As the UK’s electric vehicle population swells, it’s time for a strategic approach to curing bottlenecks in the charging network, says editor-at-large Alex Grant.

FW editor-at-large Alex Grant

To the casual observer, social media exchanges over Christmas would suggest electric vehicles have hit a bump in the road. Photos of long queues at service station chargepoints and one columnist’s furious rant about his electric driving woes both went viral over the festive period, often alongside suggestions that electric vehicles aren’t ready for the mainstream yet. I disagree, but I also think there are some issues to tackle here.

The UK’s charging network isn’t perfect. In 10 years of driving electric cars, I’ve had several journeys disrupted by broken connectors, unresponsive credit card readers and glitchy apps. But, the important thing to note is that the situation is unquestionably getting better. Today, there’s almost always a Plan B, it’s unlikely to require a membership card and (unless you’re really pushing it) you’ll probably have enough spare range to get to it. The emerging problem is bottlenecks – and there isn’t a silver bullet cure.

Queues are hardly surprising. In 2022, one in six new cars was electric (16.6%) and one in 16 (6.3%) was a plug-in hybrid – a total of 368,000 vehicles. Ten years on from diesel’s peak 50.8% market share, new cars are twice as likely to have a charging port (22.9%) than a diesel engine (9.6%, including ‘mild hybrids’). This popularity creates an influx of additional demand for public charging and a population of new EV drivers who are still learning what their cars can do.

Case in point; while using one of Gridserve’s 350kW ultra-rapid chargepoints last summer, a friend and I helped a neighbouring driver plug in their Peugeot e-208. They were unaware that they needed to remove a second plastic cap to uncover the rapid charging pins and assumed the unit was incompatible with the car. As the chargepoint then whirred into life, it showed their battery was already 85% charged – enough for a return journey to their destination 75 miles away without plugging in at all.

This is the least efficient way to use a rapid charger. Electric cars top up quickly when the battery is low, then slow down as they get closer to 100%. That final 20% can take a lot longer to recover than the previous 80%, so it’s almost always quicker to factor in another short stop later on. According to Fastned’s charging graphs, our neighbour’s e-208 was drawing a third of its maximum power at the time, extending what was already an unnecessary charging session while also paying a premium to use the fastest chargepoint. Pitfalls that should really be addressed during the vehicle handover.

User error isn’t the only issue. Range is still a selling point. So a typical 200ish-mile family car will typically have at least twice the battery capacity of an early Nissan LEAF with two times faster rapid charging to keep top-ups at around 20-30 minutes. Charging networks haven’t always kept up with that change. According to Zap-Map, two thirds of rapid chargers top out at 50kW – which is the limit of an early LEAF – and I’ve found lots of faster units don’t have an adequate power supply to meet their advertised speeds. The result is the same in both cases: an extended charging stop for the latest vehicles and more potential for queues.

So there’s more to this than simply filling gaps. Genuinely rapid rapid charging is every bit as important as installing extra chargepoints and drivers need to have at least some idea how to use what’s already there. After all, it doesn’t take many over-running charging sessions to create a queue – nor many viral social media threads to make a bump in the road seem unsurmountable to the casual observer.