E-car drivers face rising charging prices and a new cost trap

Slowly, the Number of e-car drivers, and also the charging network for the public shops is getting better and better. This will make it easier and more convenient to drive the electric car on the road. Charge. At the same time, a new cost trap is looming, because a new price driver is being added to the current tariff jungle - and it is not the electricity costs. Instead, roaming fees are coming to the fore, they have been rising significantly recently. This has the Lade-Services-Studie 2024 of the market research company UScale.

Many people are probably familiar with the roaming fee from the early days of mobile phone tariffs. It was feared, because the fee for the use of the infrastructure outside the provider's core area sometimes added steep price surcharges to the call fees. This is now also the case with the charging infrastructure. Because more and more Charging card providers and the associated charging apps conclude contracts with operators of charging stations outside their own network. This has superficial advantages, because it allows you to charge with your own charging service even on long-distance trips.

The hope was that the number of charging contracts and thus the number of charging cards that every e-car driver should have with them could slowly decrease, i.e. that e-car driving would become easier and also cheaper. After all, every charging card requires an existing customer relationship with a charging service provider: You have to store your data and a payment option there. The disadvantage is when providers make themselves pay for convenience through rising costs, as the survey of 2688 drivers of e-cars in September 2024 showed.

This is exactly what the survey revealed: The number of charging cards per e-car driver has not decreased, but rather increased, to an average of 3.5 cards per driver. What's more, electric drivers are increasingly reacting to the price increase caused by roaming costs by changing providers. Background: Those who charge in the provider's network pay less.

Concerns are growing that the large charging station operators will continue to grow and gain market power, and that prices will become less transparent.

Image: Matthias Brügge / AUTO BILD

This increases the pressure on pure roaming providers such as Chargemap or Plugsurfing, which offer access but no charging network of their own. The same applies to the charging services of car manufacturers, which usually market charging access via partners such as the provider DCS, but do not maintain their own charging network. The market share of these providers without their own network fell significantly last year.

The winners, on the other hand, are the Operators of charging points and fast charging parks. For example, the market share of the utility EnBW, which offers both, grew to 21 percent, that of ARAL Pulse to 10 percent, followed by IONITY with 9 percent. The Supercharger network of Tesla reaches 5 percent of all non-Tesla drivers and 76 percent of all Tesla owners. At the same time, cooperations are a clever move. For example, ARAL Pulse has recently started working with the ADAC, and the petrol station operator won half of its electricity customers through the cooperation. The concern now is that the big providers are getting bigger and bigger, while the smaller ones are having a harder time.

As the third reason that drives many e-car drivers to the major charging power brands, the study has identified a large number of drivers who are driving electrically for the first time. While in recent years it was common to stock up on a large number of contracts, including small and local providers, newcomers among e-car drivers would tend to prefer the established charging brands.

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