Back in the halcyon days of 2023, I came to the conclusion that building and operating public EV chargers was a mug’s game. The target for EV chargers across the UK was 300,000, and replacing all the ICE cars with EVs would lead to 30,000,000 EVs. I suggested then that the ratio, of 100 cars per charger, bearing in mind the obvious preference that EV drivers would have of avoiding public chargers, if they could, would lead to 1-3 users of each charger per day. That compares to my estimate of 64 uses per day currently for each of the c.67,000 petrol pumps.
Of course, when I estimated that 80-95% of EV drivers would charge at home, I was omitting the problem that we plebs without off-street parking are going to be cornered into getting an EV one day, and will have no choice but to use the public chargers, just as we are presently dependent on petrol stations. But still.
Somewhere in these pages, I can’t find where, I recently saw a number for the present deployment of public EV chargers. That made me wonder whether we are clearly now in the situation where there are more EV chargers than petrol pumps. So here we are.
According to the AI, there are now 1,880,000 EV cars on the road, representing 5.5% of the total. Is the total itself going up? A question to look at another day. Instinct says yes. After all, the average age of the fleet is going up.
At the end of February 2026, there were 118,321 EV chargers, which are sited on 89,842 devices across 45,561 charging locations around the UK.
Far more than petrol pumps (about 8,400 petrol stations; an average of 8 pumps per station gives 67,000 pumps).
[And, we remind ourselves, that is for a fleet far smaller than ICE. Back in 2023, I estimated 447 cars per pump; at the moment, on these figures, there is 1 charger for every 16 EVs.]
Having answered that question, I found some other interesting statistics on Zapmap, which bear on my earlier estimate of the ruinous business case for running an EV charger.
On this page, Zapmap gives some stats on utilisation. 72% of charging events are on the fast chargers, and 28% on the slow. That isn’t what they’re called, needless to say. The slow ones are “standard” or “standard plus” and go up to 50 kW. The fast ones are called “rapid” or “ultra-rapid.” In the old days, “fast” was I believe “slow”, so it got replaced by “standard plus” or something. I don’t know, and I don’t care. But by 2100, when “ultra-rapid” is considered slow, we’re going to be on “super-mega-ultra rapid.” SMUR for short. You heard it here from your favourite doomy futurist.
Next, the same page says that
On average, looking at time-based utilisation, charge devices were used for around 2 hours per day or 8% of a 24 hour period.
H’mm – I’m thinking this is no way to make money. But hey. The slow chargers were used for an average of 235 minutes per go, and the fast ones for an average of 38 minutes. The slow ones were used an average of 0.42 times a day, and the fast ones 4.02 times a day. No figure is given for the overall number of uses, but luckily, we can calculate that. First we need to estimate the relative proportions of each charger type using the data we have. I get 79% of chargers are slow and 21% fast. Then it is easy to calculate a weighted sum, for the total level of utilisation across both types. That number is:
1.2 uses per day
What about the average energy delivered? That’s quite important if you want to know whether you can make money on these things. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to calculate (Zapmap may be able to with more granular data). You can make an estimate, if the fast chargers are running at 100 kW and the slow puts in a full charge each use (80 kWh). That gets you 34 kWh per day on the slow (a generous estimate) and 250 kWh on the fast (also generous).
That makes daily earnings of £18 for the slow charger, and £193 for the fast, at Zapmap’s 54 p/kWh and 76 p/kWh for slow and fast chargers respectively. This says nothing about margins, which are naturally imponderable.
The folk charging at the slow charger, on these estimates, are paying £43 for a fill (in reality rather less because they are unlikely to put in 80 kWh, that is just a figure used for argument), and the folk on the fast charger are paying £48 for their 63 kWh in 38 minutes as they sip a latte and catch up on emails.
The number tells us that 1 in every 13 EVs uses a public charger every day. I don’t know the number for ICE but in 2023 I used a ballpark of 1 in 7, representing a weekly fill up.
