Keith Gooden
Welcome back to the Motorhome Matt Podcast. I’m Keith Gooden.
Matt Sims
And I’m Motorhome Matt.
Keith Gooden
He’s the expert, and I ask the stupid questions. Thanks for listening and watching. We’re up to over 100,000 downloads now, and we’re one of the most successful podcasts in the whole wide world.
Matt Sims
Well, the world of motorhomes.
Keith Gooden
The whole wide world, mate. Top 5% of downloads.
Matt Sims
Top 2%!
Keith Gooden
It’s not!
Matt Sims
Yeah, we are now. We are in the top 2% of podcasts globally in terms of performance and downloads. And in terms of our industry, well, we’re out there. We’re privileged.
Keith Gooden
He’s out there. It’s like flying a kite. He’s up above the clouds.
Matt Sims
On a string – a thin cord!
Keith Gooden
It’s all brought to you with www.thatleisureshop.com.
Sponsor the Motorhome Matt podcast
Keith Gooden
Let’s start off with the news, shall we? Sponsorship!
Matt Sims
Yeah, if you’re listening, and you would like to reach our audience – as Keith says, our audience is growing at a fantastic rate. If you’d like to reach them with your message from your brand, something that is relevant to us on the Motorhome Matt podcast, we’d love to hear from you. You can find out more at www.motorhomematt.co.uk/sponsor. It’s actually not very expensive.
The Eurotunnel has rebranded
Keith Gooden
You’ve got some hot news about Eurotunnel, should I say!
Matt Sims
Oh, it’s very exciting. They’ve rebranded.
Keith Gooden
LeShuttle, as it’s known now.
Matt Sims
Is that your best French? I’m going to read you something, right. So Eurotunnel have rebranded as LeShuttle.
Keith Gooden
They were always a shuttle.
Matt Sims
I think this is great. So they’ve got a new logo. And no doubt somebody somewhere charged them a lot of money for this. And this is their explanation of the new brand: “Elongated letterforms connect to show the user’s movement through the two tunnels in their journey. And the connections in the logo communicate the ease and efficiency with which LeShuttle operates, taking the user from A to B.”
Keith Gooden
There’s no BS like marketing BS. They don’t make anything and just talk a load of old…
Matt Sims
It’s a train in a tunnel.
Keith Gooden
It’s a train in a tunnel. What they’ve done is they’ve taken out the space between Le and Shuttle and they’ve made it LeShuttle.
Matt Sims
And joined it up. Very clever. We no longer get the Euro tunnel, we get LeShuttle. There you are. So if you’re heading to France this year, then send us a picture of you stood in front of the LeShuttle logo and make us laugh.
Keith Gooden
They can call it what they like and they can do as many colourful pictures as they possibly can, but I didn’t notice any change when I went on it a few months ago from the 10 years before which was when I last travelled.
Matt Sims
That’s because you had a bag on your head and you were in the boot.
Keith Gooden
And there were a lot of people with crossed legs because there weren’t any toilets to use, so go before you get on.
Matt Sims
No. Are there toilets on it now? Are they open again?
Keith Gooden
Well, I seem to recall toilets on there. Correct me if I’m wrong. I think they shut them during the pandemic. There were lot of people shuffling up and down and looking for toilets. Go before you get on. It’s only 35 minutes, the actual journey.
Matt Sims
Go in the terminal.
Keith Gooden
They’ve got plenty of toilets as well when you’re queuing up waiting to get on, because you drive onto the carriages. That’s the great thing.
Matt Sims
That’s the clever bit. It is a clever train in a tunnel, I have to say and it is fast.
Keith Gooden
C’est fantastique, as they say in France.
Matt Sims
Can we have the ‘Allo ‘Allo theme? What was the theme to ‘Allo ‘Allo?
Keith Gooden
Accordion, wasn’t it?
Matt Sims
That’d be good on the way there.
Keith Gooden
Don’t get your accordion out again. I’ve told you about that.
Matt’s top product from That Leisure Shop
Keith Gooden
Okay, then – let’s talk about www.thatleisureshop.com, shall we? I like the idea of this. Every week we should have Matt talking about his favourite product. What is it?
Matt Sims
It is a Bluetooth battery charger. I’m going to get Maddie to pass me one now. If you’re watching on YouTube, you can see it. I love these. These are back in stock. This time of year, when you get a car out or a caravan or motorhome out and the battery is flat, leisure battery or starter battery, these chargers – they’re £40-odd and they are really, really good. They’re from Maypole. This is an eight amp version. There is a four amp one as well.
The best bit about this it’s Bluetooth, so you can stand next to your caravan or your motorhome or your car and actually monitor on your iPhone what it’s doing. You can also buy a little interceptor which stays on the battery. It’s a Bluetooth transmitter that tells you what the battery’s doing. So if it’s going flat, you think, “It’s not going to start tomorrow, I need to go and plug it in and charge it. It’s really useful.”
Keith Gooden
Does it work with Android phones as well?
Matt Sims
Yeah. No, I’m an iPhone obsessive. I get it. But this eight amp one is currently £41.99. Normally, something like this is hundreds of pounds, and they are very, very good. I’ve got one permanently connected to a motorbike that I don’t ride. The battery would go flat. This keeps it in tip top order.
