Four Major Automakers Join Together to Bring Fast Charging to Europe

In an effort to reduce range anxiety and to bolster the use of electric vehicles as regular transportation, a new joint venture between four major automotive manufacturers will develop a wide network of exceptionally powerful charging stations. Next year, these new charging stations will begin to pop up around Europe thanks to a new collaboration between Ford Motor Company, BMW Group, Daimler AG, and Volkswagen Auto Group. The automakers are targeting 400 stations by 2020.

Under their direction, these stations will allow owners of compatible cars to juice-up at an extremely fast rate. The new stations will provide 350 kW of charge – or roughly 200 kW more than Tesla’s vaunted Supercharger network and a lot more juice than the DC Fast chargers in use today, which can charge at up to 50 kW. No specs in regards to charging time were provided, but the partnership says the network “will be significantly faster than the most powerful charging system deployed today.” Tesla’s less-powerful supercharging system will provide 170 miles of range in just 30 minutes, so we’d imagine this 350-kW system will be potent. Porsche has promised 15-minute charge times for its upcoming Mission E electric sedan, and these chargers likely factor into that estimate.

Not all electric car owners will be able to take advantage of this new system, however. The automakers are going with the Combined Charging System (CCS) spec over the CHAdeMO system used by cars like the Nissan Leaf, Kia Soul EV, Toyota eQ, and Mitsubishi i-MiEV. Presumably, all electric and plug-in electric vehicles produced by the participating automakers will exclusively accept CCS plugs.