Arnold Clark's EV charging gamechanger 🚗⚡

I've been driving an electric car for the past year and a bit, and it's brilliant, especially for pootling around East Anglia, which is pretty much what we do most of the time. However, there's currently a limit on how far it can go between charges, so journeys further afield require the use of public chargers, which are currently - in general - more more expensive (per mile) than petrol.

The reasons for this are very well explained in this excellent YouTube video, which reveals that it's not actually money-grabbing companies trying to make a quick profit from hapless motorists, because:

• Fast chargers cost a lot to install and maintain - a fairly hefty capital cost
• They attract 20% VAT (rather than 5% for at home charging)
• They're subject to something called 'demand charges'

All of these combined account for the price, but it's the last one that I was unaware of - it's like a standing charge fee, but based on the maximum charge that a charger produces (so the faster the charger, the more it costs). The challenge is that it's a single fee, regardless of how much the chargers are being used.

As a result, a lot of the fast and ultrafast car chargers are upwards of 80p/kWh. For quite some time, Tesla has bucked this trend, with a price of around 50p/kWh for non-Tesla cars - we've made good use of this, having particular locations that we like to go when visiting family or going on road trips.

However, car dealer Arnold Clark have recently announced that they've opened up their network of car fast chargers to the public - and they're charging 55p/kWh (at time of writing). This is something of an interesting innovation, since the chargers are on their sales sites - so not purpose-built for car charging, nor renting space from another location such as a supermarket or motorway services.

It's an excellent price, though, and I'm keen to make use of it, not just because it's far cheaper (around £21 to charge from 20% to 80%) than Instavolt or Osprey (closer to £30) but to help Arnold Clark offset the demand charges, and encourage them to continue the service. That said, my closest one is in Milton Keynes, so I'll have to work out a route that includes it (maybe a trip to the west of the country).

So yeah, this is sort-of an advert for charging at Arnold Clark, but the more cars that use the service, the more likely they are to continue to offer it, and it might encourage other companies to follow suit - or existing charger companies to reduce their prices. That would be rather good.