This episode explores the current state and future of electric vehicle charging infrastructure along the UK strategic road network, focusing on the M1 corridor in particular.

Gary discusses charging patterns, infrastructure growth, and strategic considerations for EV drivers.

Key topics

- Growth of EV charging infrastructure on the M1 and strategic road network

- Charging patterns and peak times for EVs along the M1

- Current gaps and future opportunities for charging hubs outside motorway service areas

Resources

ZapMap - https://zapmap.com/

Fastned - https://fastned.co.uk/

Ionity - https://ionity.eu/

Shell Recharge - https://shellrecharge.com/

The EV Musings Podcast is sponsored by Zapmap, the go-to app for EV drivers, helping you find and pay for public charging with confidence.

Episode produced by Arran Sheppard at Urban Podcasts: https://www.urbanpodcasts.co.uk

(C) 2019-2026 Gary Comerford

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Hi, I'm Gary and this is EV Musings, a podcast about renewables, electric vehicles and things that are interesting to electric vehicle owners.

At the end of this episode, if you enjoyed it, a like, a comment or a subscribe would be really great. Thank you.

Six years ago when I got my first electric car I took a journey from my home in Hampshire to my parents home in Yorkshire. The car I had at the time, a 30 kilowatt hour Kia Soul, had a CHAdeMO connector around 100 miles of range on the motorway and it charged at allegedly 80 kilowatts but in reality around 50 kilowatts if I was lucky. The 210 mile journey north usually took me around four hours when accounting for traffic, roadworks and rest stops.

I sure it would take longer with the charging that was going to be involved. But surprisingly enough, it wasn't as bad as I thought. I made my first stop at the Holiday Inn in Flamstead, in St Albans, about 60 miles from home. My second at the Holiday Inn in Rugby, just off the M1 at Junction 18. And the third at the Holiday Inn in Derby, just off Junction 25, before that last stretch home over the Pennines. Now you'll note a couple of things from this little anecdote. Firstly...

I was very cautious when I got my EV about making sure I stopped with plenty of range left to avoid running out. And I think everybody's the same with their first EV. And secondly, all of my stops were off motorway rather than at the MSAs.

The reason I didn't use the MSAs is because at that time they were all equipped with a single, often temperamental ABT charger installed by Dale Vince's Ecotricity network. They were relatively low powered and often occupied with Nissan Leafs doing similar journeys, mainly because they were free to charge in many cases. The reason the Holiday Inn was a great place to stop

was that they had 50 kilowatt charges installed there by Polar Plus from Chargemaster who were later brought out by BP Pulse. And with my subscription offering and the very cheap public charging available at the time, I was doing the whole journey for around £3 in public charging costs. Now just for comparison, and I mentioned this on the mid-season round table episode recently, if the government succeeds in implementing this ridiculous £3 a mile e-ved that they've announced,

So let's start with a definition or two. The Strategic Road Network is a set of four and a half thousand miles of motorways and major a roads in England that are defined and managed by the Highways Agency. If you want to have a look at what's involved in the Strategic Road Network, there's a link in the show notes.

Now I'm not going to go through all these SRN, but let's just say that if there's a major motorway or a road near you in England, Scotland, Wales have their own road networks. Chances are it's part of the SRN. Take a glance at the map on the link page and you'll see what I mean. Today, I want to look at what's happening at the strategic road network level when it comes to charging infrastructure. In particular,

I want to look at how it's changing for one specific road I use quite a lot, which is the aforementioned M1 corridor.

Every motorway service station on the M1 had at least one charger. It was usually a Gridserve and it was classed as medium power, which meant it was under around 100 kilowatts. More often than not, it was 50 kilowatts. In some cases, there were more than one. And in one case, Leicester Forest East, the charges that were there were completely shut down and covered up.

