Journalists love context-free numbers - things that sound large and scary, but without any helpful information to allow you to judge their significance.
Here's a good example from a BBC article about Electric Vehicle subsidies:
There are around 1.3 million electric cars on Britain's roads but currently only around 82,000 public charging points.
Bloody hell! That's rubbish! Bring down the government! Woke nonsense!
OK, let's take a moment to contextualise those number.
There are about 34 million cars on the road. About 1.3 million cars are pure electric. So, about 32,680,000 dinosaur-juice cars.
How many petrol pumps do you think there are in the UK?
Have a guess.
Back in 2021, the BBC reported on the decline in petrol stations:
If this prediction is correct it is a death sentence for many of the 8,380 petrol stations in the UK.
Wait…! So there are 0.06 public chargers per EV, but only 0.0002 petrol stations per fossil fuel car?!!?
Lots of EV chargers will have multiple charging heads - allowing two or more vehicles to be charged at once. Similarly, petrol stations often have multiple pumps.
Let's assume that every EV charger can only do one car at a time, and every fuel station has 10 pumps. That's still a hell of a lot more chargers per EV than pumps per petrol car.
Of course, the elephant in the room is charging time. Electric Vehicle take much longer to recharge than a petrol car takes to refuel. As a rough average, an EV takes 30 minutes to get to 80% full. That will depend on the speed of the charger and the capacity of the battery. It takes maybe 10% of that time to fill a petrol car from empty to full.
But petrol cars always need to be refilled in public. Most EVs are recharged in private. Sat on a driveway or plugged into a lamp-post overnight, they start the day full. Given the average journey length of under 10 miles, the typical EV will never need to use public charger!
There are around a million home EV chargers installed. Around 2/3rds of home have access to off-street parking which would allow a private charger to be installed. That just doesn't happen with petrol. You can't install a petrol pump at home.
All of those EVs will start the day with the capacity to take 20 average trips before needing to recharge. If any of those trips end at a supermarket, work car park, or anywhere else with a charger, they'll start their next journey full.
Suppose that you do decide to drive >200 miles in a single journey. You should be taking a 15 minute break every 2 hours - but let's say you go for 4 hours, taking your car from full to empty. At which point, you probably need a piss and want to stretch your legs. Plug in at a service station, go to the loo, have an overpriced coffee and disappointing sandwich, walk back to the car and - oh look - it's practically full.
Does the country need more public chargers? Probably, yes. Are chargers all concentrated in wealthy suburbs or evenly distributed? Who knows. What are the current occupancy levels of public chargers? Those would all be excellent questions to research and publish.
Presenting context-free numbers doesn't help people understand the scale of the problem.
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5 thoughts on “Petrol Stations 🆚 Car Charging Locations”
Lee Maguire
I imagined that the concentration of charge points against wealth levels would be something someone could do with public data. But looking at OpenStreetMap the number of
entries seems to be nowhere near the 8000 mentioned.The MHCLG maps for planning have a backlog entry for National chargepoint register ingestion, but that had already been decommissioned by the time they opened the GitHub discussion.
Apparently there's a requirement for EV chargepoint operators to provide this open data for free, but there's no indication what would be involved. I can see private companies using it to create apps, but I'd expect the location data to just be in the main map apps if it's freely available.
Daniel H
Honestly the public discourse around electric vehicles is so bad and exacerbated by poor quality journalism.
I've largely given up reading on any topic about EVs or renewable energy, it's exhausting.
The downside is the misinformation propagates very easily, but there isn't really much you can do about it and it's only going to get worse. Obviously counter narratives try their best but these never make it into the mainstream channels.
I drive an EV and like it a lot. The main advantage I have is I charge the car at home, and sometimes get my charge for free thanks to Octopus Agile, so I don't use the public car charging network much at all really. The luxury of home charging is not something that everyone has access to so they're at the mercy of the public networks where the prices p/kWh are very high, and like you say, is slower than filling up at a fuel station.
The government needs to promote destination charging, on street charging, charging in car parks for flats and encouraging workplace charging more than anything. Installing lots of 7.6kWh (or even 3kWh) chargers is way better than installing the rapids, and it makes way more sense to charge the car when you are doing other things where having a DC Rapid charge and then leaving it plugged into that for 8 hours makes zero sense whatsoever.
I also have driveway charging for my two BEVs, but even when I didn’t, in Camden, London, on my street every other lamp-post has been retrofitted with a 3kW Siemens charger, and an overnight charge would get us back close to 200 miles.
@Edent
I haven't looked at figures to the UK, but back-of-a-napkin estimates for the US suggested a while back that EV subsidies here are a fraction of those for ICE vehicles.
To elaborate on your point about charging times: in an online conversation elsewhere I observed that over the course of a year I spend much less time "filling up" an EV than I did an ICE. It's literally an extra 15 seconds at the beginning and end of a journey, vs. having to find and wait at a petrol station.
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@Edent @jmb Good blog entry. And even for any fellow Americans who *claim* to need more daily miles than EVs can easily supply (without "lenghty" stops), most of them are probably lying or at least exaggerating. Or have no idea how fast modern EVs charge (at fast charging stations).
I've done roadtrips in ours. It was fine. Enjoyable even. Taking a 20-30 min break every couple hours.
But even then, it's propaganda (likely from oil companies) that has caused "range anxiety". Convincing people they need more than 200 miles range on any given day -- when in fact the vast majority of people, yes even in America, do significantly fewer daily miles.
We've only ever charged at public charging stations on long roadtrips. 100% of "normal life" miles were charged at home or work.
It's one of several reasons nearly all EV owners say they'll never go back to an ICE car.
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