EV Café Takeaway

Bailee Harrison buys everything from pallet trucks to cranes for The Bristol Port Company, where most of the heavy equipment still runs on diesel and the target is net zero by 2040. In Bailee's first podcast, Sarah and John Curtis ask how you decarbonise a working port. What we cover: The port's long history , from trade on the River Avon before the Romans to a 2,600-acre estate spanning three cou...

Every charging session involves a handshake drivers never see: identifying the vehicle, working out who pays and at what price, and settling the bill across roaming partners whose figures don't always agree. Björn Albertsson co-founded Metergram, a 50-person services company that works only on EV charging software for operators, eMSPs and utilities worldwide. Recorded live at Fleet & Mobility...

When Nathan Gore-Brown opened Tesla's first Queensland store, EVs held 0.1% of the Australian market. Last month, plug-ins took around 35%. A former Jaguar and Aston Martin engineer, Nathan now represents AVILOO in Australia and New Zealand through TEST EV. Stefan Holzschuh, who has taken AVILOO into more than 40 markets and now runs the UK, joins at the start before a fire alarm pulls him out. Co...

When Gurjeet Grewal stepped up as CEO of Octopus EV, there was a three-month window to prove the point. Gurjeet set a deliberately ambitious target for March plate-change, and the business posted the biggest month in its history. Paul and JC hear how Gurjeet got there, from investment banking and leveraged finance to lean startups and then Octopus. Gurjeet credits curiosity to childhood summers wi...

Peter Jones built an events business twice. Two years after launching his first show, his bank manager told him he'd built a skyscraper on a sandy beach and gave him 24 hours to liquidate. He lost the house, the car, everything - then scraped together £16,000, bought the IP back at auction, and started again. Nineteen Group is now heading for 400 people and owns the Commercial Vehicle Show, Instal...

Bob Murphy was working on electric vehicles before most of the UK had anywhere to plug one in. Back in 2011, having retrained as a mechanic at Edinburgh College, he fell into a small research project that put four EVs to work as staff pool cars. Nobody knew whether they could make it from Dalkeith to Dunbar and back. There was no public charging network to fall back on. The college ended up instal...

Counting charge points tells you almost nothing. That frustration led Chris Rimmer and his colleagues at CENEX to build Are We Nearly There Yet? - reports that express public charging progress not in kilowatts or headline totals, but in years ahead or behind demand, local authority by local authority. (At recording: near-home charging sits about a year and a bit ahead. A little ahead. Not loads.)...

What happens when you take an electric van that can wheelspin off the line and make it drive like the diesel it replaced? According to Kevin Hennelly, commercial director at The Vehicle Group (TVG), you get calmer drivers, fewer accidents, longer tyre life - and up to 30% more range from the same battery. Kevin lifts the lid on TVG, a "very well hidden" UK engineering company whose Aladdin's cave...

Chris Chandler is Principal Consultant at Lex Autolease and the electrification SME across all three Lloyds Banking Group motor brands: Lex Autolease on the B2B side, Tusker in salary sacrifice (22,000 vehicles at acquisition, 100,000 the week we recorded), and Black Horse in retail finance. Between leasing and salary sacrifice, that's a serious chunk of the EVs on British roads. Paul and JC get i...

Angela Muresan arrived in the UK in 2015 with broken English and a job picking and packing in a warehouse. Ten years later she's a presenter, content creator, and the face of Be. EV — and the story of how she got there involves a notebook full of borrowed email templates, a self-funded industry event that left her with £20 in the bank, and a one-way ticket taken purely because an ex once said the...

A co-founder of EVA England, incoming chair of the Recharge APPG in Parliament, and one of the earliest UK adopters of home solar, battery storage and electric driving — Warren Phlips received one of the very first consumer Tesla Powerwall 2 units in the country (number three, he's told, just behind a certain Robert Llewellyn) — he has spent the best part of a decade quietly pulling the EV transit...

Alun Davies once told his team that electric vehicle charging "would never catch on" — and sent someone else to do the first installation jobs. Today he leads ElectrAssure, the electrical contractor behind nearly 2,000 charging sockets for National Grid, the chargers that greet every electric Volkswagen arriving on UK shores, and some of the first DC rapid chargers for Western Power Distribution....

