EVwire brief: IONITY's fast chargers were the most heavily used in Germany between July and September, averaging 894.1 charging sessions per active DC charge point.
That puts IONITY ahead of Tesla (659.5), Fastned (526.5) and EnBW (513.0) in ChargePointRadar's first quarterly Lademarkt-Report, which tracked status data from more than 175,000 public charge points. IONITY's Köschinger Forst site on the A9 between Munich and Nuremberg also topped the report's utilization ranking, with 1,952 sessions per charge point in the quarter, or around 21 cars a day at each charger.
IONITY CEO Jeroen van Tilburg shared the results on LinkedIn, explaining why he cares about utilization more than plug counts:
"Every fast charger comes with a grid connection, a permit and years of operating costs, and those costs are the same whether 21 cars stop there each day or only 2. That's why I don't measure the success of a charging network by number of plugs alone. What counts is having the right chargers in the right place: on the routes people actually drive, at the stops they would make anyway, with enough power for the cars that arrive next."
Source: Jeroen van Tilburg on LinkedIn
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Here's the breakdown van Tilburg shared alongside his post:
Source: IONITY via Jeroen van Tilburg on LinkedIn
Across the wider report, ChargePointRadar logged around 24.5 million sessions in Germany during the quarter. DC charge points accounted for 70.9% of those sessions while making up only about a third of the charge points tracked. The average DC charge point recorded 305.5 sessions, compared with 59.9 for the average AC charge point.
On total volume, EnBW led the DC market with a 28.6% share of sessions, followed by Tesla at 15.2% and IONITY at 8.1%. ChargePointRadar's figures come from the status data operators must publish under the EU's AFIR rules, and count each switch from "available" to "occupied" as a session, so they don't capture session length or energy delivered.
Source: ChargePointRadar
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Context:
IONITY's strong showing in the report comes as the network has been working to keep drivers moving through its stations. Its Fast Lane program, for one, rewards drivers with free charging credit for unplugging at 80% or charging during off-peak hours. IONITY has also surveyed drivers on how they spend their time while their cars charge, and grabbing a coffee came out on top.
The company also has the funding to keep building on that momentum. IONITY secured up to €600 million (about $708 million) in financing to expand its ultra-fast charging network across Europe, and it has not been shy about trading playful barbs with Tesla along the way, as its quirky "Y settle for less" site in Wolfsburg showed.
Source: Jeroen van Tilburg on LinkedIn, ChargePointRadar
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