To hell and app
Pick a charging network. Any network. To use it, you need their app. To get the app you need an account. To get an account you need an email address, a password, and your agreement to a privacy policy you will not read that allows them to share your data with partners you will never be able to identify. Then you need to add a payment method. Then you can charge your car.
Now do that six more times because there are six networks on your regular routes and none of them accept each other's apps. You are not a driver. You are an unpaid systems administrator managing a portfolio of charging accounts on behalf of companies that are using your data to fund the infrastructure you already paid for through your electricity bill.
To be fair: since November 2024, regulations require all public chargers above 8kW to accept contactless payment. Networks like InstaVolt and Osprey have done this properly for years. Tap and go, no account, no app, no nonsense. Gridserve too. If you are using a modern rapid charger you should, in theory, never need to download anything. The law is on your side.
In practice, enforcement is patchy. Plenty of older AC chargers are still app-only and nobody is forcing anyone to change them. Pod Point's AC network requires the app to confirm your charge continues past fifteen minutes. BP Pulse and Be.EV both lean hard on app accounts for anything beyond basic access. The regulation exists. The habit has not died. And the networks that do push apps know exactly what they are doing with the data once you are inside their ecosystem.
The free tier is deliberately broken. Real-time availability, proper filtering, journey planning. Anything that would make the app genuinely useful costs money. The app that promised to make EV driving easier is now a direct debit. The data you generated for free in the meantime, your patterns, your locations, your charging sessions, has already been packaged and sold to insurers, advertisers and the same networks whose chargers you are trying to find.
You are not the customer. You are the product, the distribution channel, and the revenue stream, all at the same time.
RFID confusion
Some networks want you to use an RFID card instead of an app. The idea is sensible: tap and go, no phone needed, works underground, works in a dead signal area. In practice it gets complicated fast.
Network-specific RFID cards from Shell Recharge, BP Pulse, Liberty Charge and others are tied to that network's estate. They track your sessions, keep your history inside their system, and some require a paid membership to order one in the first place. Liberty Charge starts at £5 a month. The card that was supposed to make charging simpler is now a subscription.
Roaming cards do exist. Octopus Electroverse, Allstar One Electric, Paua. They do work across multiple networks, which is genuinely useful. But they come with their own apps, their own accounts, and their own data arrangements. You are still feeding a system. The difference is which company gets your charging history.
Osprey, to their credit, stopped issuing their own RFID cards entirely and just accept contactless and third-party cards. That is the right answer. It is not the industry norm.
The pricing situation
Until November 2024 there was no legal requirement for public charge points to display prices clearly before you plugged in. Networks could show you a rate on an app, charge you a different rate at the charger, and add a session fee on top that was not mentioned anywhere visible. Some still do. The law changed but enforcement is patchy and the habit of burying costs in small print dies hard in an industry that built its entire culture around opaque pricing.
Roaming fees make it worse. Use a charger outside your home network and you often pay a premium rate on top of whatever the charger costs, because two companies need to take a margin from the same transaction. The driver pays for both. Neither network is required to tell you this is happening before you plug in.
If you have a subscription you pay less per kWh. If you do not, you subsidise those who do. The subscription itself costs money. You are paying for the privilege of not being overcharged. That is not a market. That is a protection racket with a green logo.
Broken chargers, bad data
A significant proportion of public charge points in the UK do not work on any given day. The exact figure is disputed because nobody is required to publish reliable uptime data, which tells you everything you need to know about who this system is designed to serve. When a charger fails mid-session, the standard resolution is to call a helpline. The helpline is often automated. The automated system cannot restart the charger remotely. A human will be with you in four to six business days.
Your car is at 12%. It is raining. You are on the A303.
There is no universal fault reporting mechanism. There is no regulator tracking uptime by network and publishing league tables. There is no financial penalty for running a broken charger on public land funded by public subsidy. There is nobody whose job it is to care, in any enforceable sense, whether the thing works when you need it.
The Public Charge Point Regulations 2023 require operators to publish open data. They do not require operators to ensure that data is accurate, up to date, or in a format that anyone can actually use. Compliance is self-reported. Enforcement is theoretical.
All of it traces back to the same thing
None of this is inevitable. It is not a technical problem. It is a regulatory problem, and the regulatory problem is straightforward: the UK government built a legal framework for public EV charging infrastructure, handed it to commercial operators to implement, and then declined to actually enforce it.
The Public Charge Point Regulations 2023 exist. Open data requirements exist. Contactless payment requirements exist. What does not exist in any meaningful sense is a regulator with teeth, a watchdog with a mandate, or a consequence for non-compliance that costs more than compliance would have done in the first place.
The result is an industry that has taken public money, public land, public grid connections, and public subsidy, and built a fragmented, account-gated, app-dependent, data-harvesting infrastructure that works for the networks and barely tolerates the drivers. Every broken app, every unexplained roaming fee, every charger that does not work and helpline that does not answer, is a consequence of that original decision to let the market self-regulate an essential public service.
Markets are good at a lot of things. They are not good at this. You do not let the water company decide whether water quality data should be public. You do not let the railway set its own safety standards. You do not build the motorway network and then tell five private companies to charge different prices, use incompatible payment systems, and report their own maintenance statistics.
But that is exactly what we did with EV charging. And drivers are living with the consequences every time they pull up to a charger at 9pm and wonder whether it is going to work.
What would actually fix it
Universal payment. Every public charger should accept contactless. Most now do, legally, but enforcement of the November 2024 requirement is inconsistent. Finish the job.
Mandatory uptime reporting. Every network should publish real uptime data, verified independently, updated daily. If your chargers work less than 95% of the time, that is public information and it should be findable before you drive to the thing.
Open data that is actually open. The current open data obligation is a joke. Operators submit feeds in different formats, at different intervals, with different definitions of what counts as operational. A single standard, a single registry, enforced by a single body with the power to fine people who do not comply.
Price transparency before you plug in. Not on an app. Not in small print. On the charger, before the cable goes in, in a format a normal person can read and compare.
None of this is radical. Most of it already exists on paper. The missing ingredient is a regulator that takes it seriously.
Until then: EVChargeSpot. No app. No account. No nonsense. Just 80,000+ charge points and a fast map.