Denmark is one of the worst European countries to own an electric vehicle, claims a new study by Uswitch – the UK-based price comparison service.
Despite the fact that more electric vehicles are registered than it has square kilometers of land, the country ranked as number 29 among the 33 countries that were evaluated for compatibility with electric vehicles.
Iceland, Greece, Cyprus and Ireland completed the bottom five. The Netherlands came first, followed by Croatia, Slovakia, Latvia and Hungary.
Charging costs
According to Uswitch, electric car owners in Denmark pay € 640.83 to charge their vehicles every year – by far the highest of any country in Europe, including Denmark’s Nordic neighbors.
Turkey was the most affordable country for charging, with owners of electric cars paying an average of € 164.49 a year.
It also cost less than € 200 a year to charge an electric vehicle in the Netherlands, Hungary, Estonia and Romania.
Charging availability
Denmark scored similarly low on infrastructure. According to the study, an average of 10.13 electric cars shared each charging point in the country, compared to 1.47 in Croatia, 2.3 in Slovakia and 2.8 in the Netherlands.
Denmark also approached the bottom of the list when it came to the availability of high-speed charging stations. Only 0.01 percent of the charging stations in the country were high-speed, the study reported.
No country exceeded the 1 percent limit, but Latvia came closest at 0.7 percent.
Denmark is trying to keep up
The results of the Uswitch survey come while Denmark has struggled to keep pace with the development of infrastructure in line with the skyrocketing demand for electric cars.
The number of publicly available charging points for electric cars increased by 68 percent from 2020 to 2021, but at the same time the number of electric and hybrid cars in the country has more than doubled.
In 2022, the push to expand the infrastructure for electric cars continues. Last month, for example, the City of Copenhagen decided to remove 5,000 parking spaces for petrol and diesel cars and replace them with 4,100 charging spaces for electric cars and 900 shared parking spaces.
Source: The Nordic Page