<p>Vehicle charging infrastructure targets in Europe currently rely on uniform benchmarks, overlooking the flexibility that could be offered by future unidirectional smart charging (V1G) and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technologies. To address this gap, here we explicitly represent charging infrastructure and its costs in a cost-minimizing European energy system model, enabling the level of charging flexibility—uncontrolled, V1G and V2G—to compete. We find that V1G captures the majority of system cost savings (€19–42 billion yr⁻¹; 2.2–4.5%) and substantially reduces infrastructure requirements, whereas V2G provides marginal savings of up to €2.5 billion yr⁻¹ but generates substantial balancing market revenues (€6.4 billion yr⁻¹). V2G deployment is most cost-effective in photovoltaic-dominated systems and limited-grid-expansion scenarios where combined solar and wind production is scarce. Charging requirements vary across countries, reflecting either utilization or flexibility maximization, indicating that uniform European Union targets risk overestimating infrastructure needs in some regions while limiting the benefits of smart charging in others.</p>