We’ve been named one of the top public EV charging networks

We’re on a mission to make smart, easy to use chargepoints available everywhere you park. As such, we’re pleased to see the Pod Point Network come out so favourably in the ZapMap survey of users and wanted to take this opportunity to let you know what we’ve been focusing on to create the best charging network we can.

We’ve been working hard on three key areas:

1. Getting more and more Pod Points available in places where more and more people are making use of them

There’s no doubt we need to grow the UK’s charging infrastructure. The scale of the challenge to provide all the UK’s charging infrastructure in homes, workplaces, destinations and en route locations is both hugely exciting and daunting.

We’ve had a good year getting units out into the wild and we are hopeful the things we are working on will see even greater increases in the public network.

2. Working on chargepoint reliability to ensure availability

A chargepoint is only useful if it is available, a chargepoint is only available if it is reliable. As such, a dedicated Network Assurance team has been formed at Pod Point, equipped with new tools to target our unit availability and we are seeing this investment bear fruit. Our Network Assurance team are now able to spot and analyse any issues proactively and directly trigger a site visit if needed, often before their customer spots anything is wrong.

For example, over the past 3 months the team have been focusing their efforts on a select group of 400 highly utilised units and have driven communications uptime from 94% to 98.34%; while unit errors (excluding loss of power/communications events) now run nationwide at <1% of chargers.

3. Working to make our chargepoints easy to use for drivers

We’re aware that there is some dissatisfaction with how difficult it is to start a charge on a lot of public chargepoints and, while we are rather powerless to directly change what the rest of the industry does, we are determined that we make it work for our drivers.

We’re proud of our innovative way of starting a charge, i.e. just plug-in, your car starts charging, you have 15 minutes to confirm the charge so that it continues (long enough to get hold of the app, or go to the web address, or call), but in an absolute emergency you get those 15 minutes free from our hosts. There’s even a fail safe contingency for loss of connection with our server.

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