Jul 8, 2026 · Charging
The new fast-charging hubs are changing how we plan road trips
More posts, in bigger clusters, in places people actually stop. The interesting change is not the peak speed on the sign — it is not having to think about it.
By Sanne de Vries
Charging news used to be about how fast a single post could go. Increasingly it is about how many of them there are in one place, and members driving across the Benelux and into Germany this summer have all come back with the same observation: the queue has largely stopped being a thing.
The shift is from three posts at the back of a petrol station to a proper hub — a dozen or more bays, canopy overhead, a shop that is open, and lighting you would be happy for your family to stand under at eleven at night. Several networks are building to that pattern now, and it is the single biggest quality-of-life improvement in electric driving in the last few years.
Peak power gets the headlines, and it does matter, but less than the sign suggests. Your car will only take what it will take, and most of the time you are not sitting there to fill the battery — you are sitting there for twenty minutes because everyone needs a coffee anyway. What actually saves you time is arriving and plugging straight in.
Two practical notes from members who have been using the newer sites. First, the pull-through bays are worth seeking out if you tow or if your charge port is on the awkward side; a growing number of hubs have them and they remove a genuinely annoying five minutes. Second, contactless payment is far more common than it was, which means fewer apps and fewer accounts to remember. Not everywhere, so keep one back-up method on your phone.
What has not changed is that the busy days are still the busy days. A Friday afternoon at the start of the holidays will test any network, anywhere, in any fuel. Leave earlier, stop sooner, and stop for longer at the quiet site rather than shorter at the popular one — that advice has never let anyone in this community down.
If you have used one of the new hubs, write it up for the community with a line about what it was like. A photo of the bays and one sentence about whether the shop was open is worth more to the next member than any map.