Fastned announces first fast-charge park in Italy

Rome: Fastned signed a contract with A4 Holding Group. It operates one of Europe’s busiest motorways, the A4 Brescia-Padova in Northern Italy, on which Fastned will position its first fast charging station in the country.

Fastned considers its expansion into Italy a milestone towards its goal to build 1,000 charging stations across Europe by 2030. Italy is the 8th country where Fastned is spanning its network and has one of Europe’s highest densities of cars per capita.

The new hub at the A4 is expected to open in 2024 and will initially have eight chargers, each delivering up to 400 kW “to serve hundreds of EV drivers a day in one of the most traffic-dense areas of Italy,” writes Fastned.

Drivers will recognise the Fastned stations by their solar canopies when travelling from Switzerland to southern Italy.

As usual, the charge point operator has not disclosed the makers of the hardware. Reportedly, Fastned has used 400 kW equipment by EVBox in the Netherlands for more than half a year on a trial basis; the EVBox Troniq High Power has been officially available for order since the beginning of June. However, at most of the new locations, Fastned relies on the proven HYC300 hypercharger from Alpitronic; a 400 kW version called HYC400 is now also available.

Michiel Langezaal, Founder and CEO of Fastned, said he was “confident that our first station in Italy will lead to many more Fastned stations along the Italian motorways and around major Italian cities in the years to come”.

A4 Holding Group is an Italian business unit of the Abertis Group that operates one of Europe’s busiest motorways and maintains around 235 kilometres of highway in the country.

“The energy transition towards a clean and sustainable mobility model is one of the key axes of A4 Holding’s ESG strategy,” said Gonzalo Alcalde, Chairman of A4 Holding. “We are very pleased with this partnership with Fastned, which allows us to further optimise our path alongside drivers in their transition to electric and sustainable mobility on our motorways.”