Inside Britain’s biggest EV hub…where electric car drivers say charging is a nightmare and costs MORE than fuel

Britain’s enormous new super hub for charging electric vehicles (EVs) has a major shock in store for eco-punters – it’s more expensive than fuel.

Drivers claim that using the nation’s largest ‘Gigahub’ is much more costly than charging at home and paying can be a nightmare. 

The site at Birmingham’s National Exhibition Centre (NEC) has 180 charging points operated by BP Pulse UK, a subsidiary of the oil giant.

At any given time most of them are standing idle, but increasing numbers of motorists are finding their way to the hub that was proudly opened by Chancellor Jeremy Hunt earlier this year.

Sitting next to a Starbucks Drive Thru on a car park at the NEC, a two-minute detour off the M42, the hub leaves some drivers grappling with its system and struggling to pay.

Customs broker Lorenzo Santana, 52, and originally from the USA, was marking Thanksgiving with a trip to the Motorcycle Show at the NEC along with his friend Greg Hall, 51.

But before anything else they needed to make sure they had enough charge for the return leg of their 190-mile round trip.

To do this they parked up at the charging hub only to be flummoxed by the payment method.

‘It’s not so simple as tapping your bank card on the side of a machine,’ said Lorenzo. ‘To use it, you have to either have a RFID card or an app – and there seems to be a glitch with the app.’

RFID – or Radio Frequency Identification – cards carry unique data to identify you and facilitate payment.

After 10 minutes wrestling with the system, Lorenzo then spent another ten minutes on the phone to BP Pulse before seeing a charge go into his car.

‘I found out about this place online and it seemed logical to leave the car on charge while we went to the show.

‘It is much more expensive than charging it at home. At home, if I charge at night, I can get it for 9p per kilowatt hour. This is charging me 69p.

‘It works out as expensive as fuel.’

While Mr Santana is correct about the higher cost of using the gigahub, like higher fuel costs at motorway services compared to local filling stations, operators of these large charging sites are putting a premium on the cost of plugging in.

The gigahub, which is the largest in the UK, is home to 150 seven-kilowatt AC charging bays and 30 more super-fast, 300kW DC charging bays – enabling 180 vehicles to to charge simultaneously.

Salesman Jamie Stevens, 44, was eating his sandwiches as his car charged at one of the super-fast charging stations, which can charge the average vehicle in roughly 15 minutes.

‘I work around the corner,’ he said, ‘and come here a couple of times a week to top myself up because I don’t have a charging point at home.

‘They say that 25p per kilowatt hour is the cut off point – if you are paying more than that then fuel would be cheaper, and this is 75p.

‘It does not make sense but the company I work for has an electric vehicle policy on company cars so I don’t have a choice.’

However, engineer Noor Choudhury, 43, said: ‘What you pay depends on whether your car is part of a fleet or whether you are signed up with BP’s workplace scheme.

‘There are offers everywhere if you know where to look. 

‘Some of the off peak tariffs offered by the energy companies are really cheap. 

‘Octopus have a good one and I am told British Gas are going to be offering free charging.’

He admitted: ‘The biggest downsides with electric cars now is the insurance. Little accidents can result in write-offs.

‘Someone went into the rear of my friend’s car and they didn’t want to repair it in case it had affected the battery.’

A 32-year-old pilot, who did not want to be named, said he found the charging hub very handy when he was flying out of Birmingham Airport before driving home to Harrogate.

‘If you have a BMW or a Mercedes then you get a discount card so I pay 40p per kilowatt hour.

‘The car tells me where to go to charge and how much I will pay.

‘This is very convenient because you know there will be space. Soon other services will get infrastructure like this.’

Meanwhile, sales director Darren Holland, 52, was on a long round trip from his home in Cheshire to Braintree in Essex and the back to Manchester.

He said: ‘I was on 30 per cent so my sat nav brought me here to charge up.

‘I have had an electric car for three years now and have done 60,000 miles in it. You have to think through each journey because the range can be as little as 220-240 miles in winter.

‘The cost of this charge will be £35 and it will last for about 180 miles.’

Not everyone finds the hub difficult – tourists Julian Wall, 59, and his wife Tessa Lock, 53, who are on holiday from Australia with their two teenage sons, are fans of the ‘amazing hub.

Tessa said: ‘We have had electric vehicles at home for three years now and I would not drive anything else.

‘We live on a solar farm at home where we grow blueberries and have cattle and it means we have had free motoring for the last three years.

‘This is an amazing hub. We don’t have anything like this in Australia where we are a bit behind.

‘We’re actually getting lots of old European cars arrive because we have lower emission standards and EVs are only about four per cent of the total.

‘I like the zero emissions factor and the lack of gears.’

Julian added: ‘Everything is very expensive for us over here. Petrol is twice the price it is in Australia and the price per kilowatt here is almost four times what it is at home.’

Philippa Powell, 49, had brought her daughter Martha, 15, to a ballet audition in Birmingham from their home in East Sussex.

She said: ‘I am in my husband’s company car and he told us to come here to recharge before heading home.

‘I am told it will take 30 minutes to charge and it will cost £35 which will be enough to get us home.

‘I like the fact that the car is eco and is not polluting. I feel less guilty driving around and I like that it sounds like a spaceship.

‘The only downside is how easy it is to speed. I got my first ever speeding ticket recently because you just don’t realise how fast you are going because it is so smooth.’

Andrew Cole, a director at the NEC Group, said the conference centre’s campus, which has seven million visitors a year, could now charge about 1,000 electric cars in every 12-hour day.

The gigahub was developed between the NEC, independent charging infrastructure company EV Network and BP Pulse, which operates the site.

Akira Kirton, the vice-president of BP Pulse UK – owned by oil giant BP – said the company would invest up to £1bn to accelerate the development of the UK’s EV infrastructure by delivering ‘the right charging speeds, in the right locations’.

He vowed: ‘We plan to roll out hundreds of hubs this decade in places EV drivers needs them – urban areas, on trunk roads and motorways and at destinations such as restaurants, retail parks and hotels.

Reza Shaybani, co-founder and chief executive of EV Network, warned that the UK’s existing grid infrastructure was ‘a key bottleneck in developing future robust infrastructure for fast charging’.

A BP spokesperson told MailOnline: ‘At BP pulse we are focused on providing fast, reliable and convenient charging to EV drivers on-the-go. 

‘We believe we provide value for money given our fast and convenient locations and we aim to price competitively.’