Barometer updated on September 23, 2026
Rapid charger reliability barometer
Of the 21,956 rapid chargers listed across 6 European countries, 4.3% carry a status saying they are not working. It is the first measure of its kind published with one method across all of them.
The gap between countries is wide: Spain shows 8.7% of rapid chargers reported out of service, against 1% for Germany. Part of that gap is real reliability, part is how faults get reported, and the method section explains how to tell them apart.
The ranking
| Country | Out of service | Stations affected | Stations analysed | Recently verified |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spain | 8.7 % | 668 | 7,696 | 57 % |
| Switzerland | 2.4 % | 6 | 247 | 9 % |
| United Kingdom | 2.3 % | 111 | 4,833 | 6 % |
| France | 2.1 % | 103 | 4,798 | 64 % |
| Belgium | 2 % | 4 | 199 | 14 % |
| Germany | 1 % | 43 | 4,183 | 3 % |
The last column is the key to reading this table. It shows the share of stations whose status was checked less than a year ago. A country where almost nothing is verified mechanically shows few faults, not because its chargers work better, but because nobody reports that they are broken.
How to read these figures
This barometer measures reported faults, not actual faults. A station status is filled in by operators and by drivers. A network that diligently reports its incidents will therefore look less reliable than one that never updates anything.
The comparison between countries still holds because the method is strictly identical everywhere: same source, same definition of rapid charging, same collection date. What gets compared is the state of the information as much as the state of the chargers, and both matter to a driver planning a trip.
Method
- Scope: stations classed as rapid charging in the database, for the six countries the site map covers.
- Indicator: the share of stations whose status is flagged as not operational, over the total analysed.
- Verification: the share of stations whose status was confirmed within the last twelve months, as a measure of how fresh the information is.
- Collection: one request per country, on the same day, with no sampling and no weighting.
Limits
Database coverage is uneven between countries. It is dense in France, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom, noticeably more partial in Belgium and Switzerland, where the totals analysed are small and a handful of stations moves the percentage.
An out-of-service status can mean a station permanently withdrawn just as easily as a fault from this morning. The figure also says nothing about how long a station stays unavailable, which is the question that really matters to a driver. These limits will narrow as readings accumulate: it is repeating the measure that will produce a trend.
The map shows each station status as reported, with its power and connectors.
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Data collected on September 23, 2026. Source: Open Charge Map