Electric Highway Spanning Italy And Norway Planned To Boost EV Adoption

While it’s largely accepted now that electric vehicles are the future of the auto industry, adoption still remains slow. This is due to the anxiety that consumers feel when it comes to the range of electric cars. To help facilitate the increased adoption of EVs, engineers are planning on building an electric highway that will connect Italy and Norway. Spanning seven countries, the highway will have over 180 fast-charging electric stations.

This project is a joint effort by two companies, E.ON and CLEVER. The two firms are invested in electric vehicles catching on and in the press release posted on the site of E.ON, it was revealed that the project is going to be a three-year grind, which the European Commission has provided €10 million in funding.

“Although, it is still early days, both companies are seeing a global shift towards electric vehicles. Countries as well as the EU is beginning to make pledges to phase out petrol- and diesel-fueled cars and consumers and car manufactures are switching to electric vehicles. In parallel the car manufacturers are making technical progress and launch attractive new EV models,” the press release reads.

“Now, international energy and e-mobility Company E.ON and Denmark based e-mobility service provider CLEVER make electric driving easier. The two companies will connect Europe with 180 ultra-fast charging stations for electric vehicles in seven countries over the next three years.”

Each station will have a charging capacity of 150 kW. For comparison, Tesla’s own super-charging stations have 145kW capacities. Both are dwarfed by IONITY’s own offering, however, which has 350kW.

As Futurism notes, E.ON’s partnership with CLEVER only accounts for 160 of the 180 charging stations that are going to be built. The rest will be a result of the partnership with an electric charging chain called YX, which is based in Norway.