app price they offer. Each line you see combines their whole dynamic range, so it shows both off-peak and peak tariffs, and also variation by locations.

And once I was done with all of the countries, it was time to do something similar that I showed you from Visual Capitalist before — just in a far better metric for an actual EV owner than an “€/100km” metric. We did it in €/kWh.

We took the average (median) fast charging price of each country there, and with some magic of Eleport’s graphics team created the grand overview across Europe:

Europe’s average came to 0.54€/kWh (which equals to ~$0.63/kWh)

And here’s another view of the same data:

The fluctuation of the median price is quite strong, as you see. From 0.38€/kWh in Finland and Bulgaria, all the way to an €0.82/kWh average in the UK. For our US readers, those numbers would be $0.45 to $0.96/kWh.

To compare, Paren’s great data for the whole US put the average at $0.49/kWh over there, and Canada at $0.42. (Michael dug deeper into latter here: link)

So yes in other words, since the US average of $0.49 is equivalent to €0.42 over on this side of the pond, it means that there are only five European countries that have cheaper average fast charging price than the US average — Finland, Bulgaria, and Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia. But there’s more to learn from this report.

Notable examples from either side:

On the other side, we’ve got a very clear look right in the top five: four Eastern European countries are in the top five for the cheapest average charging price while all have under 10% EV market share

To compare, the average EV market share in Europe was 19.5% in 2025.

It seems reasonable to suggest that the lower purchasing power of the people is a strong factor here for EV adoption, and for a complete picture, we should also compare it with the fossil fuel prices in the countries. I actually plan to do that as an extra layer here soon.

Luckily, this research also means that the higher-than-average EV fast charging prices do not hinder EV adoption.

In nearly every market I looked into, a supermarket chain is among the top three cheapest. The largest pan-European one here being Lidl (active in 15+ countries), which was battling for the cheapest available charging price with Tesla’s off-peak rates in a lot of countries. If you didn’t know, Lidl has also become one of the largest fast charging networks in all of Europe by now!

Here’s an example view from Slovakia, where it tied with our friends at ejoin GO:

The supermarket chain rollout might be due to these operators subsidizing charging to drive foot traffic, but also the reality of easier charging rollout for them – they have the land within their existing parking lots and likely have enough grid connection to play with, the two constraints all CPOs have to deal with.

Although we brought out the 20 to 30 largest DC fast charging operators per country in this overview, we started by analyzing around 300 CPOs when countries had that many.

For example, while Germany has a lot of CPOs, as it is also the largest country in Europe in terms of EV unit sales as well, these 200+ connector CPOs ended up forming a 0.59€ median fast charging price, which is in 21st place out of 29 in the ranking by the lowest median price across Europe.

The UK, also a heavily saturated market in terms of CPOs on the market and being the second-largest in EV unit sales in Europe, is the most expensive market to charge your EV at.

Tesla’s pricing works differently from most networks. Prices can vary by location and time of day. In most of Europe, the network is accessible for all EVs, not just Teslas.

The €11.99/month membership (free for Tesla owners) lowers the prices even further, and would make it the cheapest in even more countries if charging enough to offset the monthly fee. In some markets, the off-peak membership tariff can even drop to around €0.15/kWh, which is also the cheapest fast charging price we’ve seen across Europe.

“Charge cheaper if you buy our household electricity” appears in certain countries, driven by utility players. This is especially visible in the Baltics (often 10% off or other incentives), in Iceland (“loyalty tariffs” offered), and Sweden.

This vertical integration gives utility-CPOs a moat that pure-play operators can’t easily replicate. Another bundling play from certain energy providers even allows for the “use home electricity price when charging at public chargers” with certain lock-in contracts.

That’s it for now, but there’s more to discover in the report… each country has such a different charging landscape.

Some competitive analysis like this (although perhaps not as deep) is often done by the large charging operators in-house, but never really shared publicly. But the EV industry needs more transparency. That’s why I’m very happy Eleport was willing to publish this with me.

We have also created a clickable table of contents on this price report, so you can find any country that interests you immediately.

See the full report: eleport.com/price-report

PS, EVwire has some more room to add partners and create value across the EV industry together. If you think we could do something great together, reach out 🤝

We’ve yet to get the full numbers, but Cox Automotive estimates U.S. EV sales fell from 296,304 in Q1 2025 to an estimated ~212,600 year-over-year in Q1 2026, reflecting a 28% decline. (link)

Well, everyone expected a decline in Q1… now we just know the rough range. In our next newsletter, I’ll dig deeper into every automaker that decided this is the perfect scapegoat timing to shut down production of different EV models. There are more than you’d think.

The market will heal. At the same time, used EV sales moved in the opposite direction, rising 12% year-over-year to roughly 93,500 units.

New EV price premiums have fallen to around $6,500, while used EV prices are now within roughly $1,300 of ICE vehicles.

