225 - The Subscription Episode

Gary : Hi, I'm Gary and this is EV Musings, a podcast about renewables, electric vehicles and things that are interesting to electric vehicle owners. On the show today, we'll be looking at subscriptions. Before we start, I wanted to remind you that we've got lots of interesting things planned for later on this season.

Episodes on EV fires, living in an apartment with an electric vehicle. We've got more from ZapMap, discussion on battery health, amongst other things. So are you subscribed?

g my first EV in one month in: 2019

Now bear in mind, this was a month where I was travelling regularly, not working from home, and I was using public charging quite a lot. What do you think about that? Here's a little history.

Back in: 2017

You could pay £6. 55 a month for a subscription, and the electricity itself was dispensed at a rate of, wait for it, 9p a kWh plus VAT. Those were the days.

Over the years, the subscription rate rose, and the price per kWh rose, but it was always worthwhile having a subscription if you were charging in public a lot. Many people who are just moving over to EVs are looking at the price of public charging and saying it's awfully expensive. Which it is, and we talked about why that is back in episode 186.

But there are still people who are paying for their charging using contactless payment cards, as that's the easiest way to do so, alongside some specific charge point operator apps. We discussed apps back in the opening episode of this season, episode 220. But a lot of people are actually missing out on the ability to reduce their charging costs by taking advantage of a subscription with a charge point operator.

Let me just give a little caveat here. I want to also say that, as at the time of writing and recording this, the vast majority of people who currently drive electric vehicles are able to charge at home, overnight, often on a cheap EV tariff. This means they don't always need subscriptions to get the best tariff to charge their car. End of caveat.

But does this mean that all's lost and subscriptions are not actually worthwhile? Well, no.

Today we're going to have a quick look through what's out there, and how you can leverage subscriptions to lower your cost of charging.

Now just so we're clear on what a subscription is, a charging subscription is a monthly fee which is paid to enable a user to benefit from lower priced charging tariffs.

So with that out of the way, let's start with an example, Tesla.

If you drive Tesla, if you drive a Tesla, you get the best rates in the UK for high powered charging at the moment. The rates vary across the day, but it can be as low as mid 30p/ kWh for a charge. But since Tesla opened up their network to other manufacturers, they've decided to charge those who don't drive Teslas a slightly higher tariff than those who do.

And that's fine. I have no problem with that. But what they've also done is they've instigated a subscription service for charging on their supercharging network.

The subscription is £8. 99 per month and it allows you to get a discount of around 9p or 10p a kWh on your charging with the Tesla supercharger network. The reason the discount's not fixed is because Tesla's one of the few charge point operators that has time of day tariffs which rise and fall according to the demand on the grid.

Hence the discount changes too. Then there's Ionity. They have what's known as the Ionity Passport.

It has, at the time of writing, two tiers. Each tier is priced slightly differently per month and allows a subscriber to enjoy slightly different tariffs. It's applicable all over Europe but the prices differ in the UK.

In the UK you have Ionity Passport Motion which, after an introductory offer to get you on board, is £5.49 a month and 53p per kWh for each charge. Bearing in mind the non-subscription rate for Ionity is 74p a kWh.

If you tend to do a lot of public charging it might be worth going for Ionity Passport Power. This is £10.50 per month but offers 43p a kWh charging.

That's a really good deal if you're doing a certain amount of public charging each month and we'll look at working out how to calculate if your subscription is worthwhile in a moment. Now I've already mentioned BP Pulse or Chargemaster as they were. Now again, at the time of writing, their subscription is at £7.85 per month and this will give you a 20% discount on the standard charging tariffs.

Remember BP Pulse are one of the few networks that have quite a complex tariff structure depending on the power of the charger and the method of payment. Otherwise I would put actual rates down here. So how do I know if a subscription is worthwhile?

The easiest way to work out whether you're getting good value from a subscription is to divide the monthly cost by the differenc in cost between the subscription tariff and the non-subscription tariff and this will give you a number and that's a number of kilowatt hours. If you regularly publicly charge more than that number of kilowatt hours per subscription period then it's worthwhile going for the subscription. As an example, if you went for the subscription service offered by Ionity with their Ionity Passport Power offering, remember that's £10.50 per month with a tariff of 43 pence a kilowatt hour, that's a discount of 31 pence per kilowatt hour on their standard rate. Divide the £10.50 by the 31 pence saving and this will give you approximately 34.

That's the number of kilowatt hours of energy you will need to charge on the Ionity network every month to benefit from using the subscription. If you regularly charge more than that and can move all of that over to Ionity, the subscription will be worthwhile for you. But if you do less than that per month or you don't regularly charge where there are Ionity charges, it's probably not worth it.

