Roughly a third of British households have nowhere to plug a car in at home, and the economics of electric driving split cleanly along that line. With a driveway and an off-peak tariff, an EV costs around 2p a mile to run. Without one, leaning on public rapid chargers, it can cost more than the petrol car it replaced. The gap isn't fixed, though — there's a whole middle tier of options that flat-dwellers and terrace-dwellers mostly haven't been told about.

The gap, in numbers

An off-peak EV tariff — Octopus Intelligent Go is the best-known — charges around 7p per kWh in its overnight window. At a typical 3.5–4 miles per kWh, that's roughly 2p a mile. The big rapid networks charge more like 75–85p per kWh, which works out above 20p a mile — worse than a 45mpg petrol car at recent pump prices, which runs around 13–15p a mile.

There's a structural insult baked in too: electricity at home carries 5% VAT, while public charging is taxed at 20%. The person with the driveway pays less tax per mile than the person without one. It is what it is — but it explains why every trick below is really the same trick: get as close to home-tariff electricity as you can.

Lampposts and kerbside posts

The cheapest public electrons are the slow ones bolted to street furniture. Ubitricity has converted thousands of lampposts, mostly in London; char.gy and Connected Kerb run kerbside posts across a growing list of boroughs and councils. Prices typically sit around 40–55p per kWh — roughly half rapid-network rates — and some operators, char.gy among them, have run overnight rates considerably below that in certain boroughs.

These are 3–7kW sockets, so the model is overnight, not top-up: park, plug, walk away, wake up full. Bring your own cable, and check the operator's app for whether the socket is tethered or bring-your-own before you drive there. If your street has nothing, most operators and councils take siting requests through their websites — chargers genuinely do get installed where residents ask, because the operators need somewhere to put them. The unglamorous catch is competition: a street with one lamppost socket and four EVs develops its own quiet politics, so treat a full battery as a cue to move off the charger, not a parking entitlement.

The pavement gully

If your car parks on the street directly outside your home, the most valuable bit of plastic in the EV world might be a cable channel. Firms like Kerbo Charge cut a narrow self-closing gully into the pavement so a cable can run safely from your own wall box to the kerb — which means home-tariff electricity, kerbside. Costs run from the high hundreds to about £1,500 including installation, plus your council's permission, and the list of councils saying yes is growing.

The payback maths is stark. At 8,000 miles a year, the difference between a 7p home tariff and typical kerbside pricing is in the region of £800–900 annually. A gully can pay for itself before its second birthday. The obvious limitation applies: on a busy street with unallocated parking, you can't guarantee the space outside your own front door, so this works best where parking is calm or permit-controlled.

Borrowed sockets: neighbours, work, the shop

Three more ways to dodge rapid pricing, all underused:

  • Co Charger matches people who have home chargers with neighbours who need them, on a regular booked arrangement — rates land somewhere between home and public pricing, and the host gets a cut for hardware they already own
  • Work — the Workplace Charging Scheme gives employers a grant of up to £350 per socket, so if your office car park has no chargers, the case practically writes itself; forward the link to whoever owns facilities
  • Destination chargers at supermarkets, gyms and leisure centres run at 7–22kW and price well below rapids — the era of plentiful free ones has mostly passed, but charging while doing the weekly shop still beats a dedicated trip to a rapid hub

Zap-Map filters all of this by speed, price and live availability, and is the difference between a plan and a wander.

Squeezing the rapids when you must

Sometimes only a rapid will do. Even then: subscription tiers on networks like BP Pulse trade a monthly fee for cheaper kWh rates that pay off for regular users; Octopus Electroverse puts most networks on one card and app, with discounted rates on some of them; slower units at the same site often undercut the fastest ones; and idle fees for staying plugged in after finishing can quietly outcost the electricity. Charging to 80% and leaving is almost always the money move.

Estate agents list off-street parking as a perk. For an EV driver it's an £800-a-year utility. Until you've got one, the game is stacking the middle tier — lampposts, gullies, and other people's sockets.