Is the EV charging infrastructure in northern Italy reliable?

Question

I want to rent a car and drive around north and northwest Italy (Milan, Parma, Genoa, Turin, Savona) for a couple of weeks. I'd like to rent an electric vehicle, because I like them and the electricity is generally much cheaper than gas. But of course you need to charge.

Plugshare shows a high density of charging stations with reasonable reliability, maybe even more than you'd see in most of the USA, but I'm not sure how reliable that will be in practice, and I don't want to find out the hard way, in a foreign country.

Does anyone have any experience doing this? Are there enough functional chargers? Do they take American credit cards (i.e. VISA or Mastercard)? Do they have enough wattage to charge in a reasonable amount of time? What is the general cost per kWh?

Answer 1

It is not useful to ask about the reliability of all chargers in a given geographical area: what matters is the individual charging networks and the standards to which they are operated.

When it comes to charger reliability, Tesla sets the standard with 99.97% uptime and they have 125 Supercharger sites across Italy, of which 86 are in the northern part of the country. So if you rent a Tesla, you should be sorted.

What's more, virtually all of these sites are open to non-Tesla EVs as well, so as long as you have a Supercharger-compatible EV, you should have no problems. You'll need to do some homework though, because some EVs have trouble physically connecting to older V2/3 SCs with shorter leads, and there are some weird incompatibilities out there (eg BYD Atto 3s don't work with V3 SCs). V4s, on the other hand, have long leads and work with basically anything.

I don't have any personal experience with other Italian EV chargers, but I do see the pan-European IONITY network has 41 sites in Italy and I've found them quite solid elsewhere. The largest local network is Ewiva, but the fact that they can't seem to configure Google Maps correctly on their home page does not fill me with joy.

Every European EV charger I've used accepts Visa/Mastercard, although the various apps/websites they use to accept these will often make you want to tear your hair out. Tesla sets the gold standard here as well: set up the app and your credit card once, and charging a non-Tesla is as simple as pressing a button.