Having covered electric vehicles for close to 10 years now, I’ve seen how they’ve evolved and overcome several big issues. The first modern EVs were slow, dull, took forever to charge. Oh, and expensive. Don’t forget that one.
That changed after Tesla burst onto the scene and forced the industry to wake up. The technology has advanced at a rapid rate since then, and especially here in Europe, you have more and better long-range electric options than ever.
But there was still one major hurdle: Charging them was always a gamble. And even though you knew your EV had a big battery that could keep driving for hours on end, there was always the anxiety of approaching a charging station with a low state of charge, fearing that it would be offline.
I wasn’t sure if this situation was any better. But after driving across Europe, trying out multiple EVs and charging networks while taking part in the Eurocharge by Schaeffler EV electric trip, it’s clear to me that charging anxiety isn’t a problem on this continent anymore.
Here’s what I learned after thousands of miles on the road.
High-Power Charging Across Europe
For the first part of the journey, from my home base of Romania through Hungary into Austria, we only used one charging provider, OMV eMotion. It’s just one of several that are in the same league, both when it comes to how expansive their network is and also how powerful the chargers are and how consistently they work.
Ionity has a significant presence in Europe (just not in Romania, unfortunately), but we used Ionity chargers extensively in Switzerland and Italy as we meandered around the most famous mountain roads in the Alps.
Photo by: Autocritica
Regardless of the charging network we chose to test, even stations on the side of busy highways in countries where there are already lots of EVs. Even when all the stalls were busy, which was rare given that some stations had 20 or more fast-charging stalls, we never had to wait more than a few minutes for them to open up. There are so many fast-charging stations with ample stalls that waiting around for other cars to leave so that we could plug in was the exception, not the rule.
It felt like you were no longer limited by the charging network, and even though we had electric vehicles, we didn’t have to make any major compromises compared to powering the entire trip with combustion. On the way home, driving from the north of Italy to the eastern edge of Hungary, we drove 700 miles (1,126 km) in a single day, and it wasn’t the fact that the cars were electric that stopped us from driving further.
Photo by: Autocritica
Going The Distance
This was the longest distance driven on any day of the tour, and I drove the BYD Seal, which has an 82.9 kWh battery. That day started in Commezzadura, Italy, with a battery charged overnight at the hotel up to 100%. I drove the Seal for 224 miles (362 km) to Salzburg, Austria, at 6% state of charge, where I plugged into a 300 kW charger and went shopping for around an hour.
Then I came back to a fully charged car, which I drove for another 170 miles (274 km) until I reached Kapfenberg with 23% left in the battery and charged to 71% in 23 minutes from a 300 kW station. I stopped again in Austria after 89 miles (144 km) at an outlet shopping center in Parndorf, which I reached with 33% and where I used another 300 kW charger to get to 77% in 21 minutes.
Photo by: Autocritica
From Parndorf, we went all the way to Budapest, some 120 miles (193 km) away, where the car still had 21% left in the battery. Here we had fast food and left the car to charge for 35 minutes and got it to 84%, which was more than we needed to get to the hotel, which was 95 miles (154 km) away in the town of Szeged (where both BMW and BYD have big EV factories). This was our overnight stay, which we reached with 34% and then plugged in at the hotel to fully charge until the next morning.
Not including the full charge at the start of the day or the charging we did at the hotel in Hungary, we put 213.8 kWh into the BYD Seal’s battery, which would cost between €85 ($99) and €170 ($200) depending on the rates of the various charging providers. Traveling 770 km in a combustion car with an average efficiency of 39.2 mpg (6 l/100 km), calculated for an average fuel cost of €1.6, would work out to around €74.
Photo by: Autocritica
However, if your goal isn’t to rack up as many daily miles as we did, then fully charging overnight at your hotel, which is often free, can drastically reduce the cost. We only used public fast chargers, which are a bit expensive.
Almost 95% of the driving on that day was on highways with an 80 mph (130 km/h) speed limit, which we stuck to, although there were some extended stretches of roadworks where we drove slower, but the BYD Seal returned an average of 2.69 miles/kWh (23.1 kWh/100 km). BYD will soon launch an upgraded 800-volt Seal sedan, which should have faster charging and better efficiency.
Photo by: Autocritica
Like A Stop For Gas
What made the experience even more similar to driving a gas car was that in some of the OMV eMotion charging stations, which are exclusively in OMV filling stations, some of the charging stalls were arranged like regular fuel pumps. So you pull in just like you would a gas car, but instead of filling up, you hook up the CCS, you grab some refreshments and you stretch your legs.
At one of these OMV stations, a Mercedes e-Actros 600 semi truck with a full trailer attached pulled up behind our Hyundai Inster and started charging. This was the image that stuck with me for the first part of the trip, seeing one of the smallest EVs on the road charging alongside one of the largest. We also spoke to the driver, who was Romanian, so we instantly hit it off, and he told us he would hate to have to go back to a diesel truck after driving one that runs on electrons, praising it for its quietness, torque and fast-charging ability.
Photo by: Autocritica
Ten years ago, I wouldn’t have dared attempt this trip. Doing it in 2025 was a real eye-opener for me. Now I’m confident that it not only can be done, but that it’s stress-free and it takes almost the same time to complete as it would in a combustion car.
As EVs continue to improve their range and charging ability, plus with the constant expansion of charging networks, such trips will become even easier in the not-too-distant future.
When Europe catches up to China with its much more powerful charging stations that supply 1 megawatt of power and when EVs capable of charging that quickly will become available here, then a long road trip like this will take exactly as much as it would if run on combustion.
We’re a few years behind, but unlike the U.S., Europe is still committed to going electric, and matching what’s happening with EVs and charging in China should become a continent-wide ambition.
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Source: Autocritica
Europe saw its public charging network grow by 35% in 2024 compared to 2023, pushing the number of stalls to over 1 million. In the U.S., it only increased by 20% last year, reaching 200,000 stalls, as part of $5 billion effort to fund fast chargers along main roads to make long-distance EV travel easy. However, the program has slowed down considerably under the Trump presidency.
According to the International Energy Agency, the number of public chargers added globally in 2024 is greater than the total number of chargers that were available in 2020. Around two-thirds of the global public charging network expansion has occurred in China, which today has about 65% of the world’s chargers and 60% of all light-duty electric vehicles currently on the road.
But Europe comes a close second. And after driving 3,800 miles (6,000 km) on a wide range of roads, I can assure you that its public charging is more than serviceable. There are so many chargers now that you don’t even need a big-battery EV to cross the continent—but that’s a story for another day.