Keith Gooden
So what is it? It charges it?
Matt Sims
It is a smart charger, so it brings the battery back up if it’s gone flat and then trickles into it.
Keith Gooden
And you can monitor it on your phone?
Matt Sims
You can. It’s very clever. I think you can monitor up to 28 devices. Plug one into your ride on mower, your golf buggy, whatever other device you’ve got that needs a battery. I love them. I think they’re really clever.
Keith Gooden
Fantastic.
Matt Sims
And very cheap.
How common are broken ev chargers?
Keith Gooden
It is the Motorhome Matt podcast. I’m Keith Gooden.
Matt Sims
And I’m Motorhome Matt.
Keith Gooden
Okay, let’s get into the main bit of today’s podcast. We’re talking about the electric vehicle charging network or the lack of it at the moment. Now, it’s all very well if you’ve got a car and are having to plug in. We’re not doing it with motorhomes yet. So explain why we’re doing this on the podcast.
Matt Sims
Well, we’ve run this series of episodes around the whole world of EV and the change that’s coming. And if you rewind a few episodes, you’ll see several topics around this – big picture topics. Because that’s where we are at the moment. Electric motorhomes are, in reality, I think 10 years away.
But one of the big challenges that’s being thrown around at the moment is, how on earth are we going to recharge motorhomes or even cars towing a caravan on a campsite? Because they just don’t have the power. That’s very true.
And this is a transition that we’re on. So I thought it would be great to dive into this topic early doors, because I still think we’re 10 years away from having viable electric motorhomes, or alternatively powered motorhomes that are non-fossil fuel or even hybrid. And so I thought I’d unpack and take the lid off this little can of worms.
Keith Gooden
It’s not easy to find chargers. I’ve seen differing figures around all this. I’m not going to quote any for you at the moment. You’re going to hear some a little bit later on. Let’s hear Paul’s story. He was at the NEC show, wasn’t he? He was trying to charge his vehicle.
Matt Sims
Yeah, Paul drives an electric car. And Paul is actually the man who makes the orange bags that we give away on the Motorhome Matt stand. So if you’ve seen us at any of the NEC shows, thousands of you were coming in and grabbing a free orange bag with the Motorhome Matt podcast and That Leisure Shop branding on. And Paul is the man who makes them. You drive an electric car, and it needed some charge. So just tell me what happened.
Paul Hardy
Well, a total disaster. I went to charge the car, plugged it in, and then you’ve got to register an account, and then it will activate. It didn’t activate. So I thought, well, 31% left. Let’s go back to Bristol. I go down the M5, get to Strensham services – no chargers at all. 5% left in the car.
Matt Sims
So you were going from Birmingham back to Bristol and there were no charges at all at Strensham?
Paul Hardy
Absolutely nothing. I Googled it and it said there were some on the northbound, so I had to go down to the roundabout, back to the northbound with 1% left, charged the car, then went up the M5 and then back to Bristol.
Matt Sims
So how long did the trip take, then?
Paul Hardy
I got home at half past 11.
Matt Sims
At night?
Paul Hardy
Yeah, at night, and I left the show at about 5:30.
Matt Sims
It’s an hour and a half, two hours at most.
Paul Hardy
Yeah, it should be an hour and a half!
Matt Sims
So other than that, what’s your experience of driving around in your electric car?
Paul Hardy
Love it. Love it. Love it. Instant speed, no fuel bill. Obviously I charge it at work, so there’s no cost involved with that. But speed wise, comfort, servicing costs, running costs – can’t beat it.
Matt Sims
But there’s a big flaw, isn’t there?
Paul Hardy
Yeah, the charging. No two places are the same. I’ve got 10 apps on my phone just for different chargers for different services.
Matt Sims
What a nightmare. Would you buy another one?
Paul Hardy
Oh, yeah, definitely. That’s the future.
Matt Sims
Interesting comment, isn’t it, that he’s having a nightmare with charging, the basis for using an EV, yet he wouldn’t even hesitate to buy another one.
Keith Gooden
No. And this thing as well, “I can charge at work and that doesn’t cost me anything,” this idea that people can charge their cars for nothing – somebody’s got to pay for it.
Matt Sims
Well, his business is paying for it. That’s the reality. Paul installed a load of chargers in his office, so he and his staff get free charging.
Keith Gooden
Okay, then.
Are fuel station numbers decreasing?
Keith Gooden
It’s like this whole thing of pensioners driving 15 miles to go to a petrol station to save five pence on a litre of fuel and they don’t work out that they’re not making a saving. But if he’s driving around to find the charging point, this is a big problem. And like I always say, well, what’s wrong with just putting some chargers in the streets, off streetlights or some such thing?
Matt Sims
Yeah, that’s possible. I mean, streetlight cabling is very light, it’s very thin. That I’m sure will become the future. I think we’re even going to see pavement technology evolve to take cabling. They’ll have cable trunks buried in the pavements. But there are two sides to this, aren’t there? The EV world and the charging networks are growing at a heck of a rate.
