It’s no surprise that electric vehicles are becoming more and more popular. Most modern EVs are just great cars that are better alternatives to their gasoline-powered counterparts, with effortless power, better refinement, and cheaper running costs. However, electric vehicles still have one major flaw that many potential customers take issue with — charging.
But the charging infrastructure itself is a bit of a mess, outside of Tesla’s admittedly brilliant Supercharger network. Because of that, many potential customers are turned off by electric vehicles and stick to internal combustion instead. And this is what the UK government wants to avoid. They want people buying electric cars but, crucially, rather than just slapping tax incentives on them, it’s going to invest in solving electrification’s biggest problem.
New legislation was recently passed in the UK, requiring all EV fast charging stations to have 99-percent reliability. More importantly, though, the UK government is going to increase the amount of EV chargers, by up to 300,000 by 2030. If done, that would give the UK more EV chargers than petrol stations. Charging stations have increased 33 percent in the UK over the past 12 months, raising the total number of chargers in operation to 30,290. That might sound like a lot but the highest concentration of chargers is in London, which has around 111 chargers per 100,000 people.
According to this new law, not only will the number of chargers increase but their placement will become more varied. The only problem is that not all rural customers will be able to charge at home, which will force them forced to charge in public, overcrowding them. Not only increasing the quantity of chargers but also their reliability and usability will go a long way for the adoption of electric cars.
[Source: Autocar]
