In this regular column, CarGurus’ motoring expert and commentator Vicky Parrott has her say on the burning issues in the automotive world. This week, the cost of public charging comes under scrutiny…
I love electric cars. I review them all the time (including on the CarGurus UK YouTube channel), and the vast majority of the 15,000 miles I cover each year are battery powered.
There are still aspects of electric cars that frustrate, of course, but none so much as the wildly erratic pricing at public rapid chargers. The worst case I’ve experienced is the 94p/kWh that I paid (grudgingly) at a public rapid charging station on the A34 recently.
Up the road, at Chieveley Services on the M4, you’ll pay 79p per kWh for a top-up from a rival charging station. That’s a more typical price to pay, and the chargers are just as quick as those at the one I visited, are just as much on a main artery route, with all the same services on site, yet they’re more than 25% cheaper.
For further context, if you pay a £90 membership fee, you can charge at one of the third-party accessible Tesla Superchargers (not all Tesla Superchargers are open to any EV) for around 63p per kWh. Tesla owners get it for 47p/kWh; half the price of the chargers I used, and easily the cheapest ultra-rapid charging you can access.
Even if we take Tesla vehicles out of the equation, EV drivers are still subject to wild variables of 40% or more when it comes to the price they pay, depending on where they ‘fill up’. The price disparity between slower, AC charging stations and destination chargers is just as extreme, too.
What would motorists be saying or doing if petrol and diesel varied in price by 40 or 50% from services to services? If it cost £1.46 for a litre of petrol at one service station, but was only £1 per litre at the station 20 miles up the road? The higher priced station simply wouldn’t get any custom, for a start.
The thing is that you are still, to an extent, more limited when it comes to electric charging. Sure, the public charging infrastructure has improved dramatically over the last two years, and you can simply drive into just about any major motorway service station and find a decent bank of chargers, often with disabled and/or towing-specific charging bays, too. Spectacular news all round.
But until there’s a regulator ensuring fair price competitiveness among public charging providers (and fines for those providers who fail to routinely maintain and service their chargers), it still feels like you’re at the mercy of erratic pricing.
And I also know that I could likely charge more cheaply if I downloaded an app, just as I know that there are memberships from most charge providers and car manufacturers that bring cheaper charging, points rewards, free hot drinks and all of that. But isn’t the app-membership merry-go-round all just exhausting? Isn’t it reasonable to expect to plug in, tap-and-go with your card and reliably get a charge without being ripped off?
I would be the first to admit that it was my own laziness that meant I charged at the most expensive rapids I’ve ever plugged into: I only needed a brief top-up, and I simply couldn’t be bothered to look for another charger when there was a functioning one right in front of me. Sometimes that’s life, and we pay the price for taking the easy option – albeit through gritted teeth.
So, look, I’ll say it again: I love driving an EV for my daily driver. Around 95% of my mileage is powered by electricity from my home, which costs 7p per kWh in off-peak hours (25p outside of that) and far offsets the occasional overpriced public charging experience. That means that, in the MG Cyberster I was driving on this occasion with its 2.8 miles/kWh efficiency, the publich charging station electricity I purchased cost me 33p per mile, compared with 3p for the other 180 miles that I did from my home charge.
The message here isn’t that EVs are too expensive to charge. It’s that rapid charging needs to be governed so that opportunistic outliers can’t charge seemingly unreasonable sums without any risk of comeback. Even If governing the prices is out of the question, there are small changes that could help drivers to choose more easily – starting with clear signage on the roads ahead of the services, displaying fuel prices for petrol, diesel and electricity. France has managed it (not to mention solar panel roofs on many of its charging hubs), so I’m not sure why the UK seems incapable of doing the same.
Anyway, the wild west attitude with public charging costs must change. It isn’t just unfair on existing EV owners, it’s also a huge disincentive for anyone considering the move to electric motoring - especially those who don’t have the convenience of home charging. Until public charging pricing becomes fairer, electric cars will remain a very hard sell for many motorists.
