Martin Gurdon

Why you no longer need a driveway to go electric

  • From Spectator Life
Image: ZipCharge

Entrepreneur Jonathan Carrier reckons more people would drive electric cars if they had portable chargers in their boots. The electrical equivalent of a can of petrol.

So he’s launching one. Called the ZipCharge Go, he claims it’s a design world first. There are portable battery packs that work with electric cars. Generally, these are designed for giant American recreational vehicles, some of which have their own solar panels, and if you search YouTube you’ll come across allegedly comic videos of people recharging moribund Teslas with petrol generators, but the Go has been designed from the off to charge vehicles, and has the necessary software to pair up with them.

‘The inspiration was my business partner’s brother, who lives in an end of terrace house in Twickenham and bought an EV for personal use. He was always queuing to charge it up, and I thought; ‘there must be a better way,’ said Carrier.

You can buy halfway house EV chargers like the ThirdRock Energy Commando Plug, which comes with various electric outputs and plug types, but still needs to be connected to a building or a piece of street furniture before it will charge a car. Carrier’s product, which uses lithium-ion battery cells, and will be sold in three different power outputs (4, 6 and 8kWh), is entirely free standing and portable. Taking a little over half an hour to charge, it provides a claimed range of about twenty miles, so would be suitable for getting you home from work rather than getting across the country.

40 per cent of car owning households in Britain don’t have access to off street parking

Carrier is hoping the charger, which is set to be available in the second quarter of 2023, will have a ready market, claiming that 8.5m, or 40 per cent of car owning households in Britain don’t have access to off street parking, so the luxury of a reasonably rapid home charging box is denied them.

Carrier has a background in vehicle engineering, as does Richie Sibal, ZipCharge’s co-founder (the pair have worked for the likes of Lotus, Jaguar and McLaren) and talks about how the Go’s light, space frame aluminium sub structure is a homage to the way some sports cars are built.

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