The operator Q-Park announced on Tuesday the installation of 4.000 charging stations by 2025 in its French car parks, where it manages 126.000 places. The French parking leader, Indigo, has already installed 1.050 charging points and announced almost 7.000 more by 2025.
"Our ambition is to bring this charging service to the heart of the city," Michèle Salvadoretti, general manager of Q-Park France, told AFP. The terminals provided by Q-Park deliver an average power of 7 to 22 kilowatts, targeting motorists who "come for three hours to run errands, park at night or during their work". Q-Park plans in particular to install its first terminals in the underground areas of La Défense, where the employees of the towers are beginning to equip themselves with electric vehicles.
The parking Airbnbs are also in the running: the Yespark platform, which rents unoccupied spaces under apartment buildings, has installed 300 terminals in Paris in 2021 and plans to accelerate in 2022.
These announcements give a boost to the equipment of cities in terminals open to the public, which has fallen behind in France. If individuals have started to equip themselves and terminals open to the public are flourishing on certain major roads and in supermarket car parks, they are still very much absent from city centers.
"To be at the right level of equipment in the territory, 15.000 terminals are missing by 2025", indicated the Minister of Transport at the end of 2021.
While the European Commission intends to ban the sale of thermal vehicles in 2035, the mobility orientation law (LOM) requires the connection of one space out of twenty in the car parks of existing company buildings, and the pre-equipment of 20% of spaces in new car parks since 2021. Public aid covers supply and installation costs up to 60%.
Between 15 and 30 euros full
At the same time, many cities rely on underground car parks to accommodate cars driven from surface parking.
But fire safety constraints make the installation of underground bollards costly. Until 2009, the law limited the number of electric vehicles parked underground to three. From now on, if an operator wants to install more than 20 single-storey terminals, ultra-fast terminals, or install some below the very popular first level of the car park, he must equip the entire level with expensive "sprinklers", automatic water extinguishers.
"The cost of sprinklers can be prohibitive compared to a recharging equation which is already not simple", explains Quentin Derumaux, author of a study on terminals for the firm Sia Partners.
"Operators can also find themselves in competition with an offer that the local authority deploys on the roads and without too much visibility on what it will deploy", he notes.
Q-Park will launch its offer at an advantageous rate (excluding the cost of parking), at one euro per load and 30 cents per kWh, without time constraints, i.e. between fifteen and thirty euros the "full", according to battery size.
Pricing could change in a few years with the proliferation of electrified cars, and in particular take into account the charging time to speed up rotations and avoid suction cup cars, said Q-Park.
Other underground operators are already betting on fast charging (between 20 minutes and an hour for a full tank), in particular for corporate fleets, rental companies, VTCs and taxis.
Total plans to install ten charging stations with 50 kW terminals in Parisian underground car parks. Indigo also announced the forthcoming signature of a partnership to launch powerful stations in around forty French car parks from 2022.