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.

According to Zapmap,

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