Gridserve has been considered the gold standard for large charging networks, with its flagship super hubs, electric-only service station ‘Forecourts’ and renewal of the old motorway ‘Electric Highway’ chargers being seen as a revolution by drivers.

But over the past few weeks there appear to have been murmurs of discontent on social media, with drivers taking to Twitter to tell us of failed chargers and disconnections, even at the flagship Moto Rugby site on the M6. Some vocal critics even suggested they had given up on the network and accused the company of overstretching itself.

To see what is happening, Electrifying.com went straight to Toddington Harper, Gridserve’s CEO. His responses should help quash theories that the company is abandoning drivers.

“Firstly I want to say that we get it. We are EV drivers too. We know that the chargers should work all of the time, everytime. We understand the frustration, and I promise you we are on top of it.” 

The network is delivering well over 100,000 charges a month, he says, which is higher than anyone expected and he believes makes them the hardest worked chargers in the world. “All parts have a finite life of course, and we go to great lengths to keep on top of it with maintenance but there are inevitably problems we can’t forsee.

At the flagship Moto Rugby services for example, Toddington says they have been “hit by a series of technical issues which are all different in four chargers, and one was knocked over by a customer.”

Ginny at Rugby services, which is Gridserve's motorway hub flagship but at time of publication had five chargers offline

Other parts are in short supply and they have to rely on the manufacturer of the charger for some repairs as these units are still under warranty, he says, but they are ‘pushing, pushing, pushing” to get them fixed.

“But we know these issues we have make no difference to a customer if they can’t get a charge and it’s frustrating. We are doing some really leading-edge work to speed things up, bringing parts of the process in house so we can make things right much quicker.”

The company is also having its plans to rejuvenate the older motorway services charge network hampered by inherited power supply issues, but there is some good news here too.

“When we took over the Electric Highway in June last year, we had a decision to make. Do we go slow and fix it perfectly or go really fast and fix it as well as we can, but know that we will have to constantly improve it. For us there was a right answer to that question. There were a lot of people who needed charges and there were issues everywhere, so we just went for it and fixed it as fast as we possibly could knowing that it wouldn’t be perfect, but it would be much better than it was before.”

The Electric Highway - "Not perfect, but much better than it was before.”

As the chargers are now being used far more because of the boom in electric car sales, this is putting a strain on “everything”, says Toddington. “The chargers are being used back to back to back. This teases out some of the legacy issues we inherited, but we are dealing with them.

“By the end of this month we will have completed a software upgrade though which will mean two cars can charge at once from the same unit. I suspect some of the niggles people have been experiencing in the past few weeks have been to do with these software updates.

“Our plan is to upgrade these sites so they have six to 12 high power chargers as soon as possible. Where we have done this already, the sites are generally performing absolutely brilliantly.”

Toddington says there will be more of these service station super hubs opening in the near future, including Reading East and Westbound, Woolley Edge North/South and Leigh Delamere. 

There are also plans for 100 Electric Forecourts with planning permission already confirmed on Uckfield, Gateshead, Plymouth and Stevenage and more than 30 additional sites also under development. 

The company has the investment and the firm plans to build the network as well as making the current chargers as robust as possible, he said. “We want to be the beacon of dependability and continue to win awards.”

Toddington wants Gridserve to be a "beacon of dependability"