State of EV Charging

Sweden's Q1 index of 94.76 represents a modest but consistent decline from the quarter's opening week (94.97). This is not the sharp seasonal collapse seen in December 2025 — but the trend is directional. Reliability is not recovering as spring approaches.

The session picture is more concrete. Of 725,576 charging attempts, 74,044 failed — a 10.2% failure rate. If Sweden achieved a 5% failure rate instead, roughly 37,000 additional drivers per quarter would reach a charger and find it working. That gap is the measurable cost of deferred maintenance.

The large-operator problem persists. E.ON Energilösningar AB (309 stations, index 92.87), ChargeNode Europé AB (626 stations, 94.06), and Vattenfall InCharge (764 stations, 94.26) together operate over 1,700 stations — roughly a fifth of the national network — at or below the national average. These are not marginal players. Improving their combined index by two points would move Sweden's national average measurably.

At the municipality level, Ovanåker (Gävleborg) improved from the catastrophic 60.45 recorded in December–February to 76.91 in Q1 — still the worst in Sweden, and still 18 points below the national average. The double-burden municipalities — sparse coverage and low reliability — remain the highest-risk locations in the network, and the ones with the least political visibility.

Norway presents a sharper picture than Sweden. The Symbioen Reliability Index fell 1.35 points across Q1 — three times the Swedish rate — with no sign of stabilisation by April 1, when the final week reached a quarter-low of 93.18. Norway began Q1 already behind Sweden (94.53 vs 94.97) and widened that gap across the quarter to 1.36 points by April.

The session failure rate tells the hardest story: 13.7% of charging attempts failed. With 57,777 unsuccessful sessions on a network of 4,140 stations, that is approximately 14 failed sessions per station per quarter — one every week. Norway, the world's most EV-penetrated market, has a charging network that rejects one in seven sessions.

The concentration structure magnifies both risk and opportunity. Oslo Kommune operates 1,161 stations — 28% of the entire Norwegian network — at an index of 98.28. This is the strongest large-operator performance in either country this quarter. The counterweight is Kople AS: 792 stations (19% of the network) at 91.51. These two operators together account for nearly half of all Norwegian stations and pull the national average in opposite directions. Oslo Kommune is the proof of concept; Kople AS is the primary improvement lever.

Utilisation declined sharply from 16.26% in the first week to 12.58% by the last — a 23% drop as winter demand subsided. This is expected seasonally, but the failure data skews toward the period of highest strain. The most-used chargers, in the coldest weeks, failed most often. That is the failure pattern that strands drivers.

The Q1 2026 data across Sweden and Norway points to a common pattern: growing networks, stable or declining reliability. The problem is not scale — Oslo Kommune's 1,161-station network at 98.28 disproves that argument entirely. The problem is maintenance culture and operator accountability.

The operators and municipalities at the bottom of this report are, in the main, the same ones that appeared at the bottom last quarter. Chronic underperformance is not a weather event. It is a management choice — or the absence of one.

The 131,821 failed charging sessions recorded in Q1 — across both countries, in the most EV-advanced region in the world — are not inevitable. They are the measurable cost of the gap between operator-reported uptime and ground-truth performance.

Symbioen is the credit rating agency for EV charging infrastructure. We score every public charging station in Sweden and Norway — 12,700+ stations, 78,600+ charging points — so stakeholders can make decisions based on ground truth, not operator self-reporting.

Our independence is structural. Symbioen is built entirely on AFIR-mandated open data published through National Access Points. We have no commercial relationships with the operators we score. The index cannot be bought or influenced. Our methodology includes ChargeUp Uptime (aligned with EU AFIR "Until Next Success" semantics), Bayesian-averaged operator rankings, EVSE-weighted aggregations, and False Availability detection — so ghost stations cannot hide behind green status lights.

We produce custom reliability reports for individual operators, investors, and municipalities — your portfolio broken down by station, charger type, corridor, and weekly trend. Ideal for board decks, due diligence packages, and regulatory filings.