Regarding power, I calculate that the average charger is outputting 3 kW, if you spread the load across 24h. Of course it will be quite a bit lumpy. [Most of the slow chargers are idle all day.] Scaling that up, I get an average draw overall of 400 MW, and “when the journey is complete,” it will be the equivalent of about 7 GW constant. And again, in reality, quite a bit up and down. [The power going down a petrol hose is roughly 21 MW. Of course, petrol pumps are also idle most of the time. However, I estimated in Denierland that it only takes 1.3 minutes to fill a tank. Yes, the EV uses energy more efficiently.]
On Zapmap
Zapmap has the benefit of a catchy name, but I can’t help wondering whether it is eventually going to disappear. That’s because the need for a map of EV charging points is being trimmed from two sides. First, when there are charging stations everywhere, the EV driver will just continue until he or she passes one. No-one has an app to tell them where the nearest post box is. Second, as EV range improves, there will be fewer stops per journey on the road.
On the plus side, we are over a third of the way towards the hallowed “300,000 chargers,” but so far, we have only 1/18th of the EVs we are supposedly transitioning to. That means that one day, there will be 100 EVs for every chargepoint, not 16. If usage continues as now, the proprietors can expect their devices to be in use for 12h a day. Presumably that will net them a profit.
Imponderables
Will the ZEV mandate crack, or will this transition take place?
Will a super battery arise that will make mid-journey charging superfluous? [Asterisk: it would take more than overnight to charge it at home.]
Will there be a grid to support the required charging?
Will the under-utilised and loss-making slow chargers disappear and be replaced by a greater number of fast chargers?
Caveats
My spreadsheets are terrible things, grotesqueries with numbers fitted in wherever they feel like going, different colours, cells masquerading as checks that may or may not actually be checks. So there is a finite chance I’ve made a citrus marmalade out of this. Hopefully not.
ZEV mandate watch
According to the SMMT via Fleet News, March was a bumper month for car sales. The percentage of EVs sold was a staggering 22.6%. Unfortunately, this year’s target is 33%. Ah, but there are flexibilities. Yes. And I will bore you with those on another day. You can’t wait.
/message ends
Climate Scepticism 
The Borg have adapted – I mean, the AI has had an upgrade. I asked it for a picture of a Jaecoo 7, March’s top-selling car, with a banner behind it reading “Things that never happen.” I did not once mention coal, or saving the planet. Question for astute readers: Why did I want that image and text combination?
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Do batteries react to different charging rates with regard to performance, mileage etc. One of our friends has an electric Audi Q5 his wife charges it at work at a fast charger when needed but usually at home overnight. He believes after charging overnight at home the car doesn’t get full mileage and doesn’t feel as powerful also the car is quite warm in the morning.
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Never heard of Jaecoo 7 until your post, but it seems like a new “name” is appearing all the time on ads. from the JAECOO website –
“The JAECOO 7 made its UK arrival in January 2025, introducing cutting-edge Super Hybrid System (SHS) technology and generating overwhelming demand from day one. That
momentum only grew with the launch of the JAECOO 5 and E5 in late 2025, both earning instant praise from drivers and critics alike.
The result? Over 28,000 vehicles sold in JAECOO’s first year in the UK — a brand that truly hit the ground running.”
As for your question, only guess is this weird quote from the website –
“The inspiration comes from hunting scenes of hunters in ancient times. The hunters are highly focused on their preys, being at one with nature and keeping still. They will go for the preys with an amazing speed, never giving up until reaching the goal.”
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The analysis in this article fits for a geographically tiny island with a large population density distributed over a city/town/village build millenia in the making. In short, many smallish trips where battery “range” is not necessarily an over-dominant factor.
Even so:
An honest answer to each of these questions (honesty is a very difficult thing to achieve from the EV smugs) will detail the real picture for these toys. The Easter break just concluded here in Aus is traditionally a holiday where many city dwellers take to the highways for a 5 day getaway. This year was categorised by very long queues of EV’s waiting for about 5 hours to charge up for another 150km of travel.
Of course the ME war threatens reliable fuel supplies – and Aus has a series of Govts who refuse to face that issue for the longer term, so they are part of the threat. However, sitting in a 5 hour queue at a small “whistletop” while dealing with childrens’ potty needs is not a threat. It’s reality.
