After 4,157 kilometers through nine countries, we rarely struggled to find electricity and rarely had to queue. But Europe’s collection of charging cards, apps, tariffs, and payment systems can still turn a simple charging stop into an unnecessary puzzle.

A waiter in a bar in Gjirokastër probably provided the best summary of European EV charging in 2026. As we described in Part 1, we found a Vega charger with little difficulty but couldn’t activate it with any of our cards. The charger wanted Vega’s own RFID card.

Then a waiter from the neighboring bar-restaurant appeared with the establishment’s card. He activated the charger and, once charging was complete, checked the energy consumed. We paid for the electricity at the bar along with our beers. Problem solved.

It was charming, slightly surreal, and entirely effective. But it illustrated something we encountered repeatedly during our three-week journey: Europe increasingly has the hardware. Interoperability remains the problem.

Kia card, app, credit card…

When accepted, our Kia Charge card was by far the easiest solution: identify yourself, connect, and charge. But it wasn’t universally accepted.

Elsewhere, we needed operator-specific apps or accounts, including PPC Blue in Greece, iCharge and Vega in Albania, and Tesla in Germany. That generally meant downloading another app, creating an account, and registering a credit card before any electrons started flowing.

Occasionally, we could pay directly by bank or credit card, which, from a driver’s perspective, is exactly how every public charger should work.

App dependence creates another problem: you need an internet connection. That matters particularly outside the EU roaming zone. To avoid potentially high roaming charges in Albania and Switzerland, we used a temporary eSIM alongside our regular SIM.

It proved surprisingly useful: if a charger suddenly demanded another app, we could download it, register, and activate the session on the spot. Mobile connectivity has quietly become another component of Europe’s EV charging infrastructure.

Albania: electricity available, access less certain

Sarandë, a rapidly developing resort on the Albanian Riviera, demonstrated the difference between finding a charger and actually using it.

The CCS2 connection at the fast charger was occupied by a local courier vehicle, forcing us onto AC. At first, none of our usual cards activated it. Then, after some experimenting, the session suddenly started anyway. As far as we could establish afterward, we were never billed.

Gjirokastër brought the waiter-and-Vega-card solution. Neither experience qualifies as seamless charging. Yet both worked.

The contrast in charging density was considerable. Germany had more than 212,000 public charging points by August 2026, Italy almost 85,000, and Switzerland more than 18,000. Greece, meanwhile, has passed 10,000 publicly accessible points at 4,300 locations.

Albania doesn’t have a similarly comprehensive public register, and its network remains much thinner, particularly outside the main population centers and routes.

Yet during our trip, the bigger issue wasn’t battery range. It was reliable information and straightforward access to the chargers that were already there.

Greece: a glimpse of both extremes

Across the border, Greece felt considerably more mature. Chargers increasingly appeared at filling stations, supermarkets, and restaurants along busier secondary roads.

In Igoumenitsa, 60-kW charging fitted neatly into a supermarket visit. At Lefkas Marina, a 180-kW PPC Blue HPC showed how uneventful fast charging can be: the EV6 added 31.7 kWh in around 12 minutes, briefly taking around 160 kW.

At Eleousa, however, we encountered the opposite. A nearby 150-kW DC charger had been installed but was not yet operational, so we switched to an AC alternative. That required the PPC Blue app and another registration before we could add 5.849 kWh.

Again, range wasn’t the problem. Infrastructure readiness and activation were.

Slow can cost more than fast

Price transparency was another weak point. DC chargers generally made their tariff relatively clear. AC charging, particularly at hotels, was much more opaque: prices were often difficult or impossible to determine in advance.

At our hotel in Ancona, slow AC charging cost around €0.80/kWh, more than many DC fast chargers. At Castel San Pietro Terme, meanwhile, we paid €26.74 for 30.7 kWh at a 300-kW charger, about €0.87/kWh. Expensive, certainly, but also very fast.

At other hotels, overnight charging cost nothing. Charging speed, in other words, isn’t a reliable indication of price. Nor is the price per kWh the whole story: a somewhat more expensive charger used while eating, shopping, or sleeping can cost virtually no holiday time.

The hotel charger paradox

Despite the sometimes opaque pricing, overnight charging became our preferred solution. An 11-kW charger looks slow beside a 300-kW HPC station, but that’s largely irrelevant if the car will remain parked for eight or ten hours.

Plug in, have dinner, sleep, and leave the next morning with a charged battery. Effectively, there is no charging stop at all.

The bigger problem is figuring out what a hotel means by ‘EV charging’. Booking platforms such as Booking.com let you filter for hotels that offer it, but rarely say how many chargers there are, their power, whether you can reserve them, or what they cost.

Because we generally booked only a day in advance, we used AI-assisted searches to look beyond booking platforms and check hotel websites and other sources. When needed, we contacted the hotel to confirm.

Even then, there were surprises. At our hotel in Igoumenitsa, the advertised EV charging facility turned out to be an extension cable plugged into a standard domestic socket. We declined and used a public DC charger the next morning instead.

At Hotel Europa in Riva del Garda, the charger was perfectly good, but another guest was using the hotel’s only one. We waited around two hours before plugging in.

The next morning, we noticed several public DC chargers barely 100 meters away. Sometimes the charging problem is simply a lack of information.

And the queues?

There essentially weren’t any. During three weeks and 4,157 kilometers, we never had to queue at a public charging station because every charger was occupied.

Admittedly, we traveled in September, outside the main summer holiday rush; peak weekends in July and August can still put considerable pressure on popular charging corridors. The closest examples were the occupied CCS2 connector in Sarandë and the single hotel charger at Riva.

That contrasts with the perception that long-distance EV travel inevitably involves spending a long time waiting to charge. We didn’t spend the holiday nervously crawling from charger to charger, and much of the time spent plugged in wasn’t really lost time anyway: we were shopping, eating, having coffee, or sleeping.

We spent considerably more time wondering which app or card a charger wanted.

Even navigation could be better

Navigation software added another layer to the puzzle. The HERE-based navigation built into our EV6 could show charging stations, including useful information about connector type and availability. The Kia App on our iPhone also let us search for nearby chargers and send destinations to the car.

But there was a catch. For this trip, we preferred TomTom GO through Apple CarPlay because it handled our scenic routes with numerous intermediate waypoints considerably better than either the Kia system or Google Maps.

Sending a charger from the Kia App therefore meant switching to the car’s navigation or running two navigation systems simultaneously. Alternatively, we had to find the useful charging information in Kia/HERE and then search for the same location again in TomTom.

TomTom GO itself could find charging stations along our route and seamlessly add the one we preferred. Still, in our experience, it gave us little useful information about whether they were AC or DC, their charging power, or their current availability.

Once again, the information was there – just not necessarily in the system we wanted to use.

The missing piece

Europe’s charging network has matured dramatically. The user experience hasn’t quite caught up.

The next challenge therefore isn’t simply installing more chargers. It’s making the ones already there as boring to activate and pay for as a gasoline pump – including clear roadside price displays, so drivers know what they’re going to pay before they plug in.

In Part 3, our electricity ranged from free to almost €0.90/kWh. So after 4,157 kilometers, was the EV actually cheaper than gasoline or diesel?