A “supercharging” highway for electric cars across Europe will open for business this year after Germany’s BMW, Daimler and VW joined up with Ford.

The car makers have formed a joint venture called Ionity, which aims to build 400 charging stations over the next three years. The first 20 stations will open this year in Austria, Germany and Norway at 75-mile intervals along major roads, with plans for 100 stations operating across other countries by 2018.

A comprehensive network of charging stations would make electric cars more viable, eliminating the need to plan circuitous routes to use existing facilities.

According to Department for Transport data, the average length of a car journey in the UK is about seven miles, a fraction of the range of most electric cars.

However, “range anxiety” - the worry that an electric car will not have sufficient power to complete a journey and could leave motorists stranded away from charging facilities - is a factor holding back their wider adoption.