Let me say something that might surprise you coming from an EV newsletter.
The public charging network in the UK is not as bad as people say.
It's also not as good as the industry claims. The truth, as usual, sits somewhere in the middle — and understanding where it actually sits is more useful than either the horror stories or the promotional material.
I've been using public chargers for six years across four EVs. Tesla’s Supercharger network has featured heavily with only occasional visits to other chargers in my early EV years. More recently; Pod Point, BP Pulse, and Gridserve have all featured regularly. Here's what I've actually learned.
FIRST, THE CONTEXT
The UK public charging network has grown significantly in the past three years. There are now over 60,000 public charging connectors across the country, with rapid and ultra-rapid chargers increasingly available at motorway services, supermarkets, retail parks, and dedicated charging hubs.
The problem was never purely quantity. It was reliability, pricing transparency, and the fragmented experience of dealing with multiple networks each with their own app, their own pricing structure, and their own definition of what constitutes a working charger.
That fragmentation is slowly improving. But slowly is the operative word.
GRIDSERVE — THE GOLD STANDARD
If every public charging experience in the UK felt like Gridserve, the conversation about EV adoption would be very different.
Gridserve's Electric Forecourts and Electric Hubs are the closest thing the non-Tesla world has to the Supercharger experience. Clean, well maintained, consistently fast, clearly priced, and staffed or monitored in a way that means problems get fixed rather than sitting broken for weeks.
The pricing is higher than home charging — as all public rapid charging is — but it's transparent and consistent. You know what you're paying before you plug in. That sounds like a minimum standard. Across the public network it isn't.
If you're planning a long journey and you have a choice of where to stop, plan around Gridserve locations wherever possible. The extra few minutes of detour is almost always worth it.
TESLA SUPERCHARGER — STILL THE BENCHMARK
I no longer drive a Tesla but I'll be objective about this. The Supercharger network remains the best public charging experience available in the UK, and probably the world. In fact, the Supercharger network was one of the main reasons I chose Tesla as my entry into the EV world.
Since Tesla opened the network to non-Tesla vehicles the experience has been broadly positive, with one important caveat — non-Tesla vehicles sometimes charge at slightly lower speeds than Teslas at the same stalls, depending on the site configuration. Worth knowing but not a dealbreaker. You also need to bear in mind that not all Tesla Superchargers are non-Tesla friendly; however this is easy to find out on the Tesla app.
What makes Superchargers exceptional isn't just the speed. It's the reliability. In six years of EV ownership I have almost never arrived at a Supercharger to find it broken or full. The same cannot be said for every network.
BP PULSE — IMPROVING BUT INCONSISTENT
BP Pulse has the largest public charging network in the UK by number of locations. That scale is both its strength and its weakness.
When BP Pulse works it's perfectly adequate. Reasonable speeds, decent locations, contactless payment on newer units meaning no app required. The motorway service locations in particular have improved markedly in the past eighteen months.
The inconsistency is the honest problem. Older BP Pulse units — and there are a lot of them — have reliability records that give pause. An out of service charger that's been broken for three weeks helps nobody. The network's size means maintenance is stretched and response times to faults vary enormously by location.
My approach with BP Pulse is to treat it as a secondary option — fine when it's working, always have a backup plan. Although to be fair, I always make sure I have a backup charging plan regardless.
POD POINT — THE RELIABLE WORKHORSE
Pod Point occupies an interesting position. You'll find their chargers in supermarket car parks, leisure centres, and workplace car parks across the country. They're typically slower — 7kW to 22kW AC chargers rather than rapid DC units — which means they're best suited to longer stays rather than quick top ups.
Leave your car in a Tesco car park for an hour and a half while you do the weekly shop and a Pod Point charger will add a meaningful amount of range for very low cost. Some of these chargers used to be free but I haven’t seen a free one for quite some time! That's not nothing — for local driving it's a genuinely useful part of the charging ecosystem.
For motorway or rapid charging needs, Pod Point isn't the answer. For everyday opportunistic top ups it's underrated.
THE APPS YOU ACTUALLY NEED
One of the genuine frustrations of public charging is the app situation. In an ideal world you'd have one account, one payment method, and access to every network. We're not there yet but we're getting closer.
The three apps worth having on your phone:
Zap-Map — not a charging network but an aggregator that shows you every public charger in the UK, their current status, user-reported reliability, and pricing. This is your planning tool. Use it before every journey to identify your charging options and check live status.
Octopus Electroverse — if you're on Octopus Energy, their charging account gives you access to multiple networks through a single payment method at competitive rates. Worth setting up once and using wherever it's accepted.
The individual network apps — you'll inevitably end up with two or three. BP Pulse and Gridserve both require or strongly benefit from their own accounts for the best pricing. Accept this, set them up in advance, and don't wait until you're standing in a car park in the rain to create an account.
THE HONEST VERDICT
My overall experience of public charging across six years is mostly reliable with occasional frustrations. That's probably the most accurate summary available.
The occasions when something goes wrong — a broken charger, a payment system that won't cooperate, a unit occupied by someone who finished charging forty minutes ago and hasn't moved — are genuinely irritating. But they're the exception rather than the rule, and they're becoming less common as the networks mature and competition drives improvement.
The mindset shift that makes public charging work is treating it like a different activity rather than a worse version of a petrol station. Plan ahead. Use Zap-Map. Have a backup option. Don't arrive at a charger on 3 percent battery hoping for the best.
I won’t talk about cost here, that was covered in a previous newsletter but needless to say, the high speed public charging network is very expensive.
Do those things and the public network is, mostly, fine.
Matt
Charging Up
chargingup.uk
P.S. Which public charging network has given you the best — or worst — experience? Hit reply. I genuinely want to know and the best stories may feature in a future issue.