The first significant move to put the London electric vehicle charging network onto a foolproof maintenance schedule has been announced with two London boroughs signing over their responsibilities to Source London.
Southwark and Sutton are the first of 33 boroughs to hand over their maintenance responsibilities to Source London, which was sold off by Transport for London last year for £1m.
Up to 60 charging points in those boroughs will now be guaranteed to work thanks to a new back-up organisation, including mobile repair engineers and a spare parts warehouse, that Source London is setting up.
“This agreement will ensure these points are fully functional and compliant with EU standards as well as overseeing any necessary repairs for the benefit of the growing number of EV users across London,” says Christophe Arnaud, director of BluepointLondon, which runs the Source London network.
Fixing the network will also open up the chance for Source London to charge EV drivers to park at the roadside, possibly by the end of the year. A sliding scale based on TfL’s 1-6 public transport zones will be used.
Although the tariff has yet to be finalised, there are suggestions that an hour might cost £5 in the central Zone 1.
Signing up the two boroughs is a major breakthrough for Source London, which has been criticised over the poor reliability of the network, with up to one-third of all the 1400 chargers broken at any one time.
Owners of the biggest-selling EVs like the Nissan Leaf and Renault Zoe have been hugely inconvenienced by the poor availability of the chargers, particularly since many Londoners live in terraced houses without off-street parking.
In some areas, like the City of London, all chargers have been completely blacked out due to the complex web of maintenance arrangements built in to the organisation that TfL hastily created when Source London was launched in 2011.
The two boroughs are intended to be the first of the bulk of 33 to sign up, and Source London has already compiled a London-wide hit list of 300 chargers that will be fast-tracked to repair by "the summer".
As more boroughs sign up, two more waves of repairs are promised in the autumn and winter. "We will be getting on with more repairs as we get more boroughs to sign up," Arnaud told Autocar last month.
A key part of the new maintenance regime is to install a communications black box at many of the posts, which will allow Source London to monitor the hardware and software and detect faults as they occur.
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