If you wanted to use a charger outside the motorway service areas, something I currently recommend as the MSA chargers are usually very busy and we'll come on to that shortly, there were very few options. You had a couple of locations such as Markham Vale near Chesterfield or the BP Pulse Hub at Milton Keynes Coachway. Now, sadly no longer there, although there are a handful of ionity units still remaining there. With very few exceptions,

There were no large hubs or reliable chargers within a mile or so of any of the M1 exits. There might have been a couple of InstaVolt chargers at McDonald's or KFC locations just off the junctions, or even an Osprey charging install attached to a Marston's pub in a similar place. Again, Markham Vale in South Yorkshire comes to mind.

But overall, the charging provision for the busiest road in England was, frankly, lacking. And yes, you can pull me up and say, but Gary, the Gridserve units were always there. To which my reply is, yes. But were they available? Did they charge at the rate they were supposed to? And the answer to both of those questions was probably no. So I chose not to use them and I still don't use them if at all possible.

But things have improved almost beyond recognition along the M1 corridor.

Let's look at what's And we'll start with the MSAs, the motorway service areas.

I asked my good friends at ZAPMAP if they would be able to provide me with couple of bits of data around the charging situation along the M1 and they duly obliged. For a start, there are now multiple chargers at all motorway service areas. According to ZAPMAP, have been 174 additional ultra-rapid chargers added at the MSAs along the M1 in the last 24 months alone.

This includes 10 sites where the provision has gone from zero ultra rapid charges to 122 between them. And to avoid confusion, a site in this case is a block of ultra high powered charges belonging to one CPO at either a northbound or a southbound MSA. There are 29 MSA sites up and down the M1 and this differs from

This differs from double the number of MSAs themselves because some MSAs have a site on each carriageway, Toddington services, Northbound and Southbound for example. And some have a single site serving both sides. So Donington Park and Leeds Skelton Lake are examples. And some sites have multiple CPOs at each location, Newport Pagnell or Toddington for example. Now not included in this list are those sites which just have the old

medium power Gridserve units, which I'll talk about below. Now at the moment, these include Tibshelf or Trowell northbound services. Does that make sense? I hope so. If it doesn't go back and have a quick re-listen. If it doesn't go back and have a quick re-listen. Now beginning with Gridserve, the charges are generally high power and have been either upgraded or new hubs added to most of the M1 services. There are a couple of exceptions such as London Gateway, which still has

Two Gridserve medium power units, Newport Pagnell which has a couple of units southbound and three units northbound, maxing out at 40 kilowatts only. And Trowell Northbound that has two medium power rapid chargers. Tibshelf North and Southbound with one unit at each side. And Woodall North and Southbound that have two units on each side, limited to 40 kilowatts. And that's about it from that point of view. Leeds Skelton Lakes is an existing MSA that has no Gridserve chargers in there at all.

just ionity of which there are six 350 kilowatt units.

And before we go much further, let's talk about Gridserve and welcome break. Now you'll notice that I mentioned Leicester Forest East earlier. This is a welcome break site which for whatever reason shut down the Gridserve charges there. The official statement I believe was that there was insufficient power for the two medium power units that were there. This would seem to be sort of legitimate and right until you consider that Apple Green

the parent company of Welcome Break and the owner of Apple Green Electric, have now added 16 400 kilowatt charges to each side of the Leicester Forest East locations. Very interesting. There's even a brand new Welcome Break services at junction 33 Rotherham that was built with 20 Apple Green Electric 400 kilowatt units and 20 Tesla 250 kilowatt units, but no Gridserve presence at all.

And that's not all. Moto, who are one of the bigger MSAs, have recently added six of their own Moto Charge units in at Toddington services with this new Moto Charge brand. They're almost co-located with the 12 Gridserve chargers, which is an increase from six two years ago, and are faster at 400 kilowatts versus 360 kilowatts than the Gridserve ones. Grid-serve are priced at 85 pence a kilowatt hour at Toddington, and Moto Charge are priced at 89 pence a kilowatt hour.

Is the extra 4p per kWh worth it for the additional potential 40kW of charge speed? Well, unless you're in an EHGV, answer is probably no. So who else do we have on the M1 motorway service areas?

