A team at the University of Glasgow has produced what may prove to be a defining piece of research on Britain's stuttering switch to electric vehicles, mapping for the first time the strikingly different charging needs of drivers in London, Manchester and the Central Belt of Scotland.
The work, led by Professor Qunshan Zhao at the university's Urban Big Data Centre (UBDC), draws on real charging session data from across Great Britain and a sophisticated computer simulation of private EV drivers' behaviour. The conclusion is clear: a one-size-fits-all rollout will not do.
In Greater London, where flats dominate the housing stock, drivers without a home charger lean heavily on public chargers — often overnight near residential blocks, and frequently on rapid units to escape eye-watering parking fees and clogged streets.
In Greater Manchester the picture is similar, with public chargers in flat-heavy districts seeing the busiest use, while leafy streets of houses and terraces show much less reliance on them.
The Central Belt of Scotland, however, tells a different story altogether. Here, demand spikes near motorways, reflecting the long inter-city commutes between Glasgow, Edinburgh and beyond. Scottish drivers, in short, need fast en-route chargers along the M8, M9 and M74 — not just kerbside posts in the cities.
A varied response for varied regions
"Over recent years, interest in electric vehicle adoption has rocketed," Professor Zhao said, citing energy shocks from the wars in Ukraine and Iran and Britain's net-zero ambitions. He noted that the country's existing electric and hybrid fleet is already saving "about two days' worth of fuel" — a small but telling figure.
Yet adoption has hit a bottleneck, the team warns, largely because of patchy public charging — and particularly so for drivers with no driveway of their own.
A second strand of the research used an agent-based model to simulate private EV journeys across Britain, taking in psychological and financial preferences alongside both urban and inter-city trips. Reassuringly, it found that for the great majority of short and medium-distance journeys, en-route charging is rarely needed at all. Range anxiety, the researchers suggest, is largely a problem of perception — provided the long-distance gaps are filled.
Their recommendations are pragmatic. Fast chargers should be prioritised along major motorways and inter-city routes to support longer journeys. In cities, on-street chargers should be installed near blocks of flats and workplaces, so that drivers without home charging are not left behind.
A 'just transition' for the charging post
Crucially, Professor Zhao calls for a "just transition" — language borrowed from the climate movement and now being applied, perhaps for the first time, to the humble charging post.
"Private sectors will operate their EV charging stations in high EV charging demand areas to meet their commercial targets," he said, "but public chargers will also need to enable trips from deprived areas and benefit every potential EV driver, similar to the public transport."
The implications for Scottish policymakers are considerable. With the 2030 net-zero target looming and ministers under pressure to accelerate the switch, the Glasgow team's findings provide a roadmap — quite literally — for where the next generation of chargers should go.
The research was carried out by UBDC PhD student Zixin Feng with Professor Zhao and Professor Alison Heppenstall, all of the University of Glasgow.
For ordinary motorists, the message is simpler still: with the right kit in the right places, the electric future may prove rather less daunting than the headlines have so often suggested.
