Europe's EV Charging Deserts, Mapped

In the Netherlands, there is roughly one public electric-vehicle charging point for every 127 people. In Romania, it is one for every 6,600. Both countries are in the European Union, both are bound by the same 2035 deadline to stop selling new combustion cars, and both appear on the same map below. They do not look like they belong to the same continent.

We pulled every public charging location we could find in OpenStreetMap, aggregated them into equal-area hexagons, and put the result on one interactive map. Switch it to the Germany view to watch that country's network grow year by year.

Three countries, most of the plugs

The headline pattern is concentration. At the end of 2023, the last date with a complete, single-methodology count for all 27 member states, the EU had 632,423 public charging points (ACEA, Charging Ahead, 2024). Just three countries, the Netherlands, Germany and France, held 60.8% of them between them, on less than a quarter of the EU's land and population. The Netherlands alone had 144,453, more than Italy, Spain, Poland, Romania, Sweden and Greece combined.

That concentration has, if anything, hardened since. National registers now put the Netherlands past 210,000 points (RVO, end-2025), Germany at 206,207 (Bundesnetzagentur, June 2026) and France at 195,356 (Avere-France, May 2026). The EU total has climbed to somewhere between 1.1 and 1.2 million (EAFO and Transport & Environment, 2025-2026), but the top three still anchor the network.

The charging deserts

Flip the numbers to per-capita and the map splits cleanly along a north-west to south-east line. The best-served countries cluster in the top-left of the table; the deserts run down the south and east:

Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, Greece and the smaller southern states all sit below 0.35 public points per 1,000 inhabitants, four to ten times below the levels seen across the north-west. On the map, the effect is stark: dense clusters across the Randstad, the Rhine-Ruhr and the Île-de-France give way to near-empty hexagons across the Carpathians and the Great Hungarian Plain. A driver in the Netherlands is rarely far from a plug. A driver in eastern Romania often is.

Germany, and how it got here

Germany is the most instructive case, because its official register records the commissioning date of every charge point, so we can watch the network appear. Switch the map above to the Germany view and drag the timeline: in 2011 the country had 193 public charge points. By 2015 it had 1,802. By 2020, 35,221. As of June 2026, it is over 200,000 (Bundesnetzagentur Ladesäulenregister). The single biggest year was 2023, which added more than 41,000 points on its own.

And the network did not just get bigger, it got faster. Fast, direct-current chargers were a rounding error in the early years, about 1% of all points. By mid-2026 they are 28% of the network, concentrated along the autobahn corridors where long-distance drivers actually need them.

The 60 km rule

That corridor build-out is not happenstance. The EU's Alternative Fuels Infrastructure Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2023/1804, Article 3) required member states to install a fast-charging pool of at least 400 kW, including at least one 150 kW point, every 60 km along the core Trans-European Transport (TEN-T) road network by 31 December 2025.

Mid-2026 is the first real look at whether that happened. It mostly did, but not everywhere: Transport & Environment's July 2026 analysis found that about 79% of the core network is compliant, with the gaps concentrated in Spain and in central and eastern Europe, the same regions that show up thin on the per-capita map. The legal deadline has passed; the map has not caught up with it.

Density is not readiness

A raw count of chargers is a poor measure of how easy it is to actually charge. The clearest illustration is Norway. By absolute numbers it is a small market, but per capita it is second in Europe and first in fast-charger density. And yet Norway runs about 34 electric vehicles for every public charging point, against a European average of roughly 14 (Roland Berger, EV Charging Index 2025).

The reason is that Norway does most of its charging at home: around 90% of Norwegians have access to private charging, which carries the overwhelming majority of miles. Public infrastructure there is a top-up, not a lifeline. The lesson generalises. Whether a network is "enough" depends on where the cars are, how far they travel, and whether drivers can charge overnight, not on a national total. That is a question of location, not of accounting, and it is exactly the kind of question our team spends its days on.

How we built this

The interactive map is built the way we build client work: MapLibre GL rendering equal-area H3 hexagons, with the basemap served as a single Natural Earth GeoJSON from our own origin, so there is no third-party tile CDN and the map loads instantly. We aggregated the charging locations with DuckDB's spatial and H3 extensions, and generated Germany's year-by-year layer from the register's commissioning dates.

The charging points themselves are points of interest, the same class of data (shops, competitors, infrastructure) we keep deduplicated and query-ready for clients. Increasingly that means handing it straight to a model: we build MCP servers so an AI agent can ask a spatial question, like where the charging gaps sit along a given corridor, and get an answer from live data instead of a guess.

The interesting part is never the rendering. It is deciding what "enough charging" means for a given network, corridor or catchment, and where the next site should go. That is site-selection and network-planning work, and it is what we do. If you are planning charging (or retail, or logistics) infrastructure and want the map to answer a real question, book a short call or read more about our site-selection work.

Methodology and sources

Two different kinds of data sit behind this piece, and it is worth being precise about which is which.

The map shows public charging locations tagged in OpenStreetMap (amenity=charging_station), aggregated to H3 resolution-5 cells across the EU, the UK, Norway, Switzerland, Iceland and Liechtenstein. OpenStreetMap is a community dataset; its completeness varies by country, and it counts charging sites, not individual charge points. It is excellent for showing the geographic pattern, and we use it only for that.

The rankings and per-capita figures come from official statistics, not from OpenStreetMap, precisely because cross-country completeness matters for a ranking. The 2023 table is ACEA / EAFO's Charging Ahead dataset; the fresher national figures are cited inline. Germany's growth series is the Bundesnetzagentur Ladesäulenregister, which is machine-readable and dated per point.

Sources: ACEA, Charging Ahead; European Alternative Fuels Observatory; Bundesnetzagentur Ladesäulenregister; Avere-France; AFIR (Regulation (EU) 2023/1804); Transport & Environment; Roland Berger EV Charging Index 2025. Basemap: Natural Earth (public domain). Charging locations: © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL. The country dataset is available as a CSV.

Figures are current as of the dates cited. No numbers were estimated or interpolated: every value traces to one of the sources above.