It has been almost a decade since the ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars was announced. While details of what this will entail have changed more often than Transport Secretaries, as things currently stand, from 2030 the only type of new car you will be able to buy will be zero emission; given current technologies, that means electric – and possibly certain hybrids.
Clearly, this will have significant knock-on effects for the forecourt industry, as while nobody is suggesting the 38 million or so cars and vans with internal combustion engines (be they hybrid or conventional) will disappear from our roads overnight, their numbers will undoubtedly dwindle as the proportion of EVs grows accordingly over the coming decades.
Some have voiced concerns that this spells bad news for forecourts but, given an estimated 35% of UK households have no off-street parking, a more likely scenario is that petrol stations repurpose themselves as EV charging hubs.
This has already been happening to a certain extent, with Shell installing over 600 chargers at its stations across the country, and MFG hosting a similar number of plugs. In most instances these complement fuel pumps rather than replace them, but in a small number of business cases operators have found it makes more sense to rip things up and start again.
That’s the approach BP has taken at its Cromwell Road site in Hammersmith, West London. Situated on the eastward side of the perma-busy A4 Great West Road, which turns into the M4 as it wends its way out to Heathrow and beyond, the site was for over half a century a conventional filling station, albeit one that drivers fell out of love with over time, as newer forecourts with larger aprons and bigger stores tempted motorists on their way back into London.
Now, roughly three years after BP had the idea, the Cromwell Road forecourt remains relatively small in its physical footprint, but its commercial and symbolic impact are more significant.
Because in place of the four multi-hose petrol and diesel pumps that once filled drivers’ tanks now rest five state-of-the-art ultra-rapid chargers, each capable of charging two cars at a time. Built by Italian firm Alpitronic and prominently branded with BP Pulse’s livery, these units are the Ferrari of chargepoints: with a pricetag of around £70,000, each point can funnel electricity into one vehicle’s battery at a lightning-fast 300 kilowatts, or charge two cars simultaneously at 150kw. This latter figure is the more relevant one, as the majority of EVs tend to be capped at 50-150kw, while even cars like the Porsche Taycan and Tesla Model Y, which can take 320 and 250kw respectively, tend to throttle back charging speeds as their batteries fill.
It’s not just the forecourt where BP has modernised: gone is the old convenience store with its newspaper stands and night-pay hatch, replaced an all singing, all dancing shop that feels like a scaled-down modern motorway services. Adorning the storefront is BP’s new logo for its Wild Bean Cafe – the first time this has been used in the UK – while to the right of this the shop proudly informs drivers they can find M&S Food inside. Staff are specially trained to answer queries from less experienced EV drivers, while the self-service till is the shop’s busiest point-of-sale by some margin.
The cafe is a cut above what one might normally expect, too. Sure, you can grab a quick coffee and pastry, but you can also get a cheeseburger, hot baguettes and wraps and even a salad, with all food prepared on site by staff, and orders being customisable at point of order. M&S flowers dispense once and for all with the stigma that has traditionally been associated with forecourt florists, while keeping the toilets spic and span is top of the agenda. And both the store and forecourt boast free wi-fi thanks to them having “more routers than NASA”, according to Richard Bartlett, senior vice president for BP Pulse and mobility & convenience across Europe.
Companies the size of BP don’t make moves like this without sound commercial reasons, naturally, and the Cromwell Road site has been rejuvenated with full knowledge that customers behave very differently when charging their EVs compared to filling their fuel tanks, as Bartlett explains:
“The average EV customer spends 142% more in the shop than the average ICE [internal combustion engine] customer. They’re here for longer, so they’ll buy more. They’ll buy a croissant, a doughnut, and if they’re here with the kids, what do you do for 20, 30, 40 minutes?”
Well, BP wants to make charging “extraordinarily helpful” as part of the £1 billion investment in UK EV charging it announced in 2022, so aside from using the facilities, catching up on social media, chowing down on a burger or picking up dinner, drivers can make use of their charging time in other ways, too. There’s an In Post parcel point, and while the air, water and vacuum facilities are both common forecourt fixtures, and not much use when a car is tethered to a charger, the car-mat cleaning machine far more novel. These have been knocking around in the US for a while now, but they’re pretty new to the UK. Simply feed the machine £2 (contactless, naturally) for four minutes’ use, before feeding each of your car mats through its horizontal receptacle in which it is hoovered and vibrated clean. Neat, simple, useful, and comes under the “what will they think of next?” category.
Again, though, such innovations don’t happen by accident, and Cromwell Road represents a unique business model to a certain extent.
“It an obvious site because it’s a tiny site, and therefore fuel customers were preferring the bigger site we have down the road with a more pumps, a more modern apron”, says Bartlett who also highlights that “EV penetration in London is the highest in the country.”
