The electric car *charging* thread

Look into getting an Electroverse card ? Might be easier if you are with Octopus ?

The issue being this is any one of 22 delivery staff, spread around UK and using various hire car depots and three different companies.

I’m going through a carbon reduction project at work, and our road mileage is the biggest issue. We can start with hire cars, look into supporting staff with personal car changes when we can but that’s much more expensive for them and us as employer.

@matt_outandabout

if you’re wanting a commercial “fuel card” for national charging network, then Shell Recharge would do that I expect. It covers all the big operators (except Tesla, Gridserve and Chargeplace Scotland, at the moment as far as I’m aware). I had the card supplied commercially. In my case it came with the cars rather than being issued to me personally, but I presume it could be supplied for depot or individual multi/open vehicle use.

Surely the driver isn’t expected to have all the cards / apps to hire an electric car?

There isn’t really ‘all the apps’.

Almost all rapid chargers take contactless debit card payments. The exceptions are:
– older Charge Place Scotland ones, which are your only option in remote Scotland
– Tesla public superchargers, but these are not essential as there are always others.

Apps are a lot more common for ‘fast’ chargers i.e. the 7kW AC ones but these are next to useless anyway in most scenarios so can safely be ignored unless you have a specific situation i.e. there’s one at an office you go to and spend all day etc.

I recently used an Ionity charger that did not seem to accept contactless. The instructions on the screen were not clear so I waved a bunch of cards at it and the one that got accepted was apparently Electroverse. Not sure if I was just unlucky or incompetent. Or both.

Not sure if I was just unlucky or incompetent.

There are usually two RFID readers – one for scheme cards and a different one for actual debit cards. This has stumped me once or twice before.

Shell Recharge would do that

Is it just me that can’t get a card? I have the app but when I click on ‘Order card’ I just get a ‘Sorry, currently unavailable’ message and tells me to use contactless – it’s been like that for months.

Don’t know johndoh, maybe they are only supplying RFID cards to fleet contracts at this time or something of that nature.

I’d think that V2H would be no more stressful on the car battery than regular driving

It’s *much* less stressful. Some models even use the lower power charge/discharge for conditioning of the battery. If needed. Most vehicles won’t though.

Johndoh If it’s any help to you, electroverse and zap-map have networks that are pretty much the same if not identical (they all announced instavolt as a partner at the same time, so I suspect they are all piggybacking the same New Motion network *now owned by shell I think*). They issue RFID cards