It’s fair to have conflicting emotions towards heading to Centreparcs for a family holiday and it was here where my EV charging concerns started.
On one hand, it has all the facilities you could want to keep your children amused and in a safe and traffic-free environment. On the other however, even the shortest of trips will put a dent in your bank account the size of Wales, so you’re certainly paying for the privilege.
What can’t be doubted though is that Centreparcs has certainly started taking its EV charging facilities seriously. And it was while taking advantage of these facilities, that I first discovered my problem.
While charging up at the 7kW Podpoint chargers provided, I suddenly realised that I had money in my Podpoint account. I don’t use Podpoint’s public chargers all that often and, despite the public charging point laws having changed at the end of November 2024 for public charge points over 8kW, am unlikely to do so preferring faster ultra rapids.
To be fair, it was only £9 in my account, but it got me thinking when I would have last topped up my account with money and I honestly couldn’t remember, possibly even as long ago as 12 months before. That, in turn, led to me to start looking at my other charging accounts on my phone that I hold accounts with – and my jaw started to drop.
To be fair, I’ve only got myself to blame and the reasons stretches back to 2020. At the time I was the Editor for Vauxhall’s customer magazine and, for the introduction of the then-new Vauxhall Corsa Electric, we decided to drive across the widest point of the UK, from St Davids to Lowestoft. The idea was that the Vauxhall Corsa had always been a car for all of the British public and we would demonstrate that by covering this 400-odd mile journey and proving that it could be done despite the new arrival of electric power to the range.
The trip was a great success. Despite frequent stops for filming and photography along the way (the bane of any motoring journalist), it was a very long two days, the charging network proved reliable, even if we were topping up at 50kW chargers – faster chargers just weren’t as widely available back then.
But the lengthy journey and slightly indirect route (for the sake of the story and pictures) meant that we were stopping regularly and effectively leapfrogging from one charger to the next along our route. The result was that I had to stop at some unusual chargers run by companies I hadn’t encountered before. And, because things were different back then compared to today, open up individual accounts with them all and put money into my account to start a charge. The charging companies simply didn’t have the same contactless charging facilities that they have today.
And until this trip to Centreparcs, I hadn’t given really them a second thought after that or since other photoshoots with EVs. So I started making a note of them. To be fair, I had previously deleted a few a couple of years ago, but I still had 12 different charging apps on my phone and, when I totalled them up, had just over £31 in all of their accounts – which I’m now going through and seeing how I get them refunded. One of them, which I’m positive there’s funds in, won’t even let me access the app at all.
So let my mistake be a lesson to any historic EV drivers who frequently publicly charged – check out how much is sitting in any EV charging company accounts on your phone as you could be due a payday. And when you’re paying for holidays at Centreparcs – every little helps.