But this is only part of the rationale for the EV-only forecourt, he adds: “A lot of the customers coming here are Uber, and the good thing about Uber is they come in when other consumers don’t: they come in the middle of the night, early in the morning, on the airport run into Heathrow.” This, and the fact a third of all miles covered by Uber in the capital are electric (against a global figure of one in five), makes an EV hub on one of the busiest routes into London something of a no-brainer. It’s not just Uber, either, as representatives from delivery firm DPD are also in attendance at the site’s gala opening.
This is not to say that private motorists don’t use the facilities, as even some of the plushest houses in this part of town lack the off-street parking that is essential for a wallbox charger. And while the A4 is one of the busiest roads in town, myriad houses are within a stone’s throw, and around 20% of customers visit the convenience store without using the charging facilities.
Against this backdrop, BP has apparently been conservative in its sales predictions, as just two months in from its ‘soft’ opening the store is not just exceeding targets, but is hitting figures the firm didn’t expect to see for another five years. All 10 charging bays are in use 35% of the time, with that figure rising to over 55% during the 18-hour window that excludes the small hours. Little wonder the Cromwell Road has already gone into BP’s top five most utilised sites in its Pulse network.
This is not to say that everything is plain sailing for BP: while it offers charging facilities in some form or other at half its forecourts, the firm’s reputation for reliability doesn’t tend to get glowing reports in consumer surveys. This is in part due to the older sockets BP inherited when it took over Chargemaster in 2018, and the company insists it is making big strides in this area with closer monitoring of its network, and more engineers roaming the country. At times there is an issue with infrastructure, too, and replacing older 50kW chargers with 150kW ones isn’t possible as the local grid can’t handle the extra juice, but that’s a state-level infrastructure issue that even a firm as large as BP can’t magic away overnight.
Back to Cromwell Road, and while this is the first site BP has ever converted from fuel to EV charging with a convenience store, it isn’t alone in identifying this neck of the woods as prime electric territory: Shell launched a similar concept a couple of years back and a couple of miles down the road in Fulham. For BP, however, this A4 EV forecourt is just part of what it refers to as its ‘west London charging corridor’, which comprises half a dozen sites offering ultra-fast sockets. Some of these, like Cromwell Road, provide the full forecourt experience, while others rely on adjacent amenities to help draw drivers, or play host just to chargers.
This blended approach paints a more realistic picture of what the future has in store for forecourts, because while in some instances a pure EV offering makes sense, battery-powered cars make up just 4% of the UK’s vehicles, so dispensing with fuel dispensers is clearly not yet sustainable.
The firm’s Pinkham Way site in north London is a more realistic model for the future: this was a traditional forecourt hosting an M&S Food and Wild Bean Café, with a couple of elderly chargers plonked in as something of an afterthought many moons ago. But both EV market penetration and charging technology have moved on significantly since the first Nissan Leaf and Tesla Model S heralded the beginning of the modern electric car over a decade ago.
A change was clearly needed at Pinkham, as Bartlett sets out: “We knocked [the old chargers] down, put the latest technology in with a canopy, meeting customers’ needs today and tomorrow, with the anchor point being the shop. So you’ve got good cashflow coming in from the shop, and you layer in the energy transition business on top, then you get a much more profitable asset.”
This location-specific approach is clearly essential as forecourt operators survey the future, but business philosophies can only get you so far: land ownership is undoubtedly a key aspect.
“We’re a real estate player”, Bartlett explains at the Cromwell Road opening ceremony. “And real estate is critical to having a good business. We have this real estate already, so we don’t pay anything for it. Other people who come in would have to pay millions for somewhere like this.
“Anything coming out of London on the main A roads are good for charging locations”, he adds. “In London you’ve got a critical mass of EV drivers, and there isn’t much charging, so if you’ve got the real estate you’re going to do very well, very quickly. This and Sunley Island by Brentford Stadium - which is just a pure EV hub with a vending machine on a small piece of land under the M4 - have been outstanding investments for us.”
As well as knowing the locale intimately, operators considering how to accommodate an electric future should be prepared for snags along the way. Construction of Cromwell Road took contractor NG Bailey just eight months, but planning permission and other rubber stamps neede over two years to obtain. BP also had to put its totem pole at the site exit rather than the entrance (where it would be seen earlier by approaching motorists) as authorities were concerned it would block the view of traffic entering the site when drivers were reversing out of the charging bays. The fact prices per kilowatt hour are noticeably absent from the totem, meanwhile, is down to the fact subscribers and partners can get discounted rates – though both the chargers and BP Pulse’s smartphone app inform customers of kWh prices.
It is generally recognised that car makers have had a tough time of things in recent years as they battle the opposing forces of government legislation mandating electric cars, and consumer tastes that shun them. But while everyone from Volvo and Mercedes, to Lotus and Porsche have changed entire corporate strategies as they battle these pressures, forecourt retailers are arguably in a more enviable position.
“We want to be a leading mobility provider, whether that’s gasoline, diesel, biofuel or electric, Bartlett explains. “If [the EV transition] goes faster, we roll out more, if it goes slower, we do it slower”.
And if the 2030 ban gets killed completely? “Fine. Business as usual. We’ll just keep spinning the cash off the businesses we operate.”