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Not that I could find much of this reported on the BBC website, the UK EV charging industry has really struggled, with quite a few insolvencies. Perhaps your article goes some way to explaining why. The BBC didn’t tell me when I searched for it, but AI tells me this:
The UK electric vehicle (EV) charging sector has experienced significant turbulence, with several high-profile insolvencies, administrations, and market exits driven by difficult investment climates, supply chain issues, and intense competition.
Key developments in EV charging and related manufacturing insolvency include:
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Mark, there is still a 100% first year capital allowance on new chargers, which some of these companies must have taken advantage of – and they still cracked.
Ianl – you rightly highlight the point that chargepoint providers cannot base their business case on the three times a year when there are queues going back half a mile up the road. If they did so, they would end up with a field of chargers that were out of use for almost the entire year.
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Question for astute readers: Why did I want that image and text combination?
I’m afraid I still haven’t worked it out. Ready to spill the beans?
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JamesS, the usual point that is made regarding the fast charging is that it damages the battery. Now, if your car is on a three-year lease, who cares what state the battery is in when the car goes back to the dealer?
I don’t believe there is a variation in the quality of the electrons, so I’m not sure what’s going on there.
Dougie – Well, as well as being the UK’s top-selling car in March, the Jaecoo 7 also benefits from a range of tax breaks. This is because it is a plug-in hybrid, which means it is an altogether more eco-friendly car than the pure petrol or diesels driven by we plebs. [Its BIK, with its battery-only range of 56 miles, is 9% this year, vs 3% for a pure electric, and 30% for a typical pleb car. Fleetnews link.]
However, my attempt at humour was because the statistics show that many, if not most PHEV drivers never plug their cars in. That means that their eco-friendly credentials are purely theoretical; they end up dragging a battery around to no purpose, and filling up on energy at the petrol pump only. As I said the other day, quoting from the government:
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Mark, I hope my last answered your question!
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I wonder if the manufacturers of the Jaecoo 7 are also being subsidised by their hard-pressed European competitors who will end up buying credits from Chinese EV manufacturers, because the European manufacturers fail to hit the UK’s EV mandate while the Chinese EV manufacturers do so with ease?
Miliband and his ilk are very good at dreaming up policies to harm the UK economy, but the EV mandate must come close to being the greatest act of self-harm of the lot.
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I’ve just listened back to an interview on PM this evening where Evan Davies intervied ?Ginny Buckley? an EV expert and founder of electrifying.com or something – clearly a neutral voice in all matters EV.
The topic was how the government was cutting red tape for installation of chargepoints. That gave Ms Buckley the chance to say, regarding grid connections,
The context that there is currently one charger for every 16 EVs – plenty, one might think – was not provided. We need, said Ms Buckley, “visibility of chargers” because her survey said that half of all non-EV drivers did not have confidence in the charging infrastructure. There was a “postcode lottery” when it came to charging. Then she wheeled out her killer stat: that there were more chargers in Westminster, than in Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle and Sheffield combined!
Extraordinary!
That is shocking, isn’t it? Buckley asked.
Oh my goodness, that is absolutely shocking, said Evan.
Of course, some listeners’ BS meters were pegged at this point – including mine. So I got the numbers direct from gov.uk here. Table EVCI0102.
These are the numbers for 1st Jan 2026, the most recent release, that Buckley claimed to be all nerdish about:
Admittedly, it was closer than I thought, but the BS meter was accurate in this case. The stat was bogus, and millions of BBC listeners – the non-sceptical types – will have gone away with a quite false impression.
Programme weblink. [Time-limited; interview at about 12 minutes to 6.]
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I’ve had the temerity to put in a complaint. I expect that, in a cut and thrust interview, it is not always possible for the presenter to question every assertion. But they can say that it is indeed a shocking stat.
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“Area the size of 1,100 football pitches needed to meet demand for EV chargers
Spike in fuel costs because of Iran war has led more drivers to consider buying electric vehicles”
https://archive.ph/WYNzV#selection-2241.6-2245.101
…The UK will need 62,000 rapid chargers within the next four years, based on EV ownership forecasts, according to property consultancy Knight Frank. This would require 1,900 acres of land to be set aside for the charging points, equal to around 1,100 football pitches.
