Paying for charge

If you plug the car in at home, it’s your domestic bill that gets charged. But what worries prospective electric motorists the most is what about if you need to charge up while you’re out and about? Well this is, at the moment, one of the big weaknesses in the system. Although there are potentially lots of charging points, as Elspeth Brown explains to Megan McGregor, there are lots of players in the market and you need to be signed up with several of them to charge your vehicle...

Elspeth - We have used BP Chargemaster Polar today. This is one of the options for public charging across the UK with a per pence kWh. On the motorways there's the Ecotricity; Ionity networks; there's the Tesla Supercharger network; there's hundreds of people getting into the public charging space. A lot of them are only available perhaps on the motorway; so I have on my normal keys about four or five of these different fobs, plus a few apps on my phone. It is becoming difficult and they're all different price per kilowatts, and it's all ever so slightly different. We're trying to create a solution, which is a roaming card that will reduce it all onto one card, or as many networks that want to work with us, and then it will come on to either your Octopus energy bill or take it off your card.