Charging station network expanding fast in Türkiye

Taylan Özgür Dil- ISTANBUL

With demand for electric vehicles rising, the charging station network in Türkiye is expanding fast, reaching nearly 4,000.

The year 2023 marks a turning point in the Turkish EV market. According to the data from the Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜİK) and the Energy Market Regulatory Authority (EPDK), the number of EVs rose from 14,552 at the start of the year to 32,777 as of July. This translated into a staggering 125 percent increase.

Over the same period, the charging station network in the country expanded from 1,719 to reach 3,989, a 132 percent increase. Those stations had a total of 8,430 sockets, including 6,413 regular AC sockets and a little more than 2,000 fast-charging DC sockets.

The data from the EPDK showed that Istanbul had the largest number of charging stations for electric vehicles in the country, followed by the capital Ankara and the southern province of Antalya, one of Türkiye’s major holiday destinations.

The charging stations in Istanbul, Ankara and Antalya account for half of the total sockets in the country, with Istanbul taking the lead with 2,353 sockets. There are 900 sockets in Ankara and 668 in Antalya. The northwestern industrial province of Bursa and Muğla, another tourist hotspot on the Aegean coast, have 395 and 323 sockets, respectively.

As more and more electric vehicles are hitting Türkiye’s roads, more companies have entered the business of providing charging services.

Initially, there were only five charging station companies, but their numbers have climbed to 136 as of August.

One of the reasons for the fast expansion of the charging stations is the introduction of the vehicles produced by the country’s first indigenous electric carmaker, Togg, to the market.

To date, Trugo, a 100 percent subsidiary of Togg, has installed a total of 272 charging stations. Some 68 of those stations are located at Shell stations and nine of them are at retailer Migros.

According to Togg CEO Gürcan Karakaş, the electric carmaker aims to expand its network to have 650 charging stations by the end of the year.

From January to July, electric car sales leaped 584 percent from a year earlier to 17,307. Electric cars accounted for 3.4 percent of all passenger cars sold in the country. In the first seven months of 2023, passenger car sales grew nearly 62 percent year-on-year to 516,288.

In July alone, EV sales soared more than 1,300 percent. Some 4,000 EVs were sold in the month, up from 269 in July last year.