Researchers said installing these points has become more urgent because of the Middle East conflict, warning that Britain risked a chronic undersupply of chargers without action….
Possibly a bit sensationalist, not least because – as with covid and the rush on the part of people to buy houses in the country – the effect is likely to be short-lived. However, the general point is interesting, nevertheless.
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Have been looking into EV charging. Good deal available from my Energy supplier. If I buy a home EV charger, can get off-peak charging (when renewables output is high) for just 5p/kwh (+5% VAT) for a whole year. If lots of people get on the scheme might save paying for a few wind turbines to switched off. The difference being the operators will be paid under CfD for actually producing at 7-12p/kwh rather than not producing. Expect similar state-sponsored wheezes in the future.
https://www.scottishpower.co.uk/electric-vehicles/ev-bundle
Another possibility for the future is to allow your car battery to be used as storage. So for those doing mostly short trips, and/or have an EV as a second car, when required, the battery can be partly drained in those winter nights. Being a tad cynical, I would expect the EV owner to be credited at a rate significantly above highest public charger rate as an incentive.
https://www.gov.uk/government/calls-for-evidence/improving-the-visibility-of-distributed-energy-assets/improving-the-visibility-of-distributed-energy-assets-call-for-evidence#executive-summary
With millions of EVs projected in the next few years there is thus plenty of scope for using the batteries as grid storage. But the cost is likely to be huge for the masses in terms of below cost electricity to charge EVs, then well above cost for them to discharge to the grid.
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Kevin (Manic), the key point about using EV batteries as partial grid storage is your comment that it realistically can work only “for those doing mostly short trips, and/or have an EV as a second car“…
For anyone who needs to be able to use their car/van reliably for a long journey or for work, who needs to know when they plug it in to charge before going to bed, that when they get up in the morning it will be fully charged rather than discharged, this idea is a non-starter. That’s the problem with so much of the theory around net zero – on a practical level, it just doesn’t work.
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The Guardian has quite an interesting article on two-way charging. Leave out the propaganda, and it’s an informative read:
“How EVs could be part of answer to UK’s fuel reserve worries
More use of two-way charging will earn money for owners and could avoid the need to expand North Sea oil drilling”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/mar/28/how-evs-could-be-part-of-answer-to-uk-fuel-reserve-worries
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I wouldn’t plug my EV into a V2G arrangement, if I had an EV, and a smart charger to plug it into. By all means take advantage of cheap charging. I think I would rather have control of a system, for example to be able to charge a battery for naught, and discharge it over the day. But it would have to be a healthy distance from the house, and it only pays for itself if electricity is ruinously expensive. I would prefer to build a system where electricity is cheap, and skip all the gizmos.
Back in 2023, under Sunak – seems a long time ago now, doesn’t it? – the government put out a “smart charging action plan,” in which they described the arrangements for V2X – “vehicle to everything.”
I’d unplug mine when it was brimmed. The amount of money you’d get back would not be worth the pain. H’mm. Unless it’s a leased EV…
And
Anything with the word “smart” in it is a red flag to me. The last excerpt seems to be in direct conflict with the earlier comments.
gov.uk link.
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“Faisal Islam: Why the government is relaxed about Chinese car imports”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cnv82v3n6yqo
…[The car sector] came in for a bit of a shock this week with the release of data that showed that a Chinese car – the Jaecoo 7 – was the number one car in the UK for the first time ever.
The Jaecoo 7 is a medium-sized petrol or hybrid SUV. But Chinese imports have more generally been of electric vehicles, and the numbers are as remarkable. Chinese-owned brands have made up one in seven new UK cars, about 15% so far in 2026. Five years ago this was 1.3%.…
…The government’s message is that “Britain should not fear” the rise of Chinese imports.
“I don’t want to prevent UK consumers having access to cars of their choice,” Kyle told me.…
Astonishingly tone deaf! He does understand, doesn’t he, that his government’s EV mandate is doing just that.
