Last updated on February 3rd, 2023 at 10:37 am
Related to street charging is public and municipal charging at venues where you might go for activities or entertainment. This is also often AC charging at 7kW, but if you’re stopping at a shopping mall, for example, a couple of hours can be a nice little boost that might even be enough for your full week’s travel, if you’re not a distance commuter. Some of these chargers are either very cheap or free as an incentive to shop.
You can find destination chargers in supermarket car parks – such as the Pod Point service available at many Tesco stores. Sports centre and municipal car parks are also gaining banks of chargers, too, operated by a variety of networks. But there are some caveats here. These kinds of chargers tend to be the least well maintained.
As noted above, for example, bp pulse has done poorly in the Zap-Map survey, but it should be considered to be two different networks under the same brand, or even multiple networks. On the one hand, the chargers at bp petrol stations are owned and fully managed by bp pulse directly, so tend to be more reliable. But the company has also bought a whole slew of other charging brands, such as Chargemaster (including Polar), D2N2 and Charge Your Car. While bp pulse runs these networks, and performs the maintenance, repairs must be instigated by the location owner – such as a local authority or leisure centre company. This extra level of bureaucracy often ends up with chargers sitting broken for months or even years on end.
Since the best time to charge a car is when you’re not using it anyway, though, if you can find a working charger at a place where you were going to spend a few hours doing something else, they make a lot of sense, even slower AC chargers. But always check the status on an app, either the one for the network or a multi-network one such as Zap-Map’s, and don’t rely on this for mission-critical charging on an important journey. See it more as a bonus. Also, bear in mind that some car parks also expect you to pay for parking along with power, so just going there to charge can be more expensive than a similar charger without premium parking attached.
Discussion about this post