Europe quietly became the world’s road-pricing pioneer: Now comes the hard part.

Since the beginning of July, Europe has 11 nationwide road usage charging schemes, more than any other region on earth. But the straightforward part is now behind us. The next phase is about charging cars rather than only trucks, about new interfaces such as the smartphone, and about who gets to collect the money.

Ask where road pricing has truly taken hold, and most people will point to Singapore, or to a pilot somewhere in the United States. The more accurate answer is: in Europe!  Europe now hosts 11 nationwide satellite-based road usage charging (RUC) schemes. On the evidence of our recent Tolling Solutions Market Study, that makes it the most active RUC region in the world. It reached that point not through a single sweeping reform, but through a quarter-century of countries quietly switching on their own systems, one at a time. The harder questions are only now coming into view.

A 25-year build, one country at a time

The story begins in 2001, when Switzerland became the first country to use satellite positioning to charge heavy trucks, initially deriving distance from tachograph data and then moving to dedicated GNSS on-board units from 2012. Germany followed in 2005 with its LKW-Maut, run by Toll Collect, the first all-GNSS trucktolling scheme in Europe. Slovakia joined in 2010 with the system now operated by SkyToll, which has since grown to cover roughly 18,000 km.

From there, the cadence becomes almost metronomic. Hungary, Russia, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Poland and Denmark each brought a nationwide scheme online over the following years, with the Netherlands being the latest to launch last week, taking the total to 11. Roughly one new country every couple of years, and the trajectory points only upward. No other region has matched it.

But it is trucks, not you

Here is the detail that tends to surprise people: almost none of this applies to ordinary cars. Every one of those nationwide GNSS schemes targets heavy goods vehicles (HGVs). Some cover all HGVs, others started with trucks above 12 tonnes, and only a handful (Slovakia’s Myto among them) extend the charge to buses and coaches.

The reasoning is sound. Trucks do by far the most damage to the road surface, use the network most intensively, and generate the largest external costs through air and noise pollution, so they are the logical place to start applying the “user pays” and “polluter pays” principles. Two technologies compete to do the metering: satellite positioning (GNSS) and short-range roadside communication (DSRC). At European level, GNSS has steadily won out, because it is more flexible and far easier to scale. Charging light vehicles by the kilometre, by contrast, remains a matter of pilots. That gap between trucks and cars is precisely where the next phase of the market will be decided.

A fragmented market, mid-transition

If the direction of travel is shared, almost nothing else is. Europe’s tolled network runs to roughly 82,800 km of motorways, operated by some 130 concession companies and generating around €37 billion in annual revenue, supported by 77 million electronic toll subscribers, all loosely coordinated through the ASECAP association across more than 17 countries.

That total is also heavily skewed. Germany alone accounts for nearly half of all tolled kilometres in the dataset (around 50,800 km), and just five countries (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy and Slovakia) make up close to 70% of the entire European tolled length. How those networks are run varies just as widely: France, Italy, Spain and Portugal host the largest and most fragmented markets, dominated by concession groups such as Vinci, Abertis, Brisa and Autostrade, while Slovakia, Hungary and the Czech Republic run unified systems through a single state-owned operator.

The technology underneath is in the middle on a transition too. In 2005, free flow tolling barely existed outside the HGV schemes of Austria, Germany and Switzerland; today the majority of European countries run some form of multi-lane free flow (MLFF) systems on part or all of their networks. Yet the barrier is proving stubborn: as recently as 2024, around 41% of toll revenue across Europe was still collected through traditional plaza-based systems, and many private operators hesitate to fund the upgrade when their concession may expire within a few years. The result is a sizeable pool of unmet replacement demand, concentrated in Southern Europe. It is also, as our study notes, a market where the shift towards RUC is moving faster than the shift to free flow.

So much for the picture today. The more interesting story is what is changing, and 3 shifts stand out.

Shift 1: the phone in the cab

The first is the interface. In 2027, Lithuania will become the first country in the world to launch a national truck tolling programme built on smartphone apps. After years of tenders and litigation, it has selected Kapsch to deploy a smartphone-

enabled national RUC scheme: a €13.4 million, five-year contract covering 2,851 km, due to launch in January 2027 and replacing the country’s vignette with distance-based charging not only for heavy vehicles but for light commercial vehicles and all EVs. It will be the first real test of whether app-based GNSS tolling can scale nationally on the things that matter most: reliability, usability and enforcement economics.

