So the other shoe dropped:
https://www.gridserve.com/2021/06/08/ec ... gridserve/
Gridserve (backed by Hitachi) took a 25% stake in Ecotricity's "Electric Highway" back in March, at the time I opined on SpeakEV that this was likely phase one of a stealth full buyout strategy and an exit plan for Ecotricity's Dale Vince who has clearly not had the money or interest to sort out the Electric Highway in the last few years. I didn't expect the other shoe to drop in only 3 months though!
This is big news because Electric Highway has a semi-monopoly of motorway services in England and is continually ranked last in charging network survey's for reliability, usability, number of chargers at a site etc. In short they are so bad that they've been seriously holding back adoption of EV's in parts of England due to the (somewhat justified) perception that charging EV's on long journey's is too difficult and unreliable - which in the case of the Electric Highway has been true!
Gridserve seem really on the ball and enthusiastic with financial backing from Hitachi, and have already replaced many of the Electric Highway chargers in the 3 month period where they owned 25% of the company. So things are about to get a lot better for long distance EV driving in England over the next year that it's likely to take them to renovate the entire Electric Highway network.
Meanwhile in Scotland we're one month away from Swarco (based in Dundee) taking over backend services and helpdesk for the ChargePlace Scotland network from CYC, (Charge Your Car) also Transport Scotland is apparently now pushing a lot harder for improved KPI's for reliability and performance on the CPS network and has actually installed quite a lot of new chargers in the last year.
So while parts of the CPS network are still a bit ropey, I think it is also going to improve a lot over the next year. Things are finally looking up a bit on the public charging front.