Well, as I mentioned earlier, there's Ionity at Leeds, Skeleton Lake and Tesla Superchargers not open to the public at Woodall, Newport Pagnell North and Southbound and Rotherham Services.

Apple green have installed units at the following sites.

Leicester Forest East North and Southbound with 16 units each. Rotherham Services, 20 units. Woodall, 6 units Northbound and 16 Southbound. Newport Pagnell North and Southbound, 16 units each side. London Gateway Junction, 24 units.

So anyway, the MSA charger walls are fully underway on the M1.

There was a time when the only charges you could find at an MSA were the old Ecotricity units. And when Gridserve bought Ecotricity, they took over the charges and replaced them all with the better, more reliable units. Although, they're all ABB units which don't support plug and charge and have an appalling user interface, I would probably contest that. But maybe that's just my personal point of view. Your mileage may vary as they say.

The contract with the MSA operators at the time didn't allow other ChargePoint operators to come on and install units at those locations. But that seems to have been disregarded nowadays for whatever reason. There's probably a whole podcast involved in that, but I'm not going to go into that today. Tesla came into a lot of the MSAs. Now, as they were only available to Tesla vehicles at the moment, that kind of got tacitly allowed.

Then, Ionity started to encroach, especially at places like Cobham on the M25 and Beckinsfield on the M40. InstaVolt are at the M6 services at Corley.

And then Apple Green Electric came on to as many of the Welcome Break MSAs as they could. As detailed earlier, on the M1, Apple Green now have 130 ultra-rapid charges split across eight sites, as previously defined. That's well over a third of all the MSA ultra-rapid chargers. Compare this with Gridserve, who only have 108 ultra-rapid charges.

along the same route.

Apple Green have over 20 % more units on the same stretch of road. With figures like this, you'd think that Apple Green would be way ahead of Gridserv in terms of sessions and usage, right?

Well, looking at the utilization figures though, a different picture emerges. The 108 ultra rapid charges operated by Gridserve were used nearly 27,000 times each month in December 25 and January 26. Compare that with the higher number of charges for Apple green that were only used a little over 16,000 times per month across the same two months.

I have actual detailed utilization figures, sessions used, provided by ZAPMAP for all the M1 service stations. They have asked me not to discuss specific site level numbers, just approximations. So that's what we're going to go with for the rest of this episode.

The most used Gridserve units were used on average over 300 times per charger per month. The most used Apple green chargers were used on average 17 % less.

The least used Gridserve chargers were used twice as much as the least used apple green chargers.

In fact, six of the top ten Gridserve sites in terms of utilization figures had a higher number of sessions per charger per month than the single top Applegreen site.

somebody a little bit cleverer than me could probably do some statistical analysis of this and see what the factors are behind it.

Now it's not cost because Apple Green charge 83pkWh and Gridserve charge usually 89pkWh although some sites do vary slightly. In the perfect world of economic theory nobody would use the Gridserve chargers.

unless all the Apple Green units were being used. As a perfect market, will go for the cheapest charger every time.

But what he does highlight is the Gridserve first mover advantage when it comes to motorway service charging.

They have the customer recognition and familiarity alongside a well-known brand. Green Electric and Moto Charge are the new kids on the block. However, companies like Apple Green at the Welcome Break sites and Moto Charge at the Moto MSAs

are now starting to slowly encroach on this and will probably see some sort of erosion of the Gridserve lead over time.

Now this is of course good news for drivers. It means that at some motorway service areas you can have your choice of charge point operators with differing pricing strategies. Take South Mims on the M25 for example. There's Applegreen electric at 83pms kWh.

grid server at 89p per kWh and Tesla only superchargers at some incredibly cheap rate that I'm not even going to talk about because if you're a Tesla driver you're really not bothered and if you're a non-Tesla driver you can't use those locations anyway.

Or let's go to Reading Services westbound, where there are grids of units at 89pkWh and Tesla units open to the public at around 53pkWh depending on the time of day.

This is a little bit remarkable given that Tesla have, as a rule, kept their motorway service area charges for Tesla drivers only and not open them to the non-Tesla vehicles. There are exceptions, of course, and this is one of them.

