Has Ecotricity shot themselves in the foot with £6 FEE for electric car charging?

Ecotricity – providers of the UK’s most comprehensive electric car charging network – are about to start charging £6 for 30 minutes of recharging.

Ecotricity have been busy building a recharging network for electric cars and plug-in hybrids across the UK – well, on motorways at least – and now have a network of almost 300 charging points on Britain’s motorways which have delivered 30 million miles of free electricity in the past five years.

But no business model which doesn’t charge its customers is sustainable, and Ecotricity has to generate revenue at some point. But they’ve decided the time is now, and the charge will be £6 for 30 minutes. Which, for us, is a bit of a problem.

After years of being really only useful as second cars in congested cities, EVs are now threatening to become a proper alternative to the ICE car, and Ecotricity’s network does enable EV owners to venture away from home without major range anxiety.

Yet despite EVs becoming more practical, electric car buyers are opting for an EV because it’s cheap to run – both in  terms of actual running cost and BIK –  and its purchase price is subsidised by government grant, not because they perceive it as better than an ICE car

But what Ecotricity has done by announcing a £6 charge for a top-up of electricity on your journey is make running an EV away from home as expensive as an ICE car; in our experience a 30 minute top-up on a fast charger will give you around 50-60 miles of range – much the same as a reasonably economical diesel.

It also effectively means plug-in hybrid users will simply not bother, especially as they’d probably be lucky to get much more than a handful of miles for £6.

Of course there are alternatives to Ecotricity, with Tesla Superchargers free for Model S and Model X users and Chargemaster, which charges around a third of the price Ecotricity are going to charge.

We understand Ecotricity’s logic and need to charge – and there’s no doubt it will eventually cost as much to fuel an EV as an ICE car – but a charge of this size has the potential to stall EV sales, and that won’t suit Ecotricity one bit.