photos: Audi AG
Range anxiety is real and planning a long distance route can be a little intimidating but what if every gas station was required to have charging stations? Electric car sales in Germany have been slow, making up only 1.8% of new car sales in 2019. Germany is going to require all gas stations to have charging stations as part of a €130 billion economic recovery plan. Germany unveiled the incentives as part of a broader stimulus plan which included taxes to penalize ownership of large polluting ICE SUVs.
Germany has over 14,000 gas stations but only 27,730 charging stations. While the numbers may look like they favor the electrics, that’s individual power units as opposed to multi-pump gas stations. There needs to be at least 70,000 charging stations and 7,000 fast charging stations to make electric cars part of the mass market in Germany.
In 2019, the United States had over 168,000 gas stations and only 20,000 charging stations. Adding chargers to all traditional gas station would make traveling more worry-free. Obviously, the US charging stations are clumped in California and the Northeast region. If all stations are required to have chargers, more electric cars would be sold. Electrify America/Electrify Canada are opening more and more stations but there’s a lot more work to do. Here’s looking to the future of long distance electric drives.