EV Charger Manufacturing: From Rectifiers to ABB

Every fast charger at a motorway stop is a cabinet of power electronics, cooling, cables and software that someone built and tested before it was bolted to the ground. EV charger manufacturing has grown from a few hand-built units into plants where, in ABB's largest one, a DC fast charger comes off the line every 20 minutes. This post looks at how charging equipment was made and used in the early electric car era, how DC fast charging created a new kind of factory, what ABB E-mobility's plants in Italy and the United States do, and where ABB robots could take over assembly and test work.

EV charger production at ABB E-mobility's plant in Columbia, South Carolina, 2023. Photo: ABB

Rectifiers in the garage and the first fast chargers

Charging an electric car was a garage job long before chargers came out of dedicated factories. A 1912 General Electric photograph shows a woman standing with an electric car beside a rectifier, the cabinet that turned mains power into direct current for the battery. Between 1910 and 1924 Hartford Electric Light Company tried another model for electric trucks. Owners bought the vehicle from the General Vehicle Company without a battery and swapped empty batteries for charged ones from the utility. Early charging gear like this came from electrical firms in small numbers.

A woman with an electric car and a General Electric rectifier for charging its battery, 1912. Photo: General Electric Company via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Fast charging is where the modern business starts. An association formed by the Tokyo Electric Power Company and five Japanese automakers developed CHAdeMO, a DC fast charging system, in 2010. Tesla opened its Supercharger network on 24 September 2012 with six stations in California. Since 2014 the Combined Charging System has been required on public charging infrastructure installed in the European Union. Each standard came with its own connector, and chargers had to support the ones their market used.

An electric car at a recharging station, 1919. Photo: Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

ABB was an early supplier. In January 2023 ABB E-mobility said it had delivered its first DC fast charging systems 13 years earlier and had sold more than 840,000 EV chargers by then. Inside, a DC fast charger has much in common with an industrial drive cabinet: power modules, contactors, cooling fans or liquid loops, heavy cables, and a control unit with a screen and payment system. Building one means mounting heavy modules, routing cables, tightening connections to a set torque and running electrical tests on the finished unit.

A CHAdeMO fast charging plug in the socket of an electric car, 2015. Photo: Kiwiev / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Inside today's charger plants

ABB E-mobility opened its largest DC fast charger plant in Valdarno, Tuscany, in 2022. The $30 million, 16,000 square metre site builds the full range of ABB DC chargers on seven production lines and turns out one DC fast charger every 20 minutes. Its fifteen test facilities can simulate more than 400 charging sessions a day, and automation links the shop floor to an automatic warehouse, with AGVs and handling vehicles moving the material. In January 2023 ABB began production in Columbia, South Carolina, at a plant designed for up to 10,000 chargers a year from 20 kW to 180 kW, including the Terra 184.

Production area of ABB E-mobility's DC fast charger plant in Valdarno, Italy. Photo: ABB

Demand for chargers swings, and plants have to live with that. On 10 September 2026 electrive reported that Wallbox is closing its charger plant in Arlington, Texas, which opened in autumn 2022 with a design capacity of 250,000 units a year, and moving production to Barcelona. On 14 October 2026 The Driven reported that the Australian company EVX plans to manufacture Polecharger Rapid, a 40 to 50 kW pole-mounted DC charger, with first deployments promised for early 2027. A factory facing changes like these gets more out of automation it can reprogram for a new product or a new volume.

The warehouse at ABB E-mobility's Valdarno plant, where automation links storage to the lines. Photo: ABB

ABB's press releases on Valdarno and South Carolina describe automation, AGVs and test facilities, but they do not name robots on the assembly lines, so robot assembly of chargers at those plants is unconfirmed. ABB robots do comparable work elsewhere. At Electrolux's refrigerator plant in Curitiba, Brazil, YuMi and GoFa cobots carry out gas leak detection and electrical tests, and ABB says test productivity rose by more than 68 percent. A GoFa CRB 15000 could plug test connectors into a charger cabinet the same way, and Flexley Mover AMRs could carry parts between stations. Both remain possibilities for now.

An ABB GoFa CRB 15000 connecting test equipment to a refrigerator on Electrolux's test line. Photo: ABB

Where charger factories go next

Chargers are getting bigger. In a video reported by The Driven on 13 October 2026, Fortescue said nobody makes the 6 MW chargers it needs for its electric haul trucks, so it builds its own. It uses industrial robots normally found welding in car factories to connect the plug, which is too big and too dangerous for a person to handle. The arms that plug chargers into vehicles are covered in our post on the EV charging robot. For charger plants, bigger cabinets mean heavier modules and thicker cables, and those favour robots for lifting and for repeated torque work.

ABB high power chargers at the Medenbach West service area in Germany, 2021. Photo: Tomás Freres / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Home chargers are heading the other way, toward small wall boxes made in high volume, where assembly looks a lot like consumer electronics. Small arms such as the single-arm YuMi IRB 14050 or the IRB 1300 suit screwing, inserting and testing small parts, and a cell like that is usually built and tested first in RobotStudio. Cables are the stubborn part. They bend and twist, so routing them is still mostly done by people, as it is in the cabinets of the power grid switchgear that sits upstream of every charger.

An ABB YuMi dual arm robot assembling small parts beside a lab worker. Photo: ABB

Cost comes first among the open problems. A robot cell pays off only if volumes hold, and the Wallbox closure shows how fast they can fall. Testing a charger means working with high voltage, so test cells need guarding, interlocks and safety software such as ABB's SafeMove when cobots and people share the space. Workers will also need to learn to program and maintain the cells. My guess is that charger plants built around manual benches will add robots at the end of the line first, where testing is repetitive and the unit is already assembled.

ABB's Flexley Mover P604 moves loads around a plant without fixed tracks. Photo: ABB

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