I mean, there are more chargers around than there are fuel stations at the moment. In fact, we’ve got some statistics. I’ll give you them in a moment. But the reality is, lots of them are broken. In our local Tesco, I was there the other day, there are two chargers. Both were not working. Blank screens that someone had stuck a bit of paper on saying, “Not working.”
Keith Gooden
What goes wrong with them?
Matt Sims
Well, they’re constantly updating. They’ve either been vandalised, or there’s a software issue. There could be a hardware issue.
Keith Gooden
And everybody’s talking about the comparison between electric vehicles and petrol. You came up with a good little way of comparing them, didn’t you?
Matt Sims
Yeah, imagine two phones. So I’m iPhone obsessed, so I’m going to say iPhone, but Android too. So one option is a phone that the battery lasts possibly a full day on. You might have to charge it once or twice during the day and overnight, but you’ll charge it for next to nothing very conveniently at home. The other has a battery that will last a week. But you’re going to have to drive five or 10 miles and pay £50 to recharge it. Which would you go for?
Keith Gooden
The first one.
Matt Sims
Absolutely, right answer. Well done. Someone ring a bell. But you would – you’d go for the convenience, wouldn’t you? You’re charging more often, and this is the difference between adopting an EV car and a fossil fuel car, which we’re so used to driving. Once a week we fill up, we drive somewhere, pay £50 or £60 or these days £100, refuel the car and don’t think about it again for another week.
With an electric car, you’re charging at home every night, you’re arriving somewhere for a coffee, you plug in and get another 10 or 20 miles of recharge. That’s the difference. And this is something that Paul, who we’ve just heard from, has adopted, but his frustration comes when the chargers are broken. And this is an issue that’s really real.
Keith Gooden
So here’s some of that data we were talking about earlier – data from Zapmap which gives you charging locations.
Matt Sims
That’s right, EV charging all over the country.
Keith Gooden
22nd of May – there are 8,471 charging locations across the UK and they host a total of 13,613 charging devices. There are fewer than two at each place.
Matt Sims
Some are single points. So these are public charging locations, single chargers. Near us at the farm shop, two have just been installed. So that’s one location with two charging devices.
Keith Gooden
They then say in contrast, at the end of April, there were only 8,400 petrol stations in the UK, a figure which is continuing to decline. But what they don’t say is that there are between six and eight pumps in each station.
Matt Sims
That’s true. And of course, at a fuel pump, that’s more people in the fuel station, and they’re only there for five minutes at most unless they go off and do their shop. That’s you, isn’t it? Fill your fuel and then go and do your week’s shop. You annoy me. You see them come back to the car with four carrier bags… oh.
Keith Gooden
And then they take ages pulling away.
Matt Sims
Oh, nightmare.
Keith Gooden
What do people do?
Matt Sims
And stall it on the way out, too. What’s interesting is there are more charging locations than there are fuel stations. Okay, ignoring the point of how many actual chargers there are, because they could be scaled up. But interestingly, fuel stations are declining in number. I think there are 2% fewer than last year.
So fuel stations are closing and of course, the viability commercially of fuel is really low. The profit in fuel is tiny, which is why an increasing number of fuel stations have become supermarkets, hairdressers, coffee shops, all these facilities. Subway and Costa Coffee are dropping their little franchise businesses into all these fuel stations just because there’s no money in the fuel itself. That’s surely going to continue.
Keith Gooden
Well, we’ll see what happens. But one thing’s for certain – there are a lot of people with electric cars, and they want to charge them and it’s not so easy, particularly with some of the figures that are being given by manufacturers.
They’ll say that you can have a range of 300 miles but actually in practice, it doesn’t turn out to be that because you drive in a different way. Or as you’ve said in previous podcasts, it could be the middle of winter, and electricity doesn’t flow as efficiently when it’s cold.
Matt Sims
Yeah, that’s right. Of course, motorhomes are the absolute worst end of this stick to put it politely, because we want to drive a long way in our motorhome or campervan and we are heavy.
So we’re fully loaded with the family and a week’s worth of food and drink and all our clothes. So for an EV, that’s a nightmare. And this is something that is changing. It will change, but I think it’s 10 years away. But nonetheless, I’m keen that we still have a voice in the EV charging world, which is why we invited Simon in.
Hydra EVC: is the UK on track to install enough EV charging stations?
Matt Sims
So Simon Hastelow is head of marketing at Hydra EVC. They make the chargers. I actually met Simon 10 years ago. I think we were in Slovenia at a motorhome trade launch. It was an Adria motorhome trade launch and we were sat on the minibus together. He was editor of MMM and I think he was writing for What Motorhome at the time.
So he comes from our world, 10 years ago, from a journalistic point of view. So he understands the nuances of motorhoming and caravanning and now he’s in the EV charger world. And I wanted to just talk to him a little bit about the future and the journey that we’re on of implementing these EV chargers. Can you tell us a little bit more about Hydra and who they are and what their vision is?
Simon Hastelow
Hydra EVC is a fairly new company. It’s been around for about 18 months. Our parent company has been supplying electrical metering and electrical products for quite a number of years. We realised that a lot of the components we were supplying were being used in EV charge points for some of the multinational companies. And we thought, if we’re supplying to them, we could put them in our own products. It’s a rapidly growing business, as everyone seems to know.