Or there's Gloster services that have the e-Vault network with their 150kWh charges at 69p a kWh and the Tesla public superchargers at 57p a kWh during the day or 33p a kWh overnight. The granddaddy of all of these, however, is the Gretna services on the Scottish-English border. There you can find Tesla-only units, Applegreen electric units, 83p, Gridserve units, 89p and IONITY, 79p.

Now this is all in addition to the Tesla public supercharger at Caledonia Park, a mile or so further south of the services at the nearby junction. Although they're actually quite expensive at 73 pence or 58 pence a kilowatt hour, depending on the time of day. Now I mentioned earlier that I tend not to use motorway chargers, Gridserve specifically. So let me delve into that a little bit more. Consider what I said about the strategic road network and the number of vehicles using the M1.

each day.

Consider also that of these 200,000 vehicles, proportion of them are going to be electric. Consider also also that on the M1 there are only 13 official motorway service sites. Here they are, let me see if I can get through them all. London Gateway, Tonnington, Newport Pagnell, Northampton, Walford Gap, Leicester Forest East, Donnington, Trowell, Tipselth, Woodall, Rother and Woolly Edge and Leeds Skelton Lake.

that's about right and Rotherham has only been open a few months at the time of recording.

So if every electric vehicle on the M1 that needs a charge pulls into an MSA on the M1, two things are going to happen. Firstly, the units are going to get hammered a lot more than other units that have lower utilization. And secondly, the chances of a unit being in use increases.

The data I have from ZapMap indicate that each Gridserve unit along the M1 corridor is being used an average of eight sessions per day. Each Apple Green, an average of four sessions per day.

Now remember this is from a national car park that has around 5 % electric vehicles. So we're about 1.8 million vehicles from a total of 34 million. Which means that of our hypothetical 200,000 vehicles passing down the M1 every day, there will potentially be 10,000 electric vehicles that might want to charge somewhere on their journey. At the moment,

the network appears to be handling the load with the data indicating that Apple Green, for example, has the ability to effectively double the number of sessions that it can provide or supply in any given day without any issue.

But let's do a little bit of crystal ballgazing and imagine ourselves 10 years down the line. The number of EVs on the road could potentially be double what it is now. And this means that the number of vehicles wanting to use the chargers will double all things being equal. But this increase won't be evenly distributed across the day. They're going to be charging peaks where more vehicles stop. So around meal times are typical examples.

And there are going to be troughs where there is very little call for charging. So in the middle of the night, for example, not many people turn up at four o'clock in the morning wanting to charge. There are people, but not as many as two o'clock in the afternoon. Now what that means is that there is a very high probability that the charges at your favorite MSA are going to be in use when you arrive there.

you you

Now what this means is that there's a very high probability that the charges at your favorite MSAs are going to be in use when you arrive there. And if you've got time to wait, that's fine. But if not, could be a problem. So I'm generally not using motorway service areas as a provider of charging on a long journey. So who do I use? Well, that then gets me on to the next part of the discussion, which is the strategic road network outside the motorways.

Obviously, there's a lot more A-roads in England than there are motorways, and the charging provision on these roads is increasing rapidly. The latest figures from ZAPMAP indicate that 14,097 new charge devices were added to the infrastructure last year, representing over 19 % year-on-year growth, and this is on top of a couple of years of 40 % plus growth. Ultra-rapid charges have increased by 41 % year-on-year, and the number of hubs, six or more rapid or ultra-rapid devices,

has increased by just over 39 % last year to 748.

Consider that when I got into an EV less than seven years ago, there wasn't a single hub in the country. And the very first one was the aforementioned Milton Keynes Parkway that had eight 50 kilowatt chargers in one place. And I that opened just before lockdown, as I recall. So the rate of change is phenomenal. And a lot of that increase has been focused on places along the strategic road network. And a lot of these SRN locations are very close to the motorway network. For example,

If I'm heading north at the M1 and I want to stop somewhere within a mile or so of the motorway junction where there is a charging hub, there are several options. I can stop at Tesla Supercharger locations open to the public at Luton Airport, Harlington Junction 12, Starbucks Parkland Junction 18, the Mour Hotel Junction 27, the East Midlands Designer Outlet Junction 28, the Hague Supercharger near Barnsley and Calder Park Service Station near Wakefield.

