The electric car reality
How much does it really cost to re ll your batteries at a public charger?
ONE OF THE big selling points of electric vehicles (EVS) is that they’re cheap to run. Charging one up at home costs less than half the amount it would cost to refuel a petrol or diesel model, and many public charging points initially offered free electricity in a bid to promote the take-up of the new technology.
However, as EVS have become more popular, the cost of using public charging points has crept up. If you don’t plan ahead, you could end up paying more than three times as much as you would on a home charger.
Charge a car like the Renault Zoe on a feepaying Polar Instant slow charger, for example, and it’ll cost more than £13 to replenish the batteries from 0-80%. Do the same on a home charger and you’ll pay just over £4.
Although some public charging points still offer free electricity, not all do. In fact, some charge as much as 30 pence per kilowatthour (kwh), compared with 14p if you were charging your car at home, and when Shell’s promotional tariff of 25p/kwh expires on 1 June this year, its fuel station chargers will cost an astronomical 49p/kwh.
Our research has also revealed that some public charging stations don’t charge at the rate you think you’re paying. We only got a charging speed of 22kw from a Polar Instant unit in Hampshire that was billed by online maps as providing a 43kw charge. This meant that we paid £6 for a 30-minute charge but only got the equivalent of 15 minutes of charging.
On top of electricity usage, some network providers also charge an admin fee every time you charge; this can add as much as £3.50 to each charge cost. And some demand a registration fee of up to £20 just for the privilege of joining their network. Not all companies charge for electricity in kilowatt-hours, either. Some base their fees on minutes or hours of use, making it difficult for consumers to compare the cost of charging between different providers.
To find out just how much it costs to use public charging points, we took our long-term Zoe on a road trip from London to Hampshire, stopping at three charging stations from different networks along the way.
The Zoe has the longest claimed range of any mainstream EV on sale today. Its official range is up to 250 miles, although its real-world, winter range is around 130 miles. The Zoe is available with a choice of two battery
There are more than 15 different fully electric models on sale.the Nissan Leaf is the most popular, with 19,000 sold
There are now more than 135,000 plug-in electric and hybrid vehicles in the UK. Nearly 14,000 of them were registered last year – a 33% increase on the previous year
sizes: 22kwh and 41kwh. Ours is the Q90 ZE40 version, with the higher-capacity battery and rapid charging capability.
First, we parked up at a Source London charging point in south-west London, where we charged the Zoe’s batteries by 10% in 30 minutes on a 7kw fast charger. It cost us £2.07. This might seem reasonable, but if we’d wanted to replenish the batteries by 80%, it would have cost around £17.
Next, we headed out of the city to Hampshire. By the time we’d reached the Moto services on the M3 at Winchester, the Zoe’s remaining range was down to 30%, so we hooked the car up to an Ecotricity rapid charger. We were back up to 80% again after 46 minutes, at a cost of £6.90. Although this was a much quicker charger, it would cost £9.36 for a 0-80% charge, but users with an Ecotricity home energy account get a 50% discount on this price.
Finally, we stopped at the Holiday Inn in Basingstoke to add a bit of a boost before heading back to London.
The Polar Instant charger we used cost £6 for a 30-minute charge. Although it was billed as a rapid 43kw charger, it charged our car at a rate of just 22kw, so it provided us with only half of the charge we’d paid for.
So has running an EV become more expensive than using a petrol or diesel car? If you consider that a 50% EV charge will give you around 65 miles of range and you pay £6 for that energy via a rapid charger, it’s costing you around 9p per mile. If you have to add in an admin fee for every charge (Genie point London demands £1.80 per charge for its rapid chargers), this figure rises to 12p per mile, and if you stop at a Shell garage after 1 June you’ll be paying 15p per mile. In contrast, a Ford Fiesta 1.0 petrol costs about 13p per mile and a Volkswagen Polo 1.4 diesel 11p per mile.
How to charge an EV
There’s no universal type of charging plug, so it’s best to check which type your car has before charging. That said, most EVS come with two cables: one with a three-pin plug on one end and another with a seven-pin Type 2 connector. If your car doesn’t come with a Type 2 connector, you might need to buy one to use some public chargers.
Charging points are classified by the power they produce (kw), which governs the speed at which they will charge up a car’s batteries. And there are three different groups of power output: slow, fast and rapid.
SLOW
These chargers produce up to 3kw and will take six to eight hours to recharge a car with a 20kwh battery and around 14 hours to charge up our Zoe’s ZE40 battery.
Although this type of charger is the equivalent of a domestic plug socket, it’s advised that you have a dedicated charging point installed for safety reasons, because of the higher current demands of EVS and the longer amount of time spent plugged in.
The lengthy charging time of slow chargers makes them the least popular choice for public use. However, they’re commonly installed as home chargers by EV buyers who qualify for the Government’s Electric Vehicle Home charge Scheme, which provides a grant of up to 75% (maximum of £500) for installing a home charging point.
FAST
There are two power outputs: 7kw or 22kw. The former can replenish the Zoe’s batteries to 80% in eight to nine hours and the latter in 2hr 40min. These chargers can be installed at home and are also common in supermarket car parks. They generally require the use of a cable with Type 2 connectors – either the one supplied with most EVS or the one that’s attached to the charging point.
RAPID
These were initially only located at motorway service stations and on trunk roads, but they are starting to spring up in city centres, too. With a power output of 43kw or 50kw, they’ll recharge the Zoe’s batteries to 80% in an hour.
EVS capable of using rapid chargers include the BMW i3, Hyundai Ioniq Electric, Kia Soul EV, Mitsubishi Outlander, Nissan Leaf, Renault Zoe, Tesla Model S and X and Volkswagen e-golf.
Tesla owners can use even more powerful 120kw Superchargers that take just 20 minutes to give a 60% charge. Model S and X owners receive 400kwh of complimentary Supercharger credits annually; a ‘small fee’ is applied if usage exceeds this figure.
Public charging networks
There are more than 15,000 public charging points at 5000 locations in the UK and
around 500 new ones are added every month. Chargers are operated by regional or national network providers and you’ll need to sign up with one before you can use its chargers.
At the time of writing, there were 24 networks operating in the UK: 13 major providers and 11 smaller operators. While some still let users charge up EVS for free, many charge per kilowatt-hour or per minute, so it’s important to shop around to find out which provider offers the best value for money.
Polar is the largest, with more than 6000 charging points around the UK, 70% of which are free to use. Home energy provider Ecotricity operates its Electric Highway network with 680 charging points at motorway service stations and on major roads. Oil companies have also started to install charging points at fuel stations. Shell launched the Recharge rapid charger network last year, initially at 10 locations, and BP has announced that it will start to introduce rapid chargers over the coming year. London drivers can expect to see a rapid increase in the number of
Although the numbers are still very small in comparison to overall sales gures, the Department for Transport’s aim is for there to be 1.2 million EVS on British roads by 2020.And many surveys reveal that a signi cant proportion of drivers are thinking of going electric with their next car purchase
charging points available soon, thanks in part to Pod Point, a company that’s installing lamppost charging points in a number of boroughs.
Some network providers offer pay as you go and monthly subscription accounts. Pay as you go often has a higher rate per kilowatthour, so it’s pricier if you use a public charger regularly. With lower charge-per-minute rates, monthly subscription accounts are usually better value for those who need to charge up regularly.
Once you’ve worked out which is the best charging network provider for you, or signed up to a few of them to guarantee you’re covered for a long-distance journey, you’ll need to find out which chargers are available and working. Network providers have charging point maps with live information and you can also use apps or websites, such as Zap Map, which list charging point locations for more than one network.