And yes, about 18 months ago, we launched a range of EV charge points. We don’t supply to the general public, but we do supply to specialist installers. And we have some specialist companies that buy our equipment, everything from domestic right up to the rapid chargers that you see on forecourts and motorway services and things like that.
Matt Sims
And it’s important to note that you make the chargers. You don’t actually install them, you just make and supply them, don’t you? Other folk install them.
Simon Hastelow
That’s correct. Yes, we do have approved installers that we favour for some installations. But generally, we just supply the products. We’ve worked with a couple of companies who project manage the larger products, so if they put in in six, 10, 12 chargers in a location, we work closely with them. But mostly, we provide the equipment and the know-how to get it all installed.
Matt Sims
And as you say, Hydra is a fairly new company. And as we record this, it’s early summer 2023. There’s a lot of fear of the unknown with electric charge points.
Simon Hastelow
Yes.
Matt Sims
Where are we with the number of chargers in the UK? And are we on track?
Simon Hastelow
It depends on whose figures you rely on and whose figures you trust. I think we’ve recently surpassed 1 million electric vehicles on the road in the UK alone. The number of charge points is growing exponentially. I know from the number we supply that it is continuing to increase. They may not be hugely visible because a lot of the charge points are not like putting up a big petrol forecourt.
They don’t look any more intrusive than a parking metre or something like that in workplaces and hotels and leisure centres, things like that. So people might not know they’re there. But they are increasing quite rapidly. It’s still going to be a challenge to hit the deadlines that the government has set for us, the 2030 cutoff and the number of charge points that experts in the industry think we need. But it is happening. It’s quite encouraging, the take up.
Matt Sims
So you say it’s going to be challenging, but are we on track?
Simon Hastelow
Just about! Again, per the proviso, it depends on whose statistics you use.
Issues with charging electric motorhomes
Matt Sims
The challenges around charging a vehicle – there’s a plethora of them, and we could talk for hours. We’re not going to do that today. We might get you back in to talk about some other topics around this particular challenge that we’re facing, but specifically, I want to focus on the reality of charging an electric motorhome or even an electric car towing a caravan. Now, electric motorhomes we know are a decade away.
We’ve been unpacking this on previous episodes. They’re coming, but we’re not ready. Cars that can tow caravans that are pure EV or even plug in hybrid exist. They’re real. But charge points is just not being designed for someone towing a caravan or even someone driving a motorhome, are they? What’s happening about that, and what can we do to influence the change that I see is necessary to embrace us as motorhomers or caravan drivers?
Simon Hastelow
I think one of the issues has been that up until this point companies have been putting charge points in a car park environment. So in your supermarket carpark, it’s quite easy to put a charge point in so people can charge while they’re shopping. That’s no good if you’re towing a caravan or you’re driving an eight and a half metre motorhome. You need a bigger space.
There are companies like Gridserve, for instance, that are building bigger forecourts that are designed to be drive in and drive out like a petrol forecourt would be. And they would have more space to manoeuvre a bigger vehicle.
You might take up two spaces, so you’re going to have to wait until there are two spaces available because physically just your motorhome is going to be bigger. But that’s not unlike trying to get into a normal petrol forecourt in the way you are now. There’s a Gridserve location…
Matt Sims
Let me just interrupt, if I may. On a fuel station, that’s a few minutes of inconvenience.
Simon Hastelow
That’s right.
Matt Sims
Charging a car, you’re sat there for an hour. That’s a lot of frustration for the person behind you who’s waiting to charge because there’s a caravan in the way.
Simon Hastelow
I think that’s always going to be an issue, and I think EV charging will require a general change in behaviour for the entire population. At the moment now, we go and fill up with petrol or diesel once a week or once a fortnight and then you don’t have to think about it again for another couple of weeks. We will get to a point where, as I think you mentioned on a previous podcast, you plug in your phone as soon as you see a plug point.
So you’re not thinking about, “I need to fully charge it,” and then not do it again until tomorrow. If there’s a cable, you’ll plug it in. EV use will be the same. You’ll just plug it in for 20 minutes when you go shopping, plug it in while you’re at work, or if you’re out at the cinema at night, you’ll plug it in again for another couple of hours.
And we’ll just be constantly trickle charging, topping up as we go. So you might need an hour to get from 20% battery up to 80% battery on a Sprinter sized van or something like that. But if you stop two or three times on a journey, you might only stop for 20 or 30 minutes. That’s enough to go to the toilet, get a cup of tea and things like that. And then you go again.
On some of the apps that you can download for finding charge points, you can specify how many times you want to stop on a journey or how long you’re prepared to stop, and it will work out a route for you so you only have to stop 20 or 30 minutes at each one. So it’s not that you’d need to fully charge before you can move on. You just stopped more regularly. That’s what we’re all going to have to do, unfortunately.
Matt Sims
It’s a big behaviour change.
Simon Hastelow
Oh yeah, it’s going to be.
How will campsites get power for EV charging stations?
