We need to be better at access for car charging

By Brian Clegg

I am a big fan of electric vehicles, and though my current car is a plug-in hybrid for practical reasons, I’ve no doubt I’ll go all-electric fairly soon and already have an interest in charging stations to top up on longer journeys. But we really haven’t thought through the different requirements of charging stations when compared with petrol stations.

Imagine you went to fill up with petrol or diesel, went to the till and were asked if you’d paid the parking charge for stopping your car at the pump. It would be ludicrous. Yet car parks are inevitably one of the obvious places to put chargers, and we are increasingly hearing of drivers being fined for using the chargers without paying attention to parking regulations. 

This has been, for instance, for drivers using a Lidl car park which has chargers when the store was closed after 6pm (even though the charger is labelled as available 24 hours on charging apps).

Bearing in mind that the owners of car parks with chargers get a cut of the charging fee, I would argue that a pay car park really should be free for charger users, but I accept that at the moment I always have to pay for the car park if I’m using a charger.*

But where it’s really contentious is shopping centre car parks, which often have stay limits or operating hours like the Lidl example. Across the road from where I live there’s a shopping centre which has recently had a large charger station installed. I’d never use it myself as it costs nearly five times as much as charging at home. But it would be different at a distant location. I knew the car park had time limits, so thought it would be interesting to see how these applied when charging and whether it was clear to the user.

The signs on the chargers themselves don’t tell you the restrictions, but as you can see in the image at the top of the post, they do say (in small print) ‘Existing parking restrictions apply’. To find those restrictions you then have to find the other sign (not on the charger points – why?) shown alongside. Now we discover that you can only stay for four hours between 5am and 10pm, or (bizarrely) one hour between 10pm and 5am. 

There’s also the worrying statement ‘This car park is for customers only.’ Does this mean that as well as staying within the time limits, you have to buy something? This would be difficult when the shops are closed. Or does using the charger make you a customer? Note also the warning that you must be actively charging. So presumably if your car reaches charge while you are at the checkout you have to abandon your shopping and rush out to move the car away from the charger to avoid a fine.

The thing I find depressing about this kind of thing is that the car park owner is treating us as if it’s doing us a favour by allowing us to use its car park to charge our cars. It’s as if you go in a shop and if you haven’t bought anything in five minutes they fine you for loitering. Even with fast chargers (these are 160 KW), charging is likely to take significantly longer than filling up with petrol. If we want people to accept electric vehicles, we need to make charging a more customer-friendly experience.

* One of my favourite places to charge is the few National Trust car parks with chargers, as being a member the parking is free – I just wish they had more.

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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.