Mandatory changes to Eichrecht products

We as Alfen are very proud to offer our smart, safe and reliable EV charging solutions in Eichrecht certified variants. As one of the first manufacturers we were able to offer Eichrecht compliant products for home, business and public charging and we are still working on updated Eichrecht compliancy for the newest updates of our products and regulations.

Eichrecht is mandatory under German law when an user of the charger has to pay for the consumed energy, so for instance when charging on-street or at a shop. Eichrecht certification ensures the user of the charger only pays for the consumed energy, which is verifiable at a later stage and cannot be altered with.

What will change

The most recent update of the Eichrecht compliancy for our products caused us to reevaluate our current offering in authentication methods. Together with the certification authority, we came to the conclusion that the Plug&Charge method to start charging (the Alfen way of just plugging in the car and start charging, so without RFID charge card presentation) needs to be removed in order to be Eichrecht compliant.

How to handle

From firmware 6.5 (expected September 2023) the Plug&Charge functionality on all Eichrecht certified chargers (Single Pro-line DE, Double Pro-line DE and Double PG-line) will be disabled and set to the RFID authentication method free of charge (normally a license key is required to enable RFID functionality). Upgrading to RFID from today to the release of firmware 6.5 cannot be done via the web shop at this moment, please contact ace.salessupport@alfen.com for this by sending the related object numbers of your chargers. The Plug&Charge functionality will still be available for all our non-Eichrecht versions of the Eve Single S-line, Pro-line and Eve Double Pro-line.

New orders

For new orders of all Eichrecht certified chargers (Single Pro-line DE, Double Pro-line DE and Double PG-line) it is no longer possible to choose the Plug&Charge as the preconfigured authorization method. Hence all newly ordered Eichrecht certified chargers will be delivered with RFID authorization, which will be offered at no additional cost.

We regret that we need to remove this valued feature for some of our products and we hope that this does not affect the good experience you have with our products: with this change we are able to keep offering a smart, safe and reliable way to charge your EV in line with German legal requirements.