Matt Sims
One of the big concerns – and we get lots of questions about this and I’ve mentioned it before – is about the capability of the Grid. There’s just not enough power in the Grid. Now, we’ve had interviews with people and conversations with people, so I know that’s not true. That’s a pub myth. What about getting that power to campsites so your charging systems can work? What are the challenges there?
Simon Hastelow
Well, I think you’re correct about the National Grid. The National Grid themselves gave a figure that in 2002, the National Grid was providing 16% more power than it does today. And if we converted every vehicle on the road to an electric vehicle, it would only push the draw on National Grid up by 10%. So we wouldn’t even be going back to what the National Grid was capable of 20 years ago.
There is the scope within the National Grid, but that’s on the whole. That’s on a UK level. It’s on the local level that it becomes problematic, because you might have a campsite or a destination that’s a little bit out of the way. And the cable feeding that campsite just might not be up to it. It might be enough to provide a dozen electric hookups and things like that.
But once you start putting in even a seven kilowatt charger, which is kind of the minimum for a domestic charger – on a seven kilowatt you’d plug your car in overnight. So it will take between five and eight hours to charge your car. Even on a seven kilowatt one, a campsite might not be able to have 10 or 20 of those plugged in because most of them are on 16 amp supplies which are limited to three and a half kilowatt. Sorry, it’s a lot of maths.
Matt Sims
Yeah, numbers!
Simon Hastelow
So the destinations and the campsites are faced with upgrading their power supply. And some have been frightened off by their local power grid company quoting £40,000, £50,000 or 60,000.
Matt Sims
I was talking to someone who was telling me exactly this. Someone had a wedding venue and they wanted to build accommodation on it. So they wanted to put I think half a dozen static homes on this site so they could accommodate guests, and they had to run cabling so they could be powered. This wasn’t EV charging, this was just power to the static caravans. £45,000 later, they had a trench and a cable run.
Whilst this was going on, the spec of those statics was upgraded. And they started including underfloor heating and extra lighting and so on. The cable was no longer strong enough. So after a second £45,000, the trench was dug again and another cable run. They’re £90,000 in to get these static homes working. The return on that investment has suddenly doubled.
Now, as a wedding venue, they could probably leverage that and scale to accommodate that. But if you’re a campsite charging £15 or £30 a night, they’re going to have to start charging £100 or £200 a night for us to go there. I mean, it’s just not going to happen, is it?
Simon Hastelow
It’s a long-term financial commitment that the site owners are faced with. One of the good things that’s only recently come about in April is that Ofgem have capped the fees that the National Grid or each individually… the National Grid is split into different companies around the country.
They’ve capped the costs that they can charge people for upgrading their power supply. It’s not just for EV charging, but it’s to cope with other power usage as well. So now that has been capped at £1,720 pounds per kPa.
So if people have been charged or quoted £50,000, £60,000 or £70,000 to put a substation in, to facilitate even just putting a hookup in, nevermind the EV charge points, the cost that has now been capped by Ofgem. So if people have had quotes in the past, it’s worth them getting it re-quoted. So that £50,000 might be down to now £12,000 or £15,000.
Matt Sims
And that’s been one of the challenges for you as a business. In your first 18 months, as you were were telling me earlier, you put proposals out there for millions of pounds. And they fall over as soon as the venue, the host, discovers the cost just to run the power in order to buy your charger.
Simon Hastelow
Definitely. We can supply a public charge point with contactless payment and dual output so it can do two cars or two vehicles at once. The cost of that might be £2,000 to £3,000 pounds, depending on what it is. But if the landlord or the person having it installed has got to pay £30,000, £40,000 or £50,000 just to upgrade their supply, it’s a no go.
Matt Sims
It’s just too expensive.
Simon Hastelow
Yeah, the charge point itself is the cheap part. It’s just getting that power into it. The Grid can cope, but it’s just delivering it from the backbone of the National Grid into where it’s required.
Charging station apps
Matt Sims
There are a lot of challenges, aren’t there? We were talking earlier about payment. And you mentioned apps you can use that will plan your route. But interestingly, the government is intervening on this, on how the payment of charging is working. Can you tell me a bit more?
Simon Hastelow
What has happened up until now… a number of the bigger companies like BP and some of the other well known brands, they’ve got into EV charging and they like to have people’s details. So they have facilitated you using their charge points by the use of an app, just like you use a reward card if you go to Sainsbury’s or something like that. But the downside of that is you might have five or six different suppliers.
So you need five or six different apps. And that’s literally just to switch the charge point on to charge your car. The government has realised this is frustrating the public. What they want them to have to do is to make it so, just like when you go to petrol station, you can just pay with your debit card or you pay on your phone with Apple Pay or Google Pay and things like that. So there is legislation on the way. And we’ve also already seen an uptake just in our business.
Almost all the public charge points we now supply have a contactless payment terminal. You can still run it from an app if you want to. But people don’t want to be fidgeting around with their phones. They just want to plug in, tap and go. We need to make it as trouble free and as hassle free for the end user as we can.
Matt Sims
Parking your car these days, I mean, it’s sod’s law, isn’t it? You just park in that car park which has the app you don’t have. So you spend 10 minutes standing there trying to download the app just so you can pay to park.
