The UK car industry has warned of a “growing regional divide” in the provision of electric car chargers, as it called for a new regulator to oversee legally binding targets for charger installation.
The number of publicly available chargers has not grown fast enough to keep up with the soaring number of battery-powered electric cars on British roads, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT), a lobby group. Public charger numbers rose by 82% between 2019 and 2021, but this pales in comparison with the 600% jump in the number of electric cars during the same period.
The disparity between the number of chargers and cars is growing faster in the north of England than in the south, the SMMT said.
Unequal charger provision across the country has long been a concern for the industry and analysts, with fears that customers will be put off buying new electric vehicles if they do not have a place to charge them regularly. A third of the UK’s households – mainly in towns and cities – do not have their own dedicated parking space where a private charge point could be installed.
Investors, led by the oil companies Shell and BP and the French energy company EDF, are pouring money into the public charger industry. Nevertheless, those investments have overwhelmingly targeted wealthier areas of the country, led by London, as well as rapid chargers for fast recharging on popular routes. The UK has more rapid chargers per electric vehicle than any other nation barring China, South Korea and Japan, the SMMT said.
That has left some parts of the country underserved. Greater Manchester has only 17 chargers per 100,000 people, compared with 102 per 100,000 in London, according to data from ZapMap that are relied upon by the government.
Scotland is the second best region for chargers per 100,000 people, with 52 – although they are spread over a vast geographical area. Northern Ireland is the worst, with only 18 per 100,000 people.
Mike Hawes, the SMMT’s chief executive, said that “range anxiety” – the often misplaced fear that an electric car will not have enough battery capacity – had been replaced by “charge anxiety” – the fear that drivers would be unable to find an open charge point.
The SMMT said the charger mandate should be overseen by a new regulator it nicknamed “Ofcharge”, which would also have powers to set pricing, minimum standards and ensure “social equity” in provision. That would accompany a zero-emission-vehicle (ZEV) mandate announced by the government in October. Under the mandate, details of which are yet to be confirmed, carmakers will be expected to sell a growing proportion of electric vehicles and vans every year.
The mandate is expected to accelerate the UK’s transition to electric cars, but it could mean that manufacturers are not able to sell as many petrol and diesel cars, as well as hybrids that combine a battery with an internal combustion engine. Those cars are currently more profitable for carmakers, although the gap is expected to disappear in the coming years once factories are building electric cars at the same scale.
Hawes said plans to ban the sale of cars and vans with internal combustion engines by 2035 “would put the UK ahead of every major market in the world”, but added that it “needs more than automotive investment”.
He said: “With clear, equivalent targets and support for operators and local authorities that match consumer needs, government can ensure the UK has a chargepoint network that makes electric mobility a reality for all, cutting emissions, driving growth and supporting consumers across the UK.”
Ben Nelmes, the head of policy and research at New AutoMotive, a thinktank focused on the transition to zero-emissions vehicles, said the ZEV mandate should not be conditional on charger numbers.
“The rising issue we’ve seen with charge points isn’t the number of chargers available,” Nelmes said. “We need to create a nationwide charging system based on the needs of the drivers, but this issue should not prevent an ambitious zero-emission vehicle mandate from the UK government. This is the key to secure the UK’s net zero targets, as well as giving people more access to electric vehicles at a lower cost and with more model ranges available.”
