Petrol Stations Car Charging Locations

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/07/petrol-stations-%f0%9f%86%9a-car-charging-locations/

Journalists love context-free numbers - things that sound large and scary, but without any helpful information to allow you to judge their significance.

Here's a good example from a BBC article about Electric Vehicle subsidies:

There are around 1.3 million electric cars on Britain's roads but currently only around 82,000 public charging points.

Bloody hell! That's rubbish! Bring down the government! Woke nonsense!

OK, let's take a moment to contextualise those number.

There are about 34 million cars on the road. About 1.3 million cars are pure electric. So, about 32,680,000 dinosaur-juice cars.

How many petrol pumps do you think there are in the UK?

Have a guess.

Back in 2021, the BBC reported on the decline in petrol stations:

If this prediction is correct it is a death sentence for many of the 8,380 petrol stations in the UK.

Wait…! So there are 0.06 public chargers per EV, but only 0.0002 petrol stations per fossil fuel car?!!?

Lots of EV chargers will have multiple charging heads - allowing two or more vehicles to be charged at once. Similarly, petrol stations often have multiple pumps.

Let's assume that every EV charger can only do one car at a time, and every fuel station has 10 pumps. That's still a hell of a lot more chargers per EV than pumps per petrol car.

Of course, the elephant in the room is charging time. Electric Vehicle take much longer to recharge than a petrol car takes to refuel. As a rough average, an EV takes 30 minutes to get to 80% full. That will depend on the speed of the charger and the capacity of the battery. It takes maybe 10% of that time to fill a petrol car from empty to full.

But petrol cars always need to be refilled in public. Most EVs are recharged in private. Sat on a driveway or plugged into a lamp-post overnight, they start the day full. Given the average journey length of under 10 miles, the typical EV will never need to use public charger!

There are around a million home EV chargers installed. Around 2/3rds of home have access to off-street parking which would allow a private charger to be installed. That just doesn't happen with petrol. You can't install a petrol pump at home.

All of those EVs will start the day with the capacity to take 20 average trips before needing to recharge. If any of those trips end at a supermarket, work car park, or anywhere else with a charger, they'll start their next journey full.

Suppose that you do decide to drive >200 miles in a single journey. You should be taking a 15 minute break every 2 hours - but let's say you go for 4 hours, taking your car from full to empty. At which point, you probably need a piss and want to stretch your legs. Plug in at a service station, go to the loo, have an overpriced coffee and disappointing sandwich, walk back to the car and - oh look - it's practically full.

Does the country need more public chargers? Probably, yes. Are chargers all concentrated in wealthy suburbs or evenly distributed? Who knows. What are the current occupancy levels of public chargers? Those would all be excellent questions to research and publish.

Presenting context-free numbers doesn't help people understand the scale of the problem.

Frequently Made Comments

Please don't bother replying with any of the following:

peOpLe sHoUlD jUsT UsE publiC trANsporT

I agree.

wHAt ABoUt bAtTERY sWappiNg

Until every car has an identical chassis and battery, it isn't going to happen.

i liVe IN amErica And ALWAys dRive 700 MILeS pER dAy up fRozen MoUNTainS

We're talking about the UK. Most people don't have regular journeys like that.

i likE THE LOud NoISE MY eNgIne MAkes

Everyone else on the street hates you