…But the UK’s car production has halved over the past decade. And there have been some concerns about whether domestic production can compete, as well as over possible data and national security implications.…
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From the same BBC article (in the interests of balance:
…Shadow business secretary, Andrew Griffith MP, blamed government regulation designed to shift consumers away from petrol and diesel for the sector’s decline.
“British car makers have been undermined by a foolish ban on internal combustion engines, which has removed natural customer choice and sucked in imported EVs,” he said....
Remind me again which party introduced that foolish ban when it was in government? And they wonder why voters don’t trust politicians.
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Mark @11 Apr 26 at 6:31 pm
If EVs were used en masse for grid balancing it would need to be controllable by the EV owner. They would be able to determine the quantity to be discharged so they are not left stranded. There are also likely to be considerable incentives to get people to participate. That is very low prices for charging when renewables generation is excessive and very high prices to discharge batteries to the grid on windless winter nights.
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Kevin: “If EVs were used en masse for grid balancing it would need to be controllable by the EV owner.“
No doubt, but wouldn’t that undermine the whole point of claiming that EVs are potentially a massive back-up battery to provide resilience to an unreliable grid dependent on highly variable renewables? I suppose second car onwers might be prepared to see their batteries used in this way if it made money for them, but then again if the grid has to pay a lot for this electricity from EV batteries, that in turn undermines the false claim that renewables are cheap.
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This concept of using millions of EV batteries as grid storage exemplifies the truth in the old sayings “easier said than done” and “the devil’s in the detail”.
For a start this could only be applied to EVs that can be connected to domestic chargers. Even if they eventually solve the multiple challenges of EV use by those who cannot charge at home, it is highly unlikely that anyone would ever go to a public charger to allow some of their charge to be drained. So that limits the potential numbers to those with access to domestic charging.
Also, those owners with domestic chargers are likely to be very cautious about how much power they would allow to be exported due to obvious concerns about finding themselves short of range and the impact on their car’s battery life. Regular exporting would increase the number of charge/discharge cycles which is a key factor in battery degradation.
As things stand, very few of the cars on the road are equipped with “reversible” chargers which would allow them to feed power back into the grid: “V2G” in the vernacular (Vehicle to Grid). Terminology can be confusing here. Domestic “chargers” are actually nothing more than fancy connections. The kit which turns 240V AC into 400V DC (or 800V in some cases) to charge the battery is integral to the car.
Quite a few EVs are equipped for V2L (Vehicle to Load) whereby they have built-in 240V socket(s) which can be used to run tools, kettles, etc. However this is totally unsuitable and unsafe for feeding power back into the grid.
Next, aiui, none of the existing domestic “chargers” are suitable for exporting power to the grid. They would all have to be heavily modified – or replaced, more likely. The particular issue is the regulatory requirement for safety features which they do not have, features which shut off the feed to the grid if there is a blackout. There may be exceptions for homes which have solar panels and export to the grid as they will have the necessary protective kit in place. I’ve read that chargers with the requisite extra components are likely to be far more expensive than the ones typically in use today.
Then the local distribution network presents another challenge. These networks are served by step-down transformers which provide 240V AC to our homes. There are something like 320,000 of them across the country. Apparently, very few – if any – would work in reverse, stepping up from 240V to 440V, or higher, so that power could be sent further afield. Consequently any exports from EV batteries will only serve to reduce local demand: it will not be available for transfer outside the immediate area.
To summarise, for this concept to work at scale would need:
All new EVs to be equipped for V2G.
All domestic chargers sold in future to be suitable for exporting to the grid.
All existing ones to be replaced or modified.
Most local distribution transformers to be modified or replaced apart, probably, from those serving very small populations and/or in remote areas.
If my understanding is anywhere near accurate, I don’t see this happening at any significant scale for reasons of both practicality and cost.
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Mike, regarding V2G, ev-database.org has about 170 out of 800 models with this capability, presumably mostly newer ones. I do not know if an EU regulation for this is coming into force, driving the adoption.
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Jit, Thanks for that – more than I thought from reading EV forums and the like. I expect you are right about EU regs. I have seen a comment that standards for suitable domestic chargers have yet to be agreed.
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