A sign indicating a charging station for electric cars is pictured at a fuel station in Dortmund, western Germany, on October 15, 2025.
Ina FASSBENDER / AFP
A scathing U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee report backs a probable laboratory origin for COVID-19, finds no quantitative basis for the six-foot rule, and argues that officials overstated the vaccines’ ability to prevent infection and transmission.
German politicians have pumped billions into building charging infrastructure for electric cars. EV drivers, however, do most of their charging at home. A textbook example of cronyism and political stupidity.
An often misattributed bon mot says, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”
Regardless of who first made the observation, it is quite possible that German politics today would have been compelled to arrive at precisely this conclusion. Madness has become the governing philosophy in Berlin and Brussels, ideologically dominated by Berlin. Need an example? From one end of the country to the other, the mantra is: mobility must be green, emissions-free, and fully decarbonized. Naturally, the resulting transition to electric vehicles has become a matter for the state in Germany.
Nobody trusts the market anymore.
Here, policymakers think in statist terms—the cornucopia of subsidies is always close at hand, constantly replenished by the taxpayer, who also stands surety for government debt.
To equate German subsidy policy with a cornucopia would probably be an understatement. The construction of charging infrastructure for electric cars alone has consumed more than four billion euros in public money since 2017. Deutschlandnetz is the name of this taxpayer-funded boondoggle, which has additionally installed 9,000 ultra-fast high-power charging stations across the country for another two billion euros. But that is not all: Around 1.6 billion euros went into fast-charging stations for electric trucks along the highways. How often do you see an electric truck charging?
The result of this spending spree is impressive—at least on paper: Around 205,000 public charging points are now available across Germany, seemingly on every corner, an increase of 16% in a single year.
Has central planning ultimately prevailed here? From the perspective of politicians, at any rate, this is a visible success—because return-on-investment considerations carry little weight there, nor does anyone have to submit to a performance review. They simply rely on the never-ending stream of taxpayers’ money. It is true: Taxpayers ultimately bear the cost of this ideological rampage.
Only in rare cases do private operators such as EnBW, Tesla, or Ionity invest additional capital of their own in this charade. They know perfectly well that there is a problem here: The overwhelming majority of EV owners charge their batteries at home and couldn’t care less about the state’s offering.
According to available data, 80% prefer to charge overnight at home—which is actually logical, since people very rarely spend hours in the same place while taking care of everyday errands. Germany has therefore quite obviously created an oversized charging infrastructure—the kind that can only emerge in the fairyland of socialist central planning: expensive, oversized, and detached from actual demand.
Could this have been known in advance? Logical thinking, a little practical sense, and life experience might have helped at least mitigate this multi-billion-dollar misallocation of capital. Obviously, it would have been wise to leave the coordination of investment, technological adoption, and possibly the shift toward e-mobility to the market—but then politics would practically be out of a job. Its claim to omnipotence and omniscience would have been publicly exposed for what it is: the foolish presumption of knowledge by central planners.
The same ideological blindness toward market mechanisms is evident in the renewed EV purchase subsidies. Fatal, but unavoidable: Once again, billions in taxpayer money are being burned, which, to make matters worse, will also flow to a not insignificant extent—presumably up to 25%—to Chinese competitors. The morally self-righteous representatives of the left-wing party cartel always leave one question unanswered: Why should taxpayers subsidize part of the purchase price of an affluent buyer’s expensive electric vehicle in the first place?
A final word on the state of the EV market: At present, 25% of newly registered passenger cars are fully electric. A large share of these registrations comes from fleet and dealer registrations. Only 10% of newly registered vehicles are actually new cars registered by private customers. The internal-combustion engine continues to dominate, supplemented by a moderately growing hybrid market.
The EV market is growing sluggishly in Germany. There is no sign of the euphoria that politicians repeatedly pretend exists. One fundamental aspect that the functionaries in the parties’ central planning offices and the responsible funding institutions have so far ignored is the question of supplying a rapidly growing EV fleet with electricity. Industry and private households are already competing for the electricity supply in the country, artificially constrained by energy policies associated with the green transition. Prices continue to rise. Expanding the EV fleet under these circumstances could place severe strain on the electric grid and send prices through the roof.
Certainly, the German government would probably have a quick answer—energy rationing for energy-intensive businesses, climate vouchers for poorer households, and voilà: Everything is back in balance, and the party can go on.
Rescue, or so it seems, is now supposed to come from France. There, politicians have long remained committed to nuclear power, regardless of how erratically the neighbor to the east handles its electricity grid. Nuclear power—the only genuinely sensible and ecologically acceptable form of energy that permits scalable economic activity.
But perhaps the solution will look something like this: In the future, we will all be driving fully digitized electric vehicles, fully controllable by the wise apparatus of governmentThen the problem of energy shortages will solve itself—they will simply pull the digital key out of the digital cloud. How we are supposed to get to work to finance this completely tangled, ideological madness is not entirely clear. But don’t worry: The central planners will surely have a solution for that, too.
