Today we’ve seen the first car get it’s EV grant status. This will be crucial for progressing towards Britain’s target of 100% of new cars sold in the UK to be zero emission by 2035. However, reducing cost isn’t the only lever we should pull. The key to maintaining consistent EV sales will be improved EV charging infrastructure across local councils to meet growing demand – reliability is going to be what ensures people have faith in the transition.

A recent survey found that though UK councils are increasing investment in EV infrastructure by as much as 42% year on year, only 15% of councils could report that 100% of their EV chargers are operational. We’d urge them to consider a quality over quantity approach for the charging infrastructure. It’s clear that many councils could greatly benefit from the ability to track EV charger performance, detect faults or outages, and even enable remote repairs. This way whoever arrives at a charge point will be safe in the knowledge it will work.

Making sure councils have the right plan in place to plot the EV charging infrastructure will be essential to continued long-term growth in the sector – whether they’re focusing on remoting monitoring and fixes – making sure the network is reliable should be front of mind. The solution isn’t necessarily to build more, but to build better, with the right support in place to maximise uptime.