Rechtbank Overijssel declared four companies around the Dutch charge point maker We Drive Solar bankrupt on August 28, 2026. The Centraal Insolventieregister published all four on August 31: We Drive Solar Netherlands B.V. (KvK 74915126), We Drive Solar Operations B.V. (KvK 96464089), Chargers Production B.V. (KvK 93671857) and We Drive Solar Electronic Controllers B.V. (KvK 84132450). They share one curator, mr A.C. Blankestijn in Hengelo, one rechter-commissaris, mr S.J.S. Groeneveld, and one supervision number, which is the register's own way of saying this is a single estate. RTV Oost and 1Twente report roughly EUR 12 million in debt and 33 people out of work. The company itself gives the cause as sustained price pressure and rising competition in the public charging market.
The part that did not go under is the interesting one. Solar Magazine and Nederland Elektrisch both report that the vehicle to grid service for private customers falls outside the bankruptcy and continues on the Solar Life proposition with Renault, with existing warranties intact. So the entity that built the hardware is gone while the service that runs on it is still being sold.
That split is worth sitting with, because it is the normal shape of a charger bankruptcy rather than the exception. A charge point is not a subscription that stops when an invoice goes unpaid. It is a box on a wall that will happily keep switching current for another decade. What decides whether it stays useful is not the maker's balance sheet but what the box is allowed to talk to. A charger that speaks OCPP can be pointed at a different backend the same afternoon. A charger locked to one vendor's cloud is worth exactly as long as somebody keeps paying to host that cloud.
We Drive Solar sat in a small group here: the Dutch feed-in register run by the grid operators lists only three suppliers with approved bidirectional combinations, and this was one of them. Bidirectional charging is also the least portable corner of the market. The approvals are per combination of car, charger and inverter, which means a replacement is not a matter of unscrewing one brand and screwing on another.
For anyone running a mixed fleet of chargers, the lesson is the boring one that only looks boring until it happens: keep the management layer separate from the maker. Plugchoice manages chargers over OCPP regardless of who built them, and the OCPP proxy lets a charger keep reporting to its existing backend while a second one reads along. Neither of those makes a bankruptcy pleasant. Both of them mean the hardware outlives the company.
Sources: Centraal Insolventieregister, case 08.ove.26.205.F; Solar Magazine, August 31, 2026; Nederland Elektrisch; RTV Oost, August 31, 2026.