Accelerating towards the electric vehicle future
We have invested in Zap-Map the electric vehicle charge point app, as part of our move towards a localised power future.
If you’re an electric vehicle owner, you have probably heard of Zap-Map. You may be one of the app or website’s 150,000 monthly users. But if not, let us explain what it’s all about.
Zap-Map is the go-to app for Britain’s electric vehicle drivers — planning routes, identifying charge points, checking their availability and sharing power. Its reason for being is to make owning, driving and charging an EV more straightforward.
‘Range anxiety’ is the term for the worry electric vehicle (EV) drivers sometimes have about how far they can travel before needing to find somewhere to charge.
This is where Zap-Map comes in. The Bristol-based company’s popular app helps EV drivers plan routes, identify charge points, check availability and share power. Its 150,000 regular monthly users have more than 32,600 public charging devices to choose from across the UK, excluding home or business chargers, which they estimate account for another 400,000 devices.
Joining forces with Zap-Map is an important step on our journey towards making energy more localised. It reflects the changing way in which people live with energy. Rather than simply consuming it, more and more households and businesses are beginning to generate, store, sell and share. Electric vehicles are a huge catalyst for that change, making power more tangible than ever before.
Our partnership with Zap-Map will help the company accelerate its exciting new products, such as Zap-Pay, which will simplify smartphone payments for EV charging. The Zap-Home feature highlights private charging locations where households and businesses have chosen to share electricity with other registered drivers, providing access times and charging costs. It is a live, real world example of energy in the sharing economy. Which chimes with us as the only UK energy company which has more customers generating and sharing their own power, versus using supply.
We are looking forward to introducing more exciting things for EV drivers later this year, and in the longer term there are lots of ways we plan to work with Zap-Map to make owning and charging and EV even simpler — at home, at work, or on the go.
