Almost everything about how we think about charging an electric car is borrowed from the petrol station. That mental model is intuitive, familiar — and mostly wrong.
The petrol-station model — drive to a special place, fill up fast, leave — shapes how we plan EV charging, and it's the wrong frame. Cars sit parked roughly 95% of the time, and EVs charge perfectly well while idle. Designing around parking rather than refuelling — home, workplace, kerbside, destination charging — solves most needs with slow, cheap, grid-friendly power, leaving rapid charging for genuine top-ups on long journeys.
Ask someone how you “fill up” an electric car and they’ll describe a petrol station with a plug: you drive to a dedicated place, you connect, you wait as briefly as possible, and you leave with a full tank. It’s the model we all grew up with, so it’s the model we instinctively apply to EVs.
The problem is that an electric car is not a petrol car with a different fuel, and charging is not refuelling. Carrying the petrol-station model across leads to the wrong infrastructure, the wrong anxieties, and a much harder problem than we actually have.
Two facts break the analogy:
Cars are parked almost all the time. The average private car is in motion for a small fraction of the day and parked — at home, at work, at the shops — for the overwhelming majority of it. A petrol car can only refuel in motion-adjacent bursts because you can’t keep a pump attached while parked. An EV has no such limitation.
An EV charges while idle. Plug it in wherever it’s already sitting and it charges with no human attention at all. The “wait” that defines refuelling simply doesn’t apply when the car charges during time you were going to spend parked anyway.
Put those together and the entire premise of the petrol station — go somewhere special, wait, leave — dissolves. The natural place to charge an EV is wherever it already spends its time.
You don’t refuel an EV. You keep it topped up while it does what cars mostly do anyway — sit still.
If charging follows parking, the infrastructure problem reshapes completely. Instead of concentrating on a relatively small number of high-power “filling stations,” the priority becomes putting slower, cheaper charging where cars naturally dwell:
Most of these use slow or moderate power. That’s a feature, not a limitation: slow charging is cheaper, gentler on the battery, easier on the grid, and ideal for shifting demand to cheap, clean hours. Rapid charging then takes its proper, smaller role — genuine top-ups on long journeys, where speed really does matter — rather than being the default mental model for all charging.
Get the frame wrong and you over-invest in rapid-charging “stations,” under-invest in the kerbside and destination charging most people actually need, and stoke a “range/refuel anxiety” that’s really an artefact of the petrol-station analogy. Get it right and a large fraction of charging becomes invisible, slow, cheap and grid-friendly — happening quietly while cars are parked — and the remaining fast-charging problem becomes far more tractable.
Charging-while-parked is, underneath, a problem of distributed, flexible load — many slow chargers, drawing when it’s cheap and clean, coordinated against the grid. That’s squarely our area, and it connects to how fleets actually charge in practice and to flexible demand more broadly. If you’re planning charging around real usage patterns, let’s talk.
Charging-while-parked is a distributed, flexible-load problem — many slow chargers drawing when it's cheap and clean. That's squarely our area.