Charger reservation

[fly]

If I was doing a long motorway trip London - Scotland, are there any fast chargers that can be reserved in advance, like a couple of hours before I'm due to reach it, so I can guarantee it'll be available when I get there?

[mikeiow]

fly said:

If I was doing a long motorway trip London - Scotland, are there any fast chargers that can be reserved in advance, like a couple of hours before I'm due to reach it, so I can guarantee it'll be available when I get there?

Interesting idea…..I don’t *think* so…..but curious to hear if anyone else knows of any that do.
I believe Tesla’s have a degree of intelligence in knowing the state of Tesla chargepoints, but since I don’t have a Tesla, I can’t tell you how useful that works out!

[samoht]

Mercedes are talking about establishing charging stations which permit (Mercedes?) drivers to reserve them, but I've not heard of anything like that yet offered.

[plfrench]

Surely this approach just wouldn't work for rapid chargers? It would make availability pretty much zero to the vast majority as trying to pre-emptively plan exact timings and duration would leave so many margins for error for it to be useful that you'd end up with huge amounts of needless downtime per charger. You could very easily have a 30min delay due to traffic on a 200mile journey. Meaning your 'slot' would be wasted so be no good for you or someone else who could have charged whilst you weren't there.

Destination charging reservation makes much more sense - i.e. hotel spaces linked to rooms.

[SWoll]

The provider would have to charge a significant reservation fee to cover no shows (£50-100), at which point would people be willing to risk it with so many potential reasons for late arrival on a long trip?

Get there early and you're sat around making the experience even more painful, get there late and it costs you a packet for no charge. Just not workable I'd suggest?

Edited by SWoll on Saturday 11th November 08:56