What does it take to steer a £50 million business towards its founder's vision of lasting 100 years? Andrew Clint, CEO of myenergi, joins us fresh from the company's 10th anniversary celebrations to talk about the next 90. Eighteen months into the role, Andrew explains why myenergi — best known for zappi, the first solar-aware EV charger — is refocusing on Lee Sutton's original ambition: a complet...

Dan McLaren left school with no qualifications, spent his early years as a greenkeeper at a private members' golf club, and now looks after half of the BP Pulse network as Network Optimisation Lead. Dan talks about growing up dyslexic in a school system that dealt with it by "putting you in a class with less people", and about the father-in-law who took him on as a project — daily five o'clock pho...

What do you get when you cross the world's most innovative energy company with the world's largest battery maker? Swaptopus — a joint venture between Octopus Energy and CATL that's bringing HGV battery swapping to the UK and Europe. And the man growing it is Will Rowe, Entrepreneur in Residence at Octopus Energy, who joins us this week from a tennis club, the day after selling his house. Commitmen...

Most households and small businesses don't have an automotive expert on hand, just a relative who gets cornered at barbecues or "someone who used to be a mechanic" now responsible for a multi-million-pound fleet. That gap is the problem Paul Jewell built CarCloud to fix. Paul joins Paul Kirby and Sara Sloman to explain how CarCloud surfaces the MOT deadlines, lease endings and maintenance costs th...

How do you actually know what's left in a used EV battery? Nikolaus Mayerhofer and Alexander Millinger from Aviloo join us to draw the line between a real diagnostic and a glorified readout — and why that difference decides what a second-hand electric car or van is worth. NiKo has been building electric things since he was 12, soldering together his first e-bike back in 1987 and developing battery...

Guest: Jamie Sands — Operator-led zero-emission freight and innovation | TwentyForty | Welch Group Company: Welch Group ( welchgroup.co.uk · twentyforty.uk ) LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/j-sands What does a 92-year-old, family-owned haulier with 70 trucks know about the future of freight that the multinationals don't? Quite a lot, it turns out. Jamie Sands is Head of Solutions at Welch Group — a role...

Days before stepping in as Managing Director of Holman UK, Nick Hay sits down with Paul and Sara for a conversation that ranges far wider than fleet leasing. It's a candid look at what three decades in cold chain logistics teaches you about cutting environmental impact without losing sight of commercial reality — and what it costs the person doing the leading. Nick traces a career built on increme...

Calum James, General Manager of Farizon UK, joins Paul and Sara to talk about what it actually takes to land a brand new electric van marque in one of the world's most demanding fleet markets. Calum walks through Farizon's lineage inside the Geely group - the same family tree as Volvo, Polestar, Lotus, LEVC and the Mercedes-Benz Smart joint venture - and the role of Jameel Motors, the 80-year-old...

Stephen Clegg founded Topspeed Couriers in 1985 and has spent the last four years (and roughly £4.2 million) ripping diesel out of a logistics business that moves dangerous goods, radioactive material, and time-critical government samples around the UK. He sits down with Paul and John — joined briefly by Webfleet's Richard Parker before technology has other ideas — to talk about what actually happ...

Dev Chana started his career as an oil broker in Kensington. Three decades later he's running E.ON Drive Infrastructure in the UK, and his ambition for public charging is unexpectedly modest: he wants it to be boring. Reliable, standardised, unremarkable — the kind of refuel you don't post about because there's nothing to post. Paul and Sas catch up with Dev after first meeting his team in a rain-...

Paul and John take listeners deep into the heart of China’s electric vehicle revolution with Elliot Richards, long-time Shanghai resident and driving force behind of Everything Electric APAC. Fresh from Auto China, the conversation covers: How Elliot went from a three‑month visit to China to 20 years immersed in its EV industry. The rapid transformation of cities like Shenzhen to all‑electric taxi...

This week: Tanya Sinclair, Chief Executive of Electric Vehicles UK (EVUK). Tanya shares how EVUK is tackling misinformation about electric vehicles, supporting both current and future drivers, and working with the wider e-mobility sector to build collaboration rather than competition. She discusses the organisation’s approach to public engagement, from hosting hands-on events like Everything Elect...

This week, Paul and Sara sit down with Becky Lalanne, Managing Director of Voqa, a new entrant in the UK EV charging market. Becky shares how Voqa is tackling the challenge of destination charging, introducing a 7–22kW AC charger with built-in contactless payments, designed to make charging effortless for drivers and more commercially viable for venues. The conversation covers: The frustrations of...