Charger points in highway
Hi, I am writing from Italy and I drive an electric Renault 4.
I noticed that when planning a route, charging stops are never suggested at service stations along the highway network (which are often faster due to higher power output), but always at charging stations located off the highway.
Is this an intentional design choice, a bug, or is there a setting I missed? (I checked, but couldn't find any option related to this).
If this is intentional, I strongly suggest rethinking it. During a trip, charging directly at a highway service station is much faster and more convenient than having to exit the highway, charge, and then get back on to resume the journey.
For context, the route I tested was from Genoa (GE) to Valtournenche (AO) in Italy.
Thank you!
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Comments4
Aug 21
PinnedHi,
Please provide a link to the plan where this occurs. To do this;
Plan the trip in ABRP
Click/tap: ‘Share plan’
Click/tap: ‘Share ABRP link’
Paste the URL here
⚠️ IMPORTANT: Please exclude private addresses and the use of ‘my position’, home, work, etc., from the plan you post here publicly.
ABRP User #2973617
Aug 27
https://abetterrouteplanner.com/?plan_uuid=2-6a90450c-da94d08c394ee06c77ec7b14
Linda ABRP
Aug 28
Most of the chargers are very near the highway like this one.
I added Free to X as preferred charger and the location I got looks like the one above. I can see that we get Free to X chargers from Open charge map. I can ask our partner to add that network and then we get all of their chargers.
ABRP User #2973617
Aug 22
Same observation here, from Switzerland, driving to Italy regularly — different vehicle (Toyota bZ4X Touring 2026), same behaviour.
One addition that may explain it: in my experience this is not a design choice but a data gap. A large share of the Free To X stations along the Italian autostrade is simply missing from ABRP's database. Free To X belongs to the motorway operator Autostrade per l'Italia, and its chargers sit directly at the service areas. Chargemap shows them reliably, ABRP shows roughly half of them. So ABRP cannot route to them — it plans the stops it knows, which are off the motorway.
The practical cost is exactly what you describe: leaving the autostrada, charging in a town, and finding out a few kilometres later that the next service area had a charger all along.
A second, related problem on my side: I run ABRP with OBD live data (OBDLink CX), so the app receives the real state of charge from the car. When I charge at a station ABRP does not know, the SoC visibly jumps up in the app — but the plan is not recalculated. ABRP keeps the originally planned stops as if nothing happened. Detecting a charging event from the live data alone (vehicle stationary, SoC rising) and re-planning from there would solve this independently of the database gaps.
+1 for improving the Italian dataset, ideally by adding Free To X as a data source.