I have to say it’s been tempting for me just to pay the fine. It takes ages and it’s complicated getting your name and address set up and then you’ve got to enter the car details. It’s an absolute headache. So I don’t drive an EV, but I can imagine that must be really frustrating and a high barrier for anyone looking to adopt an EV. When is this government intervention happening?
Simon Hastelow
They’ve not announced that it’s going to be mandatory yet. But they have said it will be at some point. And it is being very strongly encouraged at this point that it needs to be made more convenient for the end user. I think what they’re hinting at is if we as the EV industry don’t make it more convenient, then the legislation will.
Matt Sims
it surely will happen. You as an industry will make it as easy as possible, otherwise people won’t buy your product.
Simon Hastelow
Oh, yes. The best thing for us is that people use our chargers and they use forecourts that we’ve got our charges in. So we just want to make it as easy as possible.
What are the challenges of installing EV chargers?
Matt Sims
Simon, can you tell me a little bit more about the challenges that you are facing as Hydra EVC? What challenges do you have around planning? Is there resistance from local councils to hosting a charge point or is it dead easy?
Simon Hastelow
There are some restrictions. It has become easier. There are no specifics for putting an EV charge point into a car park, for instance, or a shopping carpark. There’s nothing that specifically covers that that isn’t part of normal planning. But there are some simple rules for accessibility. The charge point has to be between 1.2 and 1.4 metres off the ground so people can stand up or sit from a wheelchair and lift it off.
But as far as that goes, there are not many restrictions, as it were, other than your normal planning process. And as you know, any business owner will know the planning process is problematic at times. So if you do need to do more groundworks to get power in or to upgrade things, sometimes it can be a little frustrating. We’re hardly ever faced with a problem that can’t be overcome, but sometimes it lengthens the project.
Some projects are very easy and can be started and completed within a month. We’ve got some which we started talking to customers middle of last year for and now we’re in the middle of this year. And we’re still talking. We’re still overcoming little details here and there just to get it all completed.
Who can install an electric vehicle charger?
Matt Sims
And for someone listening to this who has a small business or a venue which could host EV charging… so we here as a small business have discussed it. We’re right on the edge of the M5 here, and we have a shop. So we have a place that someone could come and shop for 45 minutes where their car is charging.
And we’ve discussed putting charge points here. It would be convenient in terms of our location. Is it as simple as we just ring you up and say, “Can we order some charge points? We’ve got the power.” Is it straightforward?
Simon Hastelow
It can be as straightforward as that, as long as you’ve got the necessary power to site. It’s just a matter of finding a local installation specialist in your area. They will obviously need to do a site survey, but they can hook them up fairly quickly. It’s simplifying it a little bit, but charge points are essentially an external power point.
They’ve got a lot of technology built into them for the communications and payment process and that, but it’s just an external electrical socket. So they’re going to need to run a cable back to the main consumer unit but apart from that… because they’ve all got communications built in all the configuration can be done online, from the office or from our office. I mentioned earlier the grant process that the government is doing.
They are promoting grants for charge points for public use. So say if you put three charge points in, the government will give you… depending on whether you want them just for your customers or for public use, there are different tiers. The government never makes these things easy. But they will subsidise the cost of that. It can be as much as £750 per charge point.
There are other schemes for which they will also cover some of the installation cost as well. I think it’s capped at around £15,000 or £16,000, depending on your installation and your use. So if you wanted to put some charge points in for public use, the government that are there to help. They don’t often shout about these things, but there is grant money there.
So it’s worth speaking to your charge points supplier or your local electrician if they are OZEV registered. That’s the government acronym, the Office for Zero Emission Vehicles. If they’re OZEV registered, then they should know about which grants are available to you. So if they quote £10,000, you might be able to get a third or half of that back from the government depending on your installation.
Matt Sims
So just going back to the point I made earlier about charge points being appropriate for leisure vehicle users – having the length to park in your motorhome or the ability to park up and charge your car that’s towing a caravan, in fact, any vehicle to be honest, what can we do as an industry to make sure that we’re heard by your industry, and that this challenge or perceived challenge, certainly by me and I know many of our listeners is acknowledged? What can we do?
Simon Hastelow
I think you’ve just got to be very, very vocal. One of the issues that we’ve faced… say a hotel, for instance, are thinking of putting five or six charge points in. There’s a cost involved and then they say, oh, there’s just not the demand for it. There’s not the demand for it because people haven’t asked for it.
So the more you ask for it, the more you say to campsite owners or recharge stations, “We need this size parking bay, we need the facility to be able to drive a caravan in,” or an eight and a half metre motorhome or whatever… you’ve just got to be vocal. And the more it gets recognised that that is an issue, the more they will respond to it.
At the moment towing caravans hasn’t really been addressed because a lot of EVs have a very low towing weight. So some of them might be limited to 750 kilogrammes. There ar enot many decent caravans like that.
Matt Sims
They do exist.
Simon Hastelow
It is coming up. A lot of the EVS now are being designed with much better towing weights, so you will be able to get 1,200 or 1,500 kilogramme caravans. So the more that people are buying EVs to tow the larger caravans, the more demand there will be. But they’ve also got to start shouting about saying, “We need this charging facility.”
