38 July/August 2026 | E-Mobility Engineering As the fundamental electronics of EV fast chargers mature, Peter Donaldson considers the options available to manufacturers for upscaling production Charging ahead EV charging has reached an inflection point as an industry. The fundamental power electronics of fast charging are largely mature. At the time of writing, the bottleneck is no longer topology or semiconductor physics, it is around manufacturing scalability, quality consistency and supply chain resilience. Yet, there is no single blueprint for building chargers at scale. Four companies represent fundamentally different strategic approaches. ABB operates high-automation, capitalintensive factories. Tesla pursues vertical integration, embedding charger production within its vehicle ecosystem and standardising the North American market around the North American Charging Standard (NACS). Kempower champions modularity and local supply chains, building scalable 50 kW power blocks in Finland and North Carolina. ChargePoint owns no factories at all, relying solely on established partners for both hardware development and manufacturing while it focuses on software, network operations and AIdriven quality validation. Each model has distinct trade-offs in terms of capital intensity, the ability to respond quickly and cost-effectively to regulatory changes (that is ‘regulatory agility’), quality control and supply chain risk. On the regulatory front in the US, for example, the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) programme that provides government funding and the Buy America, Build America (BABA) act loom particularly large. Understanding these manufacturing strategies directly informs supplier selection, design-formanufacturing decisions and long-term reliability expectations. Four strategy archetypes The four companies in this arms-length comparison represent fundamentally different approaches to manufacturing. ABB represents the industrial giant’s approach: own the factory, automate everything and push for consistent output at volumes that smaller competitors cannot match. For example, the Valdarno facility produces one DC fast charger every 20 minutes. This model excels at repeatability but requires sustained capital investment and long lead times to retool. Tesla inverts the logic. Manufacturing A worker checks one of Kempower’s modular high-power chargers, which are based on 50 kW power blocks (Image: Kempower)
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