France’s EV charging points: survey highlights frequent breakdowns and uneven pricing

France has significantly increased its charging infrastructure over the past few years; however, several limitations remain, making it still inadequate, a new study has found.

Que Choisir Ensemble, a French consumer group, conducted a study highlighting multiple flaws in the system.

By the end of 2025, France had nearly 2.9 million charging points in total (including both public and private infrastructure), making her the country with the best charging infrastructure in Europe after the Netherlands. 

From these charging points, around 185,500 of them are publicly accessible ones, making the target of 400,000 public charging points by 2030 appear achievable. However, several major issues persist.

The first is that charging stations are frequently out of service. According to the group’s data, in 2025 only 68.5% of charging points were permanently available, while around 6%, or 1 in 16, remained unavailable for more than one consecutive week. This means that nearly a quarter of charging points experience regular outages.

This creates hesitation among consumers considering electric vehicle adoption, particularly for long-distance travel, where charging options are limited and reliability is essential, the study indicates. 

The second issue highlighted by the consumer group is pricing. Charging at public stations is not only significantly more expensive than at home, but prices also vary widely depending on operators, applications, roaming agreements, and payment methods.

To conduct the study, Que Choisir Ensemble recorded prices across eight mobility operators at 121 charging points between April 1 and 21, 2026.

Several conclusions emerged from this analysis. The first is that prices at the same charging station can differ significantly depending on the app, card, or roaming provider used.

Prices for the same charging services varied significantly depending on the operator or access method, with gaps of up to 126% in urban areas, 99% near national roads, and 72% on motorways.

One of the most extreme examples was in Langres (N19), Haute-Marne, where prices ranged from €0.30/kWh to €1.78/kWh depending on the operator (a difference of around 490%).

This lack of transparency significantly increases the cost of electric mobility. For a 20 kWh charge (approximately 100 km of driving range), the average cost is €10.80 at a 22 kW charging point, but it can reach €35.60 at the highest observed rates. 

By comparison, the same home charging top-up at the regulated electricity rate costs around €3.80.

To address these issues, the group is calling for clearer and standardised price information to be shown before and during charging, wider availability of bank card payments at all publicly accessible charging points, and the creation of a public website to compare charging prices, similar to the official fuel price comparison tool.