alpitronic Brand Guidelines: Four Bolzano Engineers and the Hypercharger

Four engineers at a technology park.

alpitronic was founded in 2009 in Bolzano (Bozen), the capital of South Tyrol in northern Italy. The company says it began at the TIS Innovation Park, the city’s technology park, as the work of four electrical engineers: Andreas Oberrauch, Alessandro Ciceri, Sigrid Zanon and Philipp Senoner. The firm writes its name in lower case, as does the Bolzano Chamber of Commerce in its profile of the company, and it still names all four founders in its leadership, with Senoner as chief executive and chairman and Oberrauch as chief technology officer and vice chairman.

For its first years alpitronic was a development house for power electronics rather than a charger maker. The company says it filed a patent for a resonant switching inverter in 2010, began a traction-inverter project for BMW the same year and built its own power-cycling test benches, rigs that put semiconductor modules through repeated load changes to see how long they last. In 2013, it says, it made a small series of modular AC/AC converters for aircraft ground power for the firm Hitzinger, and that work became the technical basis of the “Power-Stack” inside its later chargers.

In 2015 the firm moved to the Bozner Boden area of the city and began setting up production there; from 2016 it made a snow-cannon control system in small batches for a customer, English and German Wikipedia and the Chamber of Commerce say. The Chamber’s profile describes the step that followed: in 2017 came the idea of a product line of its own, and from then on alpitronic developed, built and sold direct-current fast chargers for electric cars. The Chamber also describes how the company worked with the “Smart Mini Factory” laboratory of the university in Bolzano to model a new production line as a “digital twin” before building it. Bolzano remains the headquarters, and the company says the site houses its main research centre, manufacturing and a service repair centre.

A modular charger called Hypercharger.

The product line is called Hypercharger, shortened to HYC in its model names. The company says it unveiled the concept at the EVS30 electric-vehicle symposium in Stuttgart in 2017 as an all-in-one charger, with power electronics, cooling and cables in one cabinet rather than a central power unit feeding separate posts. Series production of the HYC150 and HYC300 began in 2018, according to the company; English Wikipedia says the HYC300 was first delivered in May 2018.

The first public Hypercharger went into service in Merano. The South Tyrolean energy company Alperia announced on 23 May 2018 that it had opened the unit in the town centre, near the railway station, calling it the first station of its kind in Italy and describing a modular design that could start at a lower power and grow as modules were added. Philipp Senoner, then described as alpitronic’s managing director, told Alperia that the aim had been a compact, powerful station, with trucks and buses already in view.

Those modules are the core of the design. In a November 2023 interview with heise autos, Senoner explained that each “Power Stack” holds the complete power electronics: up to four fit in the wider HYC300 cabinet and two in the narrower HYC150, and newer stacks built on silicon carbide let an operator share power between cables in smaller steps. English Wikipedia dates the presentation of the HYC400 to May 2022 and its first deliveries to April 2023. It says the HYC1000, introduced in 2025, moves the power modules into a separate power cabinet that serves up to eight charging posts, and that alpitronic’s first megawatt charger opened in May 2025 on the Brenner motorway. The current range runs from the wall-mounted HYC50, aimed at car parks, hotels and supermarkets, to the HYC1000; a second-generation HYC400, its display moved to the front, was announced in March 2026.

How charger makers show themselves.

Makers of electric-vehicle chargers sell a box that most people only notice when they need it. Their pictures therefore tend to put the hardware where it lives: a wallbox on a garage wall beside a parked car, a row of rapid chargers under a canopy at a motorway service area, a cable plugged into a car at dusk with the screen lit. The setting tells the buyer which kind of charging the company means, from overnight at home to a short stop on a long trip.

The second set of images is about the system rather than the plug. App screens show a charging session, a schedule or a fleet of chargers on a map, and diagrams show how power cabinets, posts and software connect. For makers that sell mainly to charging operators, depots and retailers, these pictures often matter more than the car, because the customer is buying a network that has to be installed, monitored and serviced.

Factories are the third theme. Many charger makers show their own production lines, with cabinets moving between stations, technicians testing power electronics and finished units waiting to be shipped, as a way of making engineering visible. Trade fairs play a similar part: events such as Power2Drive in Munich and the international EVS electric-vehicle symposium are where new chargers are unveiled, photographed and compared.

Many of these chargers spend their working lives in someone else’s colours. A rapid charger may carry the livery of the operator, the supermarket or the fuel company whose forecourt it stands on, so a maker’s identity often rests on form: the shape of the cabinet, the placement of screen and cable holders, and a name that may appear only in small type. Reading these brands means looking at the hardware as closely as at the logo.

Slatted cabinets in other people’s colours.

alpitronic’s chargers are often seen under other names. heise autos wrote in November 2023 that the distinctive Hyperchargers, with their slatted sides, stood at most motorway rest stops carrying EnBW logos, outside Aldi stores in Aldi colours and in blue at Aral filling stations. The company, for its part, describes the line as combining engineering with “Italian design.”

Testing is part of the story the company tells about itself. It runs a power-cycling laboratory at its Bolzano headquarters that, it says, tests semiconductor modules to the ECPE AQG 324 guideline and offers that testing to other manufacturers. Senoner told heise autos that the laboratory was one of the few remaining parts of alpitronic’s earlier life as a broader supplier to the car industry, and that its power electronics are designed for 70,000 full-load cycles.

The firm has grown well beyond South Tyrol. The company lists research centres in Bologna and Munich, a round-the-clock remote service centre in Bergamo, and a North American headquarters in Charlotte, North Carolina, opened in 2024 alongside a British base in Milton Keynes. English Wikipedia puts the workforce at about 1,100 in 2025 and says some 135,000 alpitronic charging points were in operation that year.

For a design guide, alpitronic shows how a charger maker can keep one industrial form, with its slats, screen and cable holders, while the cabinet carries other companies’ colours, and how a lower-case name can sit quietly behind an engineering record. Compare Kempower, the Finnish maker of modular fast chargers, and Tritium, the DC charger maker from Brisbane. For this guide we use slate, a cool white and an alpine green with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep alpitronic’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.