Matt Sims
Well, there’s been no shouting today. But hopefully, we’ve been able to raise our little flag to you as someone within that EV charging space. And I’m very grateful to you for coming down. I know it’s been a long trip today. And you braved the M25 and the whole length, pretty much, of the M4!.
So, Simon, thanks so much for coming in. And I’m sure it’s been interesting for our listeners. It’s a topic that fascinates me. There’s so much change coming up. I keep saying I think it’s an exciting time to be alive.
I think we’re going to see a lot of change to our behaviour and to the habits that we’ve spent 100 years building, and they’re going to change very quickly, aren’t they? Yeah, I hope we see a lot more Hydra EVC chargers coming over the coming years. Thank you again for coming in.
Simon Hastelow
Thank you for inviting me. It’s been a pleasure.
Matt Sims
There we are. Thanks, Simon. That was great. It was really interesting to get his little view of the world from his electric charging point of view.
Keith Gooden
So that’s just some of the background of what’s happening in the industry and how maybe it will feed through to motorhoming, caravanning and camping. People say that motorhomes are at the back of the queue when it comes to EV, but there’s a positive side to that, isn’t there? It’s that all the research and development would have been done for other sectors such as delivery vans and heavy goods vehicles. And we’re going to have our pick of the best technology when it rolls in.
Matt Sims
We will. I’m not so sure we’re at the back of the queue, but I think we’re just a long way down the line. We’re a niche within a niche. So if you take the delivery van sector, the commercial van, that’s what our motorhomes are built on. And the niche within that niche is, of course, the motorhome itself.
So yeah, we will have the benefit, I think of 10 years of research and development and technology advances. And by the time it gets to building a motorhome, I think that we’ll see new technologies some of which we haven’t even begun to imagine yet.
Keith Gooden
Haven’t dreamed of. So if you’ve got any questions on this and you want to ask us, you can hit the ask Matt button. How do they do that?
Matt Sims
Just to the website, www.motorhomematt.co.uk/askmatt. Hit the orange button. Record your question. Please tell us where you are. And if you’d rather not record your question, you can submit it on a form. We love getting them.
And it’s great to be able to bring them into the podcast. We do try and answer all of them – if not in the podcast, then we try and respond directly to your email. You can also send us a message on Facebook, Instagram, and now TikTok too.
Keith Gooden
TikTokToo?
Matt Sims
Yes, it’s very like TikTok! Yeah, go and check us out on YouTube as well. You’ll find loads of content there.
Keith Gooden
So we’ll repeat that for asking the questions. We want to know who you are and where you’re from. Don’t worry if you um and ah or make a mistake. I’ll edit all that out. You’re gonna sound fantastic. I mean, if I can do for Matt, I can do it for you.
Audience Q&A
Graeme: “When does a van become a motorhome?”
Keith Gooden
It’s the Motorhome Matt podcast. I’m Keith Gooden.
Matt Sims
And I’m Motorhome Matt.
Keith Gooden
This is my favourite part of the whole podcast brought to you with www.thatleisureshop.com – it’s the audience Q&A. And Graham Hanson has got in contact, Matt, from Newcastle-upon-Tyne. “Hello, guys. A question regarding when a van is not a motorhome.”
“At what point does a van become a campervan? If I put a double mattress with a sleeping bag and a couple of pillows in the back with a portable stove and a basic toilet facility and a cool box for food, does that class me as a motorhomer? If it doesn’t, does that stop me from staying at paid campsites?” That’s where we’re getting to. “Great show and podcast,” he says.
Matt Sims
Thanks, Graham. It’s a good question. So some campsites will require that you are an approved, traditionally built motorhome or campervan. And they’re not a fan of, as you describe, a van with a mattress and a chimney in it.
I don’t know why. It’s not traditional, I suppose. I guess there’s a risk of fire or explosion from gas if it’s not a professional setup, but I would definitely check with the campsite you want to go to what their requirement is. Some campsites will be very prescriptive about the way you park, so they want your habitation door – the back door – pointing all the same way.
A European built motorhome has the habitation on the driver’s side. So they would want you to drive nose in, whereas the UK built ones will be reversing. It means the habitation doors are opening out onto a wall of the neighbouring motorhome.
So it’s definitely worth checking with a campsite if you’ve built this van whether you’re going to be welcome. If it looks like a campervan, you’ve got graphics on the outside and it looks like a leisure vehicle, I don’t see why you would have a problem.
Keith Gooden
There you are Graham. I hope you got something from that answer from Matt. He’s the expert, remember.
Richard: “Cheers for the portable solar panel solution!”
Keith Gooden
Richard Jones is from Bristol.
Richard Jones
Our solar system was dying so I replaced the roof panel. I’m still thinking about when the sun is low and the motorhome is not in the perfect position. At the NEC this February, I bumped into Motorhome Matt who listened to my concern. Matt suggested and supplied the solar panel in a suitcase. Armed with the new kit, we went to the south of France for a month.
