BYD and Iberdrola Promise Three Years of Free EV Charging in Spain, So I Read the Fine Print

On 3 November 2026, BYD and the Spanish utility Iberdrola launched the Plan Recarga Inteligente. Anyone who buys a new BYD at a Spanish dealer gets a free home wallbox, installation at half the usual price and an electricity credit worth 10,000 km of home charging a year for three years. The small print on BYD España’s website ends the offer on 31 December 2026, or sooner if the wallbox stock runs out. The headline says “three years of free charging”, but the conditions behind it decide whether that is true for you.

The deal covers BYD’s battery electric cars and its DM-i plug-in hybrids, which make up more than half of its Spanish sales this year.

What the Free Wallbox and Electricity Credit Actually Cover

The hardware is simple. BYD gives you the wallbox, but you have to hire Iberdrola to install it and you pay for that yourself, at half Iberdrola’s reference price. Neither company has published the reference price or an actual installation quote, so the €969 saving that the two companies quote for the box and the discounted installation together is the only number to go on.

The electricity credit has more moving parts, so here are the numbers in one place.

The 16 kWh figure is a flat assumption for every car, so a hybrid with a small battery will need many more plug-ins than an electric car to use the full 1,600 kWh.

To get the credit you have to move your home electricity to Iberdrola’s Plan Recarga Inteligente tariff and link the car to the assistant. You also have to let Iberdrola manage your charging remotely and remove any charging schedules set on the car or the wallbox, because they can interfere. If you charge outside the assistant, the energy is billed at the standard price. The tariff is for homes only and Iberdrola says it has no minimum contract period, so you can theoretically leave if the numbers stop working.

Iberdrola labels the €0.05 rate as before tax. Its page doesn’t label the €0.195 standard price, but the Spanish comparison sites Vatify and CuandoCargo both list it as before tax, and electrive puts the tariff at about €0.25 per kWh including taxes. That matches €0.195 plus the same 27.2%. Iberdrola’s blog on the plan says the promotional rate covers up to 60% of the energy destined for the car, and the tariff page says anything above that goes on the bill at the standard price.

What a BYD Costs in Spain Right Now

BYD España lists “from” prices that assume BYD’s financing and an advance of €2,250 from the Plan Auto+ incentive, which I explained in my piece on Spain’s Auto+ incentive scheme. These are the plug-in models on the page this week.

Source: BYD España, November 2026. It also lists a rental offer for the Atto 2 DM-i Boost at €344 a month with VAT, with an initial payment of €5,038.92 over 36 months and 10,000 km a year, valid until 31 December 2026 or until stock runs out.

Those prices come with finance conditions. The Black Days campaign, which runs until 30 November 2026 for private buyers and the self-employed in mainland Spain and the Balearic Islands, advertises a discount of up to €14,260 financed through CA Auto Bank. The example loan on the page is €17,001.12 over 99 months at a 9.50% nominal rate (10.31% APR), with a total repayment of €24,336.

Against those prices, the €969 saving is about 7.5% of the Dolphin Surf’s promoted price, about 5.8% of the Dolphin G DM-i’s and about 5.2% of the Atto 2’s. That is a real help on a small car, and I covered how the cheapest BYD stacks up against its rivals in my Twingo versus Dolphin Surf comparison. For a family weighing the compact SUV, my BYD Atto 2 guide covers trims and range. The Atto 3 Evo, which starts at €28,888 in the table, has its own guide in my Atto 3 Evo overview.

The Apartment Problem and Public Charging

Eurostat’s Housing in Europe 2025 publication puts the share of Spaniards living in flats at 65% in 2024, the highest in the EU and well above the 48% EU average. If you park on the street and have no space where you can fit a charger, a free wallbox and a home electricity credit don’t help you. Article 17.5 of Spain’s Horizontal Property Law lets an owner install a private charger at their own space after notifying the community in advance, without needing a vote, and the Supreme Court has backed that reading even when the cable runs through common areas. The cable route from your meter to your space decides the installation bill.

For those buyers the package includes public charging on Iberdrola’s network, which the company says has more than 12,000 operational public points in Spain. You get 50% off for six months without a subscription, then 12 months of the Plan Recarga + subscription at no cost. It normally costs €9.99 a month and takes an extra 20% off at the charger.

The 50% discount applies only at points the Iberdrola app marks as “puntos ventajosos”, not at every charger. Before counting on it, I’d open the map and see how many of those points sit near your commute.

What Iberdrola Gets Out of the Deal

A utility helping to pay for a car promotion needs some explanation. The terms say part of it, and the rest is my reading. To get the credit you need an Iberdrola electricity supply and its Plan Recarga Inteligente tariff, so every buyer who takes the offer becomes an Iberdrola customer, although the tariff has no minimum contract period. The Asistente Smart Avanzado is what ties the car to that tariff. Iberdrola’s blog on the plan says you set the time by which the car has to be charged and that the reduced rate applies whether you charge in the morning, afternoon or at night. The tariff page adds that you must link the car and let Iberdrola manage the charging remotely.

BYD didn’t invent this kind of bundle. In June 2025 it launched a leased Dolphin with a bidirectional charger and a free-charging tariff with Octopus Energy in the UK, billed as the UK’s first bundle of its kind. That followed a free two-way charging tariff that Renault, Mobilize and The Mobility House had launched in France in October 2024, and a month later Renault and Octopus Energy offered a year of charging credit with the Scenic and Megane E-Tech in the UK. On 12 October, Polestar added a new entry-level tier to its Polestar Charge subscription.

What BYD’s Spanish Sales Look Like

ANFAC, the Spanish carmakers’ association, published its October report on 2 November. Electrified cars, meaning battery electric and plug-in hybrid together, took 31.5% of passenger car sales. Battery electric cars rose 81.2% to 16,425 units and plug-in hybrids rose 15.8% to 14,619.

BYD’s own figures came out on 3 November, the day the charging plan was announced, and Capital published them that evening. BYD says it registered 5,305 cars in October, up 89% on a year earlier, and entered Spain’s top five brands for the first time with a 5.4% share.

Source: BYD figures as reported by Capital, 3 November 2026. The October shares are my own division of BYD’s numbers by ANFAC’s totals above.

The split between the two types matters for the charging deal. The top-five rank comes mostly from the hybrids, and they are the group a home charger bundle has to convince to plug in regularly. I covered the wider European picture in my piece on how BYD’s European market share more than doubled.

If I had a house with a driveway, or a garage bay close to the meter, I’d take this package, as long as Iberdrola’s installation quote came in at around the half-price level the companies describe. I’d pass on it for a street-parked flat.

Featured Image: BYD