Top 50 Indie Park Garage Group has launched a template for its electric vehicle charging ambitions with what it claims to be the highest spec hub in the UK.
In what it believes to be a first for UK forecourts, it has fitted its Blackpool site with the most powerful 480kW ultra-fast chargepoints, which are double-sided allowing for six bays and a single charge of 240kW. The units, supplied by Helix Renewables, are positioned at a lower height and in wider bays than usual to provide wheelchair user access, and they are under a lit canopy branded Park & Charge.
The petrol station operator is working with the EV chargepoint management platform Fuuse, which will help it to understand the charging habits of its customers. The 77-strong forecourt business plans to use this data to set up a loyalty app for its EV charging customers to download and to be targeted with appropriate promotions.
“If we find that a customer always charges at 8am, for instance, we could say let’s try giving them an offer on coffee and a bacon sandwich,” says Park Garage Group’s operations director Hemant Tandon.
“The idea will be to link charging with deals in the shop as much as possible,” he adds.
The Shell site also displays the price it is charging – currently 68.99p per kilowatt hour – on a forecourt pole, and the charging unit lights up with a green strip to indicate how much longer the vehicle needs to be plugged in.
In the next six months the business plans to be equipped to take the Shell EV fuel card, which will widen appeal of the charging service to fleet customers, including light commercial vehicle drivers, who will be on a preferential charging rate, says Hemant.
Hemant admits that the business is not offering the cheapest charging rate compared with the market, but he believes that this is countered by the company’s premium charging offering, tied in with a strong emphasis on food to go at the site.
“We are giving customers the highest spec, and from an aesthetics point of view it is a lot higher quality than anything I have seen at other petrol stations, pubs, retail parks or other charging locations,” says Hemant. “We are the Harrods of charging, and we are putting longevity into the business by taking this approach.
“The Blackpool site has a 26-seat Greggs, Rollover and Starbucks, and you can almost do a small shop for the 20 minutes you are charging,” he adds.
But the business, says Hemant, needs to focus on payback, with an investment of well over £1 million to secure access to the electrical grid from its distribution network operator, and to purchase all of the infrastructure, including a 1,000 kilowatt sub station, the chargepoints, canopy and mini pole. “If we get pay back within five years we will be happy, less than that and we will be ecstatic,” he adds.
Four weeks in and the business has made solid progress, says Hemant, with typically 20 to 25 charges a day, rising to around 50 over the bank holiday. By the end of the year, Hemant is hopeful of hitting an average of 60 to 80 charges, with that increasing to 80 to 100 over peak bank holiday periods. To aid this the Blackpool site is on the major EV hub location finders such as Zap Map, and also features on fuel card supplier Allstar’s website.
If all goes to plan EV charging will be rolled out at four other Park Garage Group sites by this time next year, with Mogador in Surrey, and Maidstone in Kent the first in the running. They could be followed by Thinford in County Durham, and its flagship Rushton, Northamptonshire forecourt.
“We have five or six sites ready to push the button on, but we want to see where we get with the deliverables at Blackpool. We are in no rush and want to get this right with such a high level of investment at stake,” explains Hemant.
“We have to smoothe out any potential problems with the app and the equipment first. A priority will be to keep chargepoints maintained so that they don’t break down. Faulty chargepoints are a big problem in the industry. We want to make sure of the quality of service we offer, and that the charging area is clean and tidy, just like for any other product we sell in our business,” says Hemant.