I didn’t use electric hookup once and the new system worked a dream. To give it a big test we used our air fryer microwave and kettle at lunchtime midday. Recovery astonishingly was half an hour. Our 200 watt roof panel best delivery was 185 watts at midday.
When the sun was low and the motorhome was not in the perfect position, it was 30 to 50 watts if lucky. That’s when the portable 100 watt panel came into its own. More freedom for us. It was amazing. Cheers, Matt!
Keith Gooden
Cheers, Richard, thanks very much for your question. He’s a fan of solar power.
Matt Sims
Well, do you know what comes with solar? A lot of maths. Have you noticed that? You’re one of those people with an app on your phone. You’ve got solar panels on your roof. You’re obsessed,
Keith Gooden
I’m not obsessed, but I’ve got 16 solar panels and can generate 4k.
Matt Sims
You’re obsessed.
Keith Gooden
Which is the best is the most anybody in a private home can generate, 4,000 watts. We’re recording this now in mid-June. So in the last two months, we’ve been completely, with a battery, self-sufficient in electricity because obviously the days are longer and the nights are shorter.
And so the sun comes up and starts powering the house and charging the battery before the battery has expired. Saying that, in winter it’s different. We use a lot more electricity from the Grid because there’s less daylight around. But I am a big fan of solar power. It’s amazing the amount of energy that the sun provides which you can tap into. So Richard’s a fan. I’m a fan too.
Matt Sims
He is a fan. And Richard’s challenge was moving the motorhome with the solar panel fixed on the roof. It’s not always feasible to get a charge from the sun. So I said, “Well, have you considered a portable solar panel?” We sell them in the shop, and he bought one of our Photonic ones.
I’ve done a lot of research into this. I think these are brilliant. They’re very efficient. They have an MPPT controller in them. I won’t bore you with what that is, but it basically stores the electricity and implements it into the battery when the sun is no longer shining on the panel, put very simply. And Richard loves it.
And he was getting more out of this 100 watt panel, which is portable. He could position it exactly in the right place, meaning it was performing better than the big panel on his motorhome roof.
But what I love about solar, when you start getting into this, is you start realising how much power you’re consuming. And that is a good thing. My kids all do it. And they’re the same with phone data as well. They know exactly how much data they’re using. They know exactly how much power they’re using. And that has to be a good thing.
Keith Gooden
Yeah, a laptop will consume 650 watts without even blinking. You put the electric kettle on, 2,000 Watts is suddenly being dropped – yes for a short time, but that’s what you’re using. The dishwasher, 2,500 watts, the tumble dryer, 2,500 or 3,500 watts. And you do realise how much you’re consuming and you actually unconsciously change the way you live.
Matt Sims
We change behaviour. We’ve been talking about this a lot, haven’t we, over these past few episodes. I mean, even making a cup of tea, don’t fill the kettle. You don’t need to. It’s only one cup. Just put enough in for one and a half cups. Some is going to evaporate when it boils. Put some water in it -enough for one cup.
Keith Gooden
And the solar panels that you supply to people, can you gang them up together to get a larger array?
Matt Sims
Yeah, you could do, but I don’t think you need to. I mean, as Richard said, his panel recharged the battery in half an hour. One was enough in that scenario. Okay, it was in Spain. He was slightly closer to the sun and it was out. So you might have a challenge here at home in Britain, where it can be very cloudy. But right now, today it’s beautiful, clear blue sky. They would work a treat.
Keith Gooden
Yeah. And it’s photovoltaic, remember, so even if there’s heavy cloud, it’s still going to be generating… well, I generate 350 watts from a 4k array on the dullest days. On a day like today where it’s sunny, I’m feeding back into the National Grid.
Matt Sims
Yeah, you’re selling it. Yeah. That’s a whole new kind of mentality, isn’t it, tell the electric back to the National Grid.
Keith Gooden
And we’ve been talking about EV charging. I thought about putting a charger on my drive. We don’t have electric cars, but putting a charger on it and maybe charging people to come along and plug in. The trouble is, when it’s a dull day, it’s going to cost me money to do that. And I just want to tell people, the charger’s available when the weather is good. And there’s no way for me to do that. So if you come across an app…
Matt Sims
There is an app.
Keith Gooden
Is there?
Matt Sims
There is, and there’s a whole a company doing exactly this, where they’re asking you to sign up and tell them about your charger and they will sell that space.
Keith Gooden
Brilliant. Fantastic. I’ll be on that one. Richard from Bristol, thanks so much.
Get in touch with Matt and Keith
Keith Gooden
Now, how do people ask their questions again, Matt?
Matt Sims
You can go to our website, www.motorhomematt.co.uk/askmatt. Hit the orange button and record your question. And please tell us where you are. Or you can just complete the form and submit it to us and we will do our best to answer the question either in the podcast or come back directly to you. You can also message us via Facebook, Instagram, and Tiktok.
Keith Gooden
And share with a friend as well.
Matt Sims
We would love you to do that. Yeah, would you help us grow the podcast audience and share it with someone who you think might enjoy it or appreciate some of the content? And if you’re listening on Apple or Spotify, if you could leave us a five star review, we would be ever so grateful and it helps spread the word of the podcast and does something to an algorithm.
