How much is it to charge?

 Well if you are going to buy an EV you would ideally want your own homecharger point. At the moment OLEV (The Office for Low Emission Vehicles) is overseeing a grant which will give you back up to 75% of the cost of installation – this is up to a total amount of £500. The cost of the homecharging units ranges from around £300 for the most basic versions, up to around £1000 for more complex units. To qualify for the grant, you do need to own or lease an EV already so it’s not something you can have installed prior to the purchase. The grant now also only applies to smart-chargers that can be remotely controlled.

Once you have the charger installed you are looking at around £8 for a full-charge which will give a range of around 180-210 miles on the average EV. That works out at around 4p per mile, compared with the average ICE vehicle which is around 17p per mile.

Paying for ‘Public’ chargers is not at the moment a very uniform process. Some require a subscription account which will then charge the vehicle owner when the unit is activated via a smartphone App, whilst other rely on a RFID (radio frequency identification) card, but changes are being made and some chargers are now being installed with a contactless card reader. Having said that, many public chargers are still free and are funded by the initial parking costs. There are sixteen major charging networks and over twenty smaller more local systems in place, plus two which are dedicated to taxi drivers.

The largest system, Polar, runs a two-tier system: Polar Plus and Polar Instant. Polar Plus is a monthly subscription service which includes free access to around half of the Polar charging points, while the cost of the chargeable points will be at a reduced rate.

Polar Instant is a pay-as-you go service which is similar to the phone pay-as-you go systems, and requires you to top-up your account before starting your charge. The Polar Plus membership costs £7.85 per month (the first three months are free), and then use of the chargers costs 12p per kwh for the fast chargers and 15p per kwh for the rapid points. They also have an ultra-rapid 150kwh system which is charged at 20p per kwh.

The Polar Instant PAYG service is charged at 18p per kwh for the fast points and 25p per kwh for the rapid points. The Ultra-rapid points cost 35p per kwh. The charging points on the PAYG system have a minimum charge of £1.20.

It certainly looks complicated, and most of us want to know one thing – how much will it cost to charge a flat battery at a public point? The average battery is 40kwh so charging it on the PAYG basis from flat would take around two hours and cost approximately £10. I’d imagine not many EV drivers would wait until the battery was that low to recharge; planning a route with stopping points to recharge therefore becomes a major part of the EV owner’s journey.