The early evidence counsels caution. Two European schemes already let drivers pay via smartphone, and both show low adoption next to dedicated OBUs and fleet telematics. In Denmark, the app accounted for just 0.7% of tolled kilometres in 2025, with route tickets adding 5.0% and an in-vehicle OBU still handling 94.3%; the app is offered by a single provider and remains a niche channel. Poland’s experience is starker still: in its e-TOLL system the mobile app had the lowest share of both devices (14.2%) and transactions (5.7%), well behind telematics devices and EETS OBUs, and the app itself carries a 1.2-star rating, with users reporting a poor experience (particularly non-Polish speakers) and some admitting they simply did not pay as a result.

The technology, in other words, is the easy part. Making it usable and enforceable is the hard part, and that is exactly what Lithuania is about to find out.

Shift 2: the collection layer is being unbundled

The second shift concerns who collects the money. As the European Electronic Toll Service (EETS) gains ground, letting a single provider and on-board unit work across borders, the national service providers (NSPs) that once owned their domestic markets are losing weight.

Germany is the clearest example. EETS providers’ market share there more than doubled -to over 38% in 3 years. Over the same period Toll Collect, the German national GNSS provider, saw its mounted OBU base shrink from 1.1 million to 0.9 million, and the volume it directly tolls fell from 36 to 26 billion kilometres. Tolls collected nonetheless rose, to €8.5 billion, though that reflects the introduction of CO₂ charging and the widening of scope to all HGVs rather than a recovery in Toll Collect’s own position. Belgium shows the same pattern even more pronounced, with EETS’ share approaching 70%.

The implication for the industry is significant: the incumbent national champion model is being unbundled. Value is migrating away from the domestic toll charger and towards interoperable EETS providers, and towards the back office, enforcement and data layers that any scheme, national or pan-European, still needs.

Shift 3: the real prize is charging cars

The third and largest shift is the move from trucks to light vehicles, and no country illustrates both the pull and the difficulty better than Norway. By the end of 2025, EVs made up 96% of new car sales there and roughly 32% of all cars in use. That success hollowed out fuel tax revenue, which is precisely the problem: in 2018-2019 the resulting shortfall prompted a parliamentary push to study RUC, and in 2021 the Finance and Transport ministries commissioned a concept study. That study proposed a phased path, beginning with simple odometer readings and evolving towards GNSS as the long-term technology, and concluded that a move to RUC was “inevitable”. Then, from 2024, it stalled at political level, and no system has yet been implemented.

The technical groundwork, however, has continued for years. Norway removed EVs’ toll exemption in 2019, consolidated its tolloperators from 60 to 5 in 2017, and has run a

 succession of RUC pilots with companies such as Aventi, SmartCar, Q-Free and Kapsch. The next step is a new national satellite tolling pilot for light vehicles, running from October 2026 to June 2027 using an aftermarket on-board unit: around 1,500 private cars across two locations for three months, testing both “thick” and “thin” on-board client configurations, with the aim of understanding accuracy, integration with core tolling and back-office systems, and the potential for traffic management.

What the pilot is really probing are the real obstacles to charging cars by satellite: higher device complexity and cost, privacy concerns around location tracking, and the need for reliable positioning and data processing. These are the problems solution providers are now racing to solve. Whoever cracks that combination of low cost, ease of use and privacy will hold a meaningful advantage when light vehicle RUC finally arrives at scale.

What it means

Step back, and the market’s centre of gravity is moving on every axis at once: from the toll booth to free flow, from the national champion to the EETS provider, from the dedicated OBU towards the smartphone and the aftermarket tag, and, eventually, from the truck to the car. Each of these shifts opens demand across the full tolling stack, from on-board units and gantries to enforcement and back-office platforms. But each also redistributes where the value sits.

The headline from our Tolling Solutions Market Study is that Europe has already won the global race on RUC. The more useful conclusion is that its lead is being rebuilt in real time, and that the next set of winners will be decided less by who can meter a kilometre, which is now well understood, than by who can make charging usable, enforceable and privacy-proof for ordinary drivers. Lithuania and Norway are about to give us the first real answers.

These findings are drawn from PTOLEMUS’ new Tolling Solutions Market Study, the most comprehensive independent assessment of the tolling solutions market across North America and Europe, with forecasts to 2035.

Have a question about the Tolling Solutions Market Study or the themes in this piece? Or thinking through what the shift towards RUC means for your own strategy? We would be glad to talk.

PTOLEMUS works with toll operators, solution providers, investors and public authorities to turn market intelligence into clear strategic decisions. Whether you are sizing an opportunity, assessing the competitive landscape or shaping your next move in North America, feel free to reach out.

Contact Alex Tallon at [email protected] or connect on LinkedIn, and explore the full study here.

Article written by Alex Tallon, under PTOLEMUS copyright