Kerbo Charge sponsoring the London to Paris Rally!
We’re pleased to say we’re ‘competing’ in this year’s London to Paris rally on 1 July! The winning car will use the least number of kW/H to get there. As I’ll have my family in the car and air conditioning on, it probably won’t be us, but it’s all about the taking part.
We’re also not actually going all the way to Paris, just to….Brighton (marketing budget didn’t quite stretch to Paris). But we’ll have a great stand on the Brighton seafront - so make sure you come and say hi if you’re in the area.
We’re joining the London to Paris rally to build awareness for something we’re very worried about – the huge issue of how to charge your EV if you don’t have a drive – which is 40% of the UK population!
We believe the UK is on a knife-edge in its ability to hit the 2030 target to ban petrol/diesel cars because a large part of the population need to use public charge points to charge their car – which now often costs more per mile than petrol.
So if electric cars are more expensive to buy, and cost more to run than petrol cars – why would people who can’t charge at home buy them?
Then there’s convenience. I live on a terraced road in London and I’m relatively fortunate there’s a charger less than 200m from my home, but still it’s a tedious experience to drive over to it, hope it’s actually free, then walk back, walk back again and finally drive home.
This is anecdotal, but we exhibited at Fully Charged Live in April and the majority of people that came to our stand said they would not buy an EV unless they can charge at home – they just don’t want the hassle of having to use public charge points.
That’s why we set about developing the ‘ultimate’ safe cable channel product that would enable people to safely get a charging cable from their house to the car.
So what does this sort of product need to do? We worked with councils to understand their requirements, and we settled on these three:
1. A cable channel with a lid that cannot be left open – it must self-close, but without any consumable parts.
2. Very shallow - to minimise groundworks and surveys.
3. Can flex with the pavement during installation – as pavements are not flat!
It wasn’t too easy creating a product meeting these requirements, but, two years later…..we developed Kerbo Charge.
Now it’s in the ground what are customers saying about it?
‘Freedom’ is the word most commonly used. Freedom to be able to charge at home for the first time – it’s quite a liberating experience. A feeling of independence and self-sufficiency (especially if you have solar).
One of our customers is called David, he has a hybrid and says he puts at least 65 litres less petrol into his car each work since getting his Kerbo Charge.
65 litres for one person! Scale that up to say, just 100,000 people, and that’s 338 million KG of CO2 removed from our emissions[1]!
This little example shows how important our mission is. Get in touch if you’d like to know more.
[1] Based on 2020 data of 50% of the UK energy mix coming from zero carbon renewables
