Is Europe building the wrong charging network?

Yesterday I drove the A8 towards Salzburg and stopped at Irschenberg. The chargers there deliver 150 kW. Not megawatts. And the place was packed, both at the chargers and next door at DINZLER Kaffeerösterei AG, the coffee roaster and coffee house everyone on that road knows.

150 kW is exactly right there. People stop for a coffee anyway, for twenty or thirty minutes. The coffee sets the length of the stop. The charger just has to match it.

That is the whole lesson, and I think much of the industry is missing it.

Europe now has 1.3 million public charge points. Operators like Electra compete with subscriptions, partner networks and perks to fill their hubs, and the industry's own analysts say many charge points sit underused. Irschenberg needs none of that. People already have a reason to be there.

The right charger depends on one question: how long does the vehicle stand still anyway?

Where cars sleep: eight hours overnight. Slow chargers and cheap power. For millions of city renters, they barely exist.

Where people stop anyway: a coffee, a supermarket, an errand in town. Twenty to thirty minutes. Around 150 kW, like Irschenberg.

Where time is short: a truck driver's legally required 45-minute break, or a fleet that loses money every minute off the road. That needs real power. Around 700 kW adds roughly 400 km to a heavy truck during that break. The flash chargers BYD and XPENG are proposing for Europe put a battery behind the charger. They can deliver a megawatt to a vehicle while drawing around 100 kW from the grid.

Much of today's building ignores this: hubs in places nobody would otherwise stop, with the power chosen from a catalogue rather than from the stop. When a place gives people no reason to be there, you end up paying them to come.

Irschenberg didn't need a loyalty programme. It needed a good coffee roaster.

If you build, finance or plan charging: which of the three is Europe overbuilding, and which is it missing?