And if I look at non-Tesla superchargers that have six or more devices, there's Pogo who have sites at the Holiday Inn Wakefield. Nice Chargers, not a great location to be honest. The Holiday Inn Derby and the Holiday Inn Crick near Rugby. Or there's the Ionity Hub at Milton Keynes Parkway, Junction 14. Leicester, Junction 21. South Normanton, Junction 28. And Meadowhall, Junction 34. Osprey have a couple of hubs just off the motorways. There's the Three Compasses at Watford. Lutterworth Hub just off Junction 20.

and the common hub at junction 35. Sainsbury's Smart Charge has one at Fosse Way near Leicester, which is junction 21, and another down outside Watford, again, within the M25. Evyve have a hub at Grove Farming, NWB off junction 21, which is the only one they have anywhere near the M1 And that's actually quite interesting because there's a side note.

What's interesting is that the big CPOs have almost no presence alongside the M1 in the form of large hubs. Fastned, for example, nothing from St Albans, where their hubs not close to the M1 junction to Leeds. Instavolt have nothing big at all along the M1, although they have numerous two unit sites just off various junctions. MFG, they've got a couple off the M1, but not that close and each is a reasonable diversion off your route. Raw Charging, coming on this podcast this season.

They have two hubs on the route, but neither of them is a quick diversion from M1. At Shell Recharge, there's one just off a road, just off a road, just off the M25 near the M1 junction. It's about a five-minute diversion and 2.6 kilometers or 1.5 miles. But other than that, there's nothing along the full length of the M1 with six or more devices at which you can charge. BP Pulse has nothing within easy reach of the M1. The closest they have is at Toten Park and Ride junction 25.

It's an easy diversion from the M1. I've used it in the past, but it will add another 10, 15 minutes to your journey to do that detour. Last time I went there, it had no facilities at all. No doubt I will have missed one or two locations. And there are of course, dozens of single or double unit sites within a few minutes of the various junctions. But for a long distance drive, I'm heading for a hub rather than small site where a charger might be occupied or even worse.

Iced. So what does this mean for me as an EV driver? I hear you cry. What does this mean for me as an EV driver? Well, I'm glad you asked. Comprehensive review of the state of charging across all four and a half thousand miles of the SRN is not possible in a single podcast. Nor would it be something I think I'd want to do. But by using the M1 as a proxy for this, we can see a couple of things that jump out. Now, firstly, the charging provision is increasing rapidly.

We know this because Zapmap published the figures for charger growth on a regular basis. There are a lot of chargers going into the ground. But we do also know from looking at the M1 that there's still a large amount of potential for additional chargers. There are still gaps in the motorway service areas. As we said earlier, there are several sites with no ultra rapid charging of any provision. And once you get off the motorway, there are still plenty of junctions where a nice hub would make sense for those not wanting to charge at an MSA.

But for now, I'm quite content to know that when I go and see my parents, I have a bigger choice now than I did eight years ago of large multi-unit dependable charging hubs at which I can choose to charge. Let's hope some of the other large CPOs start to look at the gaps and see if there are places in which they can add hubs. And I'm looking at you, Fastned So I hope you enjoyed listening to today's show. It was put together with the help of Jade Edwards and the Data Insights team at ZapMap.

Thank very much for your help. If you've reached this part of the podcast and are still listening, thank you. Why not let me know you've got to this point by messaging me at musingsv.beesky.social with the words, fancy stopping for a cuppa and a pee, hashtag if you know, know, nothing else. And thanks as always to my co-founder, Simon. You know, he thinks they should allow electric unicycles at MSAs. What do you think? Thanks for listening. Bye-bye.