Agreed, but its still cheaper than ICE, so folk with home charging the occasional "expensive" road trip charge shouldn't be a concern as obviously more infrastructure is needed (government could be helping out there ... it has the choice of sponsoring EVs more, or paying to clean up pollution and NHS bills ...)
Folk with no home/work charging (brave, at this time in the EV gestation, IMHO) would be better off with destination chargers, as constant rapid-charging of battery not ideal.
because of this infrastructure that Ecotricity started
I agree, kudos to Ecotricity. Trouble is that they have lost money on it ever since, so are cash starved to now have to replace them
but I think they deserve that chance.
But all-the-rest need to become like Supercharger - plug-in and walk-away. I have only had to do a handful of 3rd party charges, over nearly 4 years, and none of them comes close to Supercharger, My worse was at Ecotricity; took me 20 minutes to start CHAdeMO charge (2x failures at first pump, and then success at second pump, didn't even have to move car as the cable reached). All that time was taken up with filling in the APP to do an adhoc payment. Three times. From scratch each time, nothing pre-filled. Clearly if you are an Ecotricity customer, with an RFID, it would be better ... but that was my first Ecotricity charge after nearly 3 years of ownership (I'd even kept the APP updated on my phone "just in case"). Might well be my last, on that experience.
they obviously have no interest in keeping it going long term
They are in the middle of a rollout of new pumps ... so disagree with your "no interest". Would have been good if they started sooner, and anticipated CCS charging from Model-3, iPace, eTron, ECQ ... but until the iPace arrived I'm not sure they knew that they had a real problem with [CCS compatibility of] their CCS conversion kits (might be cutting them too much slack, the i3 had already had trouble IIRC). Either way, at best they reacted slowly and that may now cost them in the race. They have monopoly (still, I think?) on MSA sites, so ought to be able to turn that to profit.
I think the biggest problem is the scant number of stalls that these 3rd party vendors are putting in. Ionity looks the best (in terms of "Plug-in and walk-away" and high speed charging), but they are installing 2 and 4 stall sites. Way too short sited [Edit:
Freudian slip, I'll leave it!]... but their rollout is expensive of course ... The last 4-stall site Tesla did was in 2015, only a year after they built their first one. And now Tesla have done a "software fix" to ramp up the power at most existing ones ... Come On Competition, you aren't even in the race ... but you are needed!
BP are gouging the market on price (outrageous adhoc price, unless you take out a monthly subscription, which then needs about 2000 miles charging to break even - are there that many people, with home charging, who need 2,000 miles p.a. road-charging?, and who will always be able to find a convenient BP pump?), whereas BP could easily afford to run a loss leader and completely see off the competition in a few years.
Buy Hey! I'm just an armchair critic of course ...
