There are threads and threads of anecdotes that are now made public by their authors. You can sit here until midnight still reading them all. You are not going to get a coherent conversation in just a day, but if you read past threads you will.
What you need to include;-
Ecotricity have monopolising motorway service stations and are sitting on contracts preventing others from expanding there. Highways England are refusing to exercise any power over their licencees at these sites to dent this. Ecotricity have been market leads and have really made things possible in the first couple of years, but the scant few chargers that are there now are unreliable and badly supported. So their 'Electric Highway' is now preventing EV growth not helping it. They used to have a connection charge which helped discourage 'PHEV' hoggers who block chargers for battery electric vehicles (BEVs). PHEV charge slowly and have poor electric range, they are better on motorways just to keep driving on petrol and not stop to prevent BEVs using the points.
BP Chargemaster Polar have been developing a network and buying up others. Some of the sites for these are terrible, for example a funded project for 5 sites in Worcestershire put half of them behind locked gates for most of 24hours, and many of the others were put in locations of such poor electricity supply that they were only allowed to charge at half the possible rate. Polar have been installing more chargers recently and they run a subscription service that works for some users but others think the £8 a month charge is too much to run their £30k cars.
New entrants such as instavolt are doing good things by introducing 'ad hoc' chargers where anyone can charge without making subscription payments, but at a high cost per kWh. Considering the service offered, the price is not too bad.
The most feared problems for charging you EV are not necessarily the mix of different companies, it is whether the charge points are working, because reliability has been shocking (especially Ecotricity) and no-one like OLEV are holding them to account. The next fear is being blocked by an ICE (internal combusion car) by idiots that often wilfully block the chargers. The next problem is with PHEVs that charge so slowly that it is virtually the same, and lastly is other BEV drivers themselves who don't actually need to charge, they are just getting a free charge at a local supermarket when other people passing by might really actually need to charge.
A new problem to emerge is that some cars are poorly designed and charge too slowly. The new Leaf will not charge at the advertised speed if it gets a bit warm, which it usually does after the first charge on the motorway.
Chargers themselves rarely deliver the advertised rate, in theory they should deliver 50kW but most don't go over 44kW. When they do, even without overheating, it will not charge at that rate for all of the battery charge, so it is not possible to charge up fully and repeat the same mileage, instead you have to stop and charge only half the battery at a time. Even cars that are supposed to be able to charge at 100kW can only manage 60kW or so on chargers that are supposed to be able to do that. This is like some hidden secret that the manufacturers don't want buyers to know, they need to come clean on exactly how fast their cars are going to charge at and not talk it off casually when the cars can't do that. If you bought a car to drive at 70mph you would rightly complain if it could only do that for a few miles and then it slowed down to 50mph on the motorway, so why are EV manufacturers getting away with this? (answer; it is still not understood properly by consumers, so they are getting away with it).
All these things are easily solvable but needs the Government to get organised. OLEV has been dishing out grants for cars and chargers, but has not held anyone to account for failing to deliver to the grant requirements. For example, they issue funding for 50kW chargers and only get 22kW or 44kW charge points. They give grants for cars on the condition they have warranty for 5 years on the high voltage parts of the car, yet companies like BMW only offer 3 year and are getting away with it. Vauxhall have been repeatedly denying owners of Amperas basic repairs on high voltage components for years. Renault have downgraded their warranty from 4 years to 3. Meanwhile the Government's OLEV looks on and refuses to intervene and get the tax payer's money worth out of these companies.
