Our Better Guide to buying an EV attracted quite a few comments on Facebook about how complicated it is; different apps and systems you have to navigate. What are people’s experiences? @EV_Owners hopefully have some useful input!
Ha! I think that going forward more of the public charging facilities will go contactless, so it should get easier. At the moment, it can be a bit challenging/frustrating, but it’s just a case of planning ahead on a long journey. Almost all the service station chargers are Ecotricity (for better or worse). PodPoint are in a lot of the supermarkets and Chargemaster/Polar are all over the place. So far I’ve managed to get away with just those 3 apps. There are a couple more that are limited to certain areas - Source London, Alfa are mostly up north, but spreading further (they have a key fob, which is quite handy).
Much as I hate to say anything positive about Shell, their charging points are contactless. Things have already moved on though - when EVs were first available, you had to have cards for each different provider. The sales guy at Nissan told me that one of his customers had a huge wallet-full of them. So the apps are definitely an improvement!
So I guess I’d say, persevere - it’s not as complicated as it might seem and it’s getting better!
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