The UK, along with many other urbanized regions, has a special challenge to overcome if EV adoption is to take off: many drivers live in multi-family housing, and have no assigned parking spaces in which to install chargers. One possible solution is a peer-to-peer charging network that allows EV owners to share their home chargers with others.
One company addressing this challenge (or opportunity) is Bookmycharge, which launched in 2017. The service works much like Airbnb, bringing together charge point owners and EV drivers needing a place to charge, while providing an interface to take reservations and payments via the Bookmycharge.com web site (another UK firm, Zap-Map, is exploring a similar model).
According to Bookmycharge, there are now more than 85,000 charge points operating at homes across the UK, compared with around 6,100 public charging locations.
“Our mission is help EV drivers to maximise the potential of the UK’s huge domestic charge point network,” said Bookmycharge co-founder Jan Stannard. “We want to encourage a ‘sharing economy’ approach so that the EV community has guaranteed access to the wealth of home charging locations across the country.”
Source: Bookmycharge