Europe will boast a whopping 2 million electric car charging points by 2017, according to research released this week.
The forecast from research firm Frost & Sullivan is likely to be a welcome boost for electric-car early adopters, suggesting that the number of charging points is set to rapidly swell in the coming year from fewer than 10,000 public charging points in 2010.
That growth will see the ratio of electric cars to charging stations fall significantly, despite the predicted growth of the vehicles.
Frost & Sullivan believes that by 2017 there will be 1.8 cars for every charging station, compared to 2.5 today.
Governments will budget around €700 million for this expansion, the report said, which is why chargers are set to take off in such as big way, with consumers being lured to electric vehicles with incentives such as discounts on the purchase price, tax reduction or exemption, and other advantages such as no congestion charge, free parking, and use of exclusive lanes, among others.
However, the firm also warned that the slow speed of charging currently offered by public car chargers represents an infrastructure problem, with cars potentially tying up charge stations for a six-hour charge.
While acknowledging that the development of such chargers was critical, it observed that they are currently expensive and harder to find and therefore predicts a slower growth of fast-charging points.
Only three percent of the 2 million chargers built by 2017 will be DC-DC rapid chargers or wireless inductive chargers, the report said.
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