“EV CHARGING SOCKETS ARE REALLY HARD TO FIND”

A new survey says, “over half of UK motorists are concerned they don’t have charging facilities where they live.” Well, duh. They won’t have looked. See, only a tiny fraction of them will be drivers of a car with a plug. There are 500,000 EVs and PHEVs out of 35 million vehicles on UK roads. That’s 1.4 per cent.

So among the 1,000 motorists surveyed for this research, just 14 will have had a reason to track down the “charging facilities near where they live”. Plus maybe a few who were, in the weeks before the opinion pollster phoned, researching life with an electric vehicle with a view to buying one.

Petrol and diesel car drivers can very easily find filling stations. They’re about an acre big and have a honking great illuminated sign. Anyone expecting charging points to be as obvious will almost inevitably be among those concerned about not having them.

Most electric car points (unless they’re the rapid chargers which you don’t need near home) stand unobtrusively on the pavement, and are approximately the size of a kitchen bin. Many are smaller than that. I often use sockets in lamp posts

– just a plastic plug cover the size of a beer mat, a tiny blue LED and a little QR code for your payment app.

These charging points are easy to find using Zap-Map.com, among other websites. But you wouldn’t simply stumble into them. And if you were asked out of the blue where they were located, it’s but a short step to citing that as a ‘concern’ about driving electric.