17 EVs, 1 charger: the queue we’re here to fix
Andrew Wang
8 April 2026
The UK doesn’t have a charger shortage. It has a sharing problem.
Seventeen EVs share every public charger. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of private ones sit idle on driveways all day.
The maths nobody likes.
In the UK there are roughly 17 electric cars for every public charger. The more people switch to electric, the worse that gets, not better. And building new public chargers is slow: years of planning and millions of pounds for a single site. We cannot dig our way out of this fast enough.
But the chargers already exist.
Here is the bit that flips the whole thing. There are around 950,000 private chargers in the UK, against roughly 119,000 public ones. And most private chargers sit unused for more than 15 hours a day. The capacity to clear the queue is already bolted to the wall. It is just stuck behind people's front gates.
Sharing beats building.
Every home charger that joins Splash is a new place to charge that cost nothing to build and took about ten minutes to switch on. No planning permission, no roadworks, no two-year wait. Just a neighbour saying "sure, use mine."
That’s the bigger picture.
We are not trying to out-build the public network. We are trying to make the network we already have, the one sitting on driveways up and down the country, actually usable. That is how you beat the 17-to-1 ratio. One shared charger at a time.
