This piece draws on Vlad Erhan's analysis of the Romanian market, and I'm grateful for the time and insight he shared. You can connect with Vlad on LinkedIn here.

A thousand cars a month and no one chasing them

Romania registers around 1,000 new EVs a month, roughly the multi-year average, though 2026 has run higher, closer to 1,500 (energynomics, H1 2026), and almost nobody is competing for the people buying them. Fully electric cars sit around 5 to 6% of new registrations (EU Alternative Fuels Observatory), the fleet crossing 68,000 in early 2026 (LEKTRI.CO / Romania Insider). Battery-electric sales dropped nearly a tenth in 2025 (EAFO), then rose more than 75% year on year in the first half of 2026 (energynomics). This is a small, subsidy-sensitive market that moves whenever the incentives move.

So there's an open field and no one running into it, because the people who might buy are held back by several things at once, each propping up the next.

Who is buying? So far, roughly one guy

Vlad’s own data shows the buyer being someone richer than average, male, somewhere between 45 and 65, degree on the wall, and, oddly, as likely to be in a village as a city. Everyone else is standing at the edge with their arms folded, and if you ask why, you get the same three names every time: range anxiety, not enough chargers, and price (Statista / RFE).

Vlad's read is that most of that is an information problem wearing a hardware costume. Plenty of people have never been told how you service an EV or even that an ordinary wall socket will do the job. Only about 40% of charging in Romania happens at home, one of the lowest shares anywhere, and a lot of drivers say they have no dependable place to plug in at all (Roland Berger / Romania Insider).

Paved with good intentions

Start with the money for buying the car. The eco-voucher has swung year to year with the state budget, and in 2025 it was cut to around 18,500 lei, roughly 3,500 euro, well below the level buyers had been led to expect (Romania Insider), after an earlier reduction the industry itself called devastating for confidence (APIA / energynomics). A subsidy that large and that unpredictable makes the market dependent on the incentive and it strips away the predictability anyone needs to commit to a car they'll keep for years.

Then there is the rooftop solar and battery scheme. The scheme covers up to 90% of a home system (pv magazine), and the appetite is enormous: the number of prosumers in Romania has gone from under 2,000 in 2020 (Balkan Green Energy News) to well over 250,000 (momentumgroup / ANRE). But the money is handed out first come, first served. The platform opens, billions of lei are gone in minutes, and the winners are whoever showed up with the paperwork already filled in and a fast connection (Urbanled). Which is not the household sweating over its energy bill. The fairness of the method has been flagged for years and the program itself has been suspended or postponed in successive years (pv magazine).

EV charging funding repeats the mistake in hardware. Romania has the money and the targets, a recovery-plan commitment to tens of thousands of charge points, and by the most recent public accounting had built roughly a fifth of them (Roland Berger). The shortfall is the tenders won on price. Putting a charger somewhere and putting it where people will use it are two different jobs. Siting a public charger well means knowing where the cars are, where they sit long enough to charge, what the grid connection can carry, and who maintains the thing when it faults.

Ask and ye shall charge

Vlad's reference point is the Netherlands, where the logic runs backwards from Romania's. A resident with no off-street parking can request a public charger, and applying for it and installing it are free to them (Opcharge). The request puts the municipality on the hook to find a spot within reasonable walking distance. But the location isn't just wherever's cheapest to dig.

The placement gets checked against data: whether the local grid can carry another point, if demand is real and if cars sit long enough to make one worth installing. Amsterdam started this (the Dutch call it paalvolgtauto, the pole follows the car) and the big cities now pool millions of charging records to forecast where the next points should go and to spot which existing ones are underused (evdata.nl; ICCT).

Demand-led placement suits an immature market better than a mature one. When uptake is low, letting requests pull the chargers guarantees each new one gets used, which is exactly the reassurance a nervous investor, or a finance ministry, wants to see. Its weakness is the opposite of Romania's problem: it under-serves the places where almost nobody has an EV yet, and the Dutch patch that by layering grid-constraint maps and parking data on top (ICCT).

Looking ahead

In a country facing high fuel prices and an energy crisis, Vlad thinks people will turn towards solutions that offer them more security and predictability. His hope for the future is that the Romanian government will back them in that, if not with subsidies, then at least with education, information, and removing the friction.