🇪🇺 In Europe, we’ll get the Q1 numbers in the latter half of the month, but Jan-Feb saw 379,604 BEVs sold across Europe (EU+EFTA+UK), up 14.8% YoY and reaching an 19.6% market share of all new cars sold.

Biggest growth was seen in Croatia, albeit a small base, with 335 EVs bringing in +174.6% YoY, and then Poland continuing its massive EV adoption run with +99.4% YoY to reach 5,435 EVs sold.

Automakers: As for sales numbers from automakers that make both EV & ICE vehicles, we don’t have much in the worldwide Q1 yet, but I can already tell you these numbers for global scene of EV-only makers (and BYD):

Tesla delivered 358,023 vehicles in Q1 2026, up 6.3% year-over-year. This means it retook the best-selling EV brand title (link) from:

BYD reported 310,389 BEV sales in the first quarter, a 25.46% decline. 
NIO 83,465 (+98.3% YoY)
Xiaomi ~79,000 (+~4% YoY)
XPeng 62,682 (-33.3% YoY)
Polestar 13,126 (+7% YoY)
Rivian 10,365 (+20% YoY)
Lucid 3,093 (+0.5% YoY)

🇰🇷 We also reported that South Korea had their first quarter where a fully electric brand was the #1 in imports — Tesla beat BMW and Mercedes for Q1 (link).

This was such great news that even Elon himself reposted our article on it, through our friend Sawyer (and yes, this is how cool our thumbnails look):

Tesla had a record March in YoY growth in a lot of European countries, too, especially given that Q1 last year was quite low due to Model Y changeover.

So here’s one for everyone who spelled doom for the brand same time last year. Tesla sales in March:

🇩🇪 Germany quadrupled +315% YoY making it its best March ever, and also had the best quarter in two years (link). I bring this out, as Germany has been one of the most “I told you so everyone hates Tesla and Elon” markets for a while.
By the way, even Tesla Europe's official account reposted our article on this rise.

🇫🇷 France: +203% YoY
🇳🇴 Norway: +178% YoY
🇸🇪 Sweden: +144% YoY
🇩🇰 Denmark: +96% YoY
🇧🇪 Belgium:+89% YoY
🇳🇱 Netherlands: +72% YoY

We’ll see if this rebound momentum lasts, but the interest does seem solid for now.

… and Tesla’s Supercharging team in Germany delivered.

Tesla opened a new Supercharger station in Wolfsburg, right in the home of Volkswagen Group, and made good use of the irony with a friendly jab at VW ID. Series: the large white lettering painted on the ground reads “I’D CHARGE HERE.” (link)

It’s situated about 4km from the VW factory and HQ, and right across the street from the VW Brand Marketing Forum.

The fun part is, I already saw that VW employees are taking this joke very well and actually appreciate it (link). We need more of this across the industry, please. 👏

Tesla has introduced transparent pricing and a profitability calculator for its Supercharger for Business program, giving potential site hosts a clearer view of likely costs, returns, and payback timelines.

The important, or rather even unparalleled bit in our industry here, is that Tesla gives away as much of real-world information as possible, from the hardware pricing to all cost and utilization estimations based on the zip code entered, before you have to click that “get a quote” button.

We dug a lot deeper into the calculator here (link), and here is the calculator itself: (link). It’s US-only for now, but it will expand to other markets where Tesla Supercharging is present.

We’ve been tracking quite a few third-party Supercharger sites by now and reported on them. Can’t link them all here because this email is already too large, but among them we found a real gem of a charging site: a diamond shop in Florida installs its own Tesla Superchargers and Chargepoint dual-port charger (link).

We showed you last time how Canada has essentially made a 180° and started boosting its EV policy, including deciding to let the Chinese EVs in.

Now, Michael reports that Stellantis considers building Leapmotor EVs at Brampton Plant in Ontario… but is already seeing union resistance as they believe it’ll lead to less workers & a Chinese supply chain. (link)

BYD is also accelerating its Canadian expansion plans with 20 branded dealerships expected within one year.

Canada and Germany also strengthened collaboration on EVs and batteries, as the country tries to reduce its reliance on the US (and well, not completely replace it with China, is my guess) (link).

By the way, if you’re one of our readers in Canada and around Vancouver, go grab a charge free of charge at 400kW by Mercedes-Benz High-Power Charging this weekend (Apr 11-12th):

Meanwhile, the Hyundai Ioniq 6 N was showcased in Canada (link). Ioniq 5 N is a car that I have seen a lot of praise for, surprisingly, in the true auto geek groups (that are not for EV specifically). Let’s see if the Ioniq 6 will reach that level.

To be really honest, we’ve covered quite a lot more news on our site by now, which I just couldn’t fit in this email, so feel free to browse EVwire.com!

I’ll get us back up to speed with more frequent newsletters soon :)