Overview
- A government reply published late May shows 4,548 of Germany’s 10,775 municipalities, or 42 percent, have no public electric‑vehicle charging point and that the number has fallen by about 2,000 compared with five years ago.
- The national register recorded 200,255 public charging points as of April 1, including more than 51,000 DC fast chargers, reflecting strong overall growth but uneven local coverage.
- The gap is concentrated in very small and eastern communes with the highest shares of missing access in Rheinland‑Pfalz (72 percent), Mecklenburg‑Vorpommern (68 percent) and Thuringia (65 percent), while municipalities with more than 5,000 inhabitants are almost fully served.
- In places without public chargers residents mainly rely on home wallboxes or workplace charging, which leaves renters and apartment dwellers dependent on scarce public options as purchase subsidies of roughly €1,500 to €6,000 drive EV uptake.
- Policymakers plan a 2028 rule requiring petrol‑station chains with at least 200 sites to install one fast charger per station, but critics including Die Linke lawmaker Dietmar Bartsch say that measure will not solve access problems for villages that lack petrol stations.