ChargePoint's Europe chief sees a charging market shakeout — and plenty of room to grow

ChargePoint’s new man in Europe has barely had time to unpack, but he already expects the charging map to look very different within a few years. John Saffrett, freshly installed as EVP and Managing Director for Europe, reckons consolidation will reshape the sector over the next three to five years — and not every network will make it through.

The American firm’s European push is being led by someone who spent nearly 29 years on the other side of the fence. At Ayvens, the fleet management and leasing giant, Saffrett was Global Deputy CEO, overseeing operations across 42 countries and some 3.5 million vehicles — among them more than half a million battery-electric cars.

“Europe is becoming increasingly important to ChargePoint’s success globally,” he says. He joined in time for Berlin’s icnc charging conference, even asking for his start date to be pulled forward a week so he could walk the floor.

A market that now has to show its maths

Saffrett’s read on the industry is blunt. The era when technology companies could burn investor money for years without a return is closing, and capital is getting pickier about where it lands. Providers with viable products will increasingly look to acquisitions, mergers or partnerships; others simply won’t have a long-term case.

• Profitability first: investors now want sustainable business models, not just growth stories
• Selective capital: funding is flowing to fewer, stronger players
• Consolidation pressure: large CPOs want partners still standing in five or ten years

He stops short of calling charging mature. But the days of two people in a room building something that suddenly takes off are behind the industry, he suggests.

Why drivers still hesitate

On the question of what holds fleets back, Saffrett points to psychology as much as infrastructure. Range anxiety usually comes first, though it fades when modern EVs offer 400–500 kilometres.

After that, the questions turn practical: where and how will I charge? Drivers fret about public charging even though most of their charging happens at home, at the office or at a depot. Subsidy and tax uncertainty piles on top — incentives appear and vanish, thresholds shift, prices move. For a company promising 500 employees a fixed three-year car cost, that unpredictability is a real headache.

Then there’s hardware. Plenty has been spent on high-power chargers, yet not every car on the road can absorb the power they deliver. Models that looked cutting-edge a few years ago now trail today’s newcomers on charging capability — a gap that will matter more as those older EVs reach the used market.

Saffrett on legacy EVs: “Europe still has a substantial legacy fleet of older BEVs that cannot fully benefit from the improvements being made to the charging infrastructure.”

Where the growth sits

For all the consolidation talk, Saffrett sees plenty of upside. Battery-electric cars already take more than a fifth of new registrations in some European markets, yet their share of the total car parc remains under five per cent. That gap, he argues, is where the next wave of demand comes from.

The Benelux countries and the Nordics lead on infrastructure maturity, helped by government support that has been both strong and consistent — a phrase that carries a quiet message for markets where policy has wobbled. Heavy-duty transport electrification is another opening he flags.

And the competitive question nobody avoids: Chinese hardware suppliers. Saffrett’s answer is to compete on both hardware and software, positioning ChargePoint as a European leader on both fronts rather than picking one.

His first weeks have been a crash course in comparison — walking the Berlin show floor, meeting clients, then asking his own team where they win and where rivals meet them. The verdict on that, presumably, comes later.