With Tesla, the calculation is a little trickier because the subscription price is fixed but the amount you can save varies according to the location and the time of day. Some times and locations give you 12 pence per kilowatt hour savings, some give you 8 pence per kilowatt hour savings. I've averaged it out at about 9 pence a kilowatt hour savings.

So the £8. 99 subscription would need 100 kilowatt hours per month of charging to repay the cost of the subscription itself. But there are other sorts of subscriptions you can get and these are not network specific and they fall into two separate groups.

OEM provisions and roaming provisions. Let's take a look at OEMs. You may have heard, because I've mentioned it once or twice, that I drove from London to Geneva in June this year alongside a number of other electric vehicles.

It was a fantastic journey, the weather was great, we all had a lovely time. But at one of the chargers, we were approached by a Frenchman who it seemed had just bought a brand new electric BMW iX2 and he said to me that this was his first time he'd ever charged at a public charger and he had no idea how to do it. Could I help?

Well, of course, I was more than happy to show him how the Alpitronic units worked at this particular rest stop. But what was also interesting to me was when I asked him how he would pay for it, he produced a BMW RFID card. Now this means that when he bought his car, he was provided with a charging subscription by BMW to help him charge.

This subscription may be explicit or it may be implicit. In other words, he may have had to set it up as part of the purchase of the vehicle or it may be provided automatically. Either way, someone is paying BMW an amount of money per month to use this RFID card.

In essence, this RFID card or EMSP, as it is known in the trade, is actually a really clever way of doing things. What it's actually doing is it's linking a specific payment method – a card – to a specific payment instrument – a bank account or a payment card, credit card type thing. This then can also be linked into one or more subscriptions as detailed earlier on.

For example, Ionity have linkages with all the Audi VW range – BMW, Ford, Genesis, Hyundai and Kia, Mercedes-Benz and MINI. And usually this gives the drivers of these cars access to subscription level tariffs that I detailed earlier on for Ionity. You may know that I run the Volkswagen ID3. VW have teamed up with a third-party provider called Elli to provide a similar service there. With Elli you can opt to pay a monthly subscription and get discounted charges across the UK and Europe.

Although if I'm totally honest, the discounts aren't that great. For example, on the first level of paid subscription, which is Drive Plus, it costs £5. 99 per month and DC charging in the UK is 85p a kWh but Ionity is 53p a kWh.

For the higher use level, Drive Highway, the UK DC rate is 69p a kWh and again 53p a kWh for Ionity. Now bear in mind that Ionity is 74p a kWh so it's not that bad again if you're a big Ionity user.

I want to move on to roaming apps now.

Some of them have a subscription offering and some of them don't. Let's take Bonnet for example. Actually it's now called Charge Anywhere and it's part of the OVO offering.

We spoke with Alex Thwaites, the director of electric vehicles at OVO in episode 207 last season so check that out. With what was called Bonnet and is now Charge Anywhere, you can again elect for a subscription offering which they call a boost and use that to get reduced tariffs on numerous charges. There are two levels of boost.

The first is £2 per month and it gives you 10% off eligible charge point operators and the second is a turbo boost at £8 a month and it gives you 15% rates. Now this can drop for example a Fastned tariff from 69 pence kilowatt hour to a little over 58 pence a kilowatt hour.

The final sort of subscription I want to talk about is one that we'll cover in more detail in a later episode of the program.

It's a subscription to allow AC charging if you live in an apartment block. Charge Guru have an offering that allows you to have your own charger installed running off a standard domestic electricity rate so you're not paying public charging rates. And it's all managed for you by them for a standard subscription per month.

Now keep an ear out for more details on this later in the season. And thank you to Charge Guru for sponsoring this episode. So what can we say about subscriptions?

Well one thing I always hear about public charging is that it's more expensive than petrol or diesel. And my usual answer to that is if you only charge in public and you only pay the most expensive tariff then that's probably true. But that's like only filling your petrol car at the expensive motorway service areas and not taking advantage of cheap fuel at places such as the supermarkets.

Why would you do that? Exactly. With EV charging if you charge enough that a subscription would be merited it means you can take advantage of some pretty good deals.

And if you don't charge enough for in public to merit a subscription then surely public charging isn't such a huge expense that you should be able to complain about it. Right? I don't have any subscriptions but then again I only really charge using public rapid charges for about 5% of my total usage.

spend public charging back in: 2019

Well I have old statements that show the total charging cost for a heavy month of public charging is £23.19 including the subscription charge itself. Nowadays I can spend that much on one charge of my ID3 battery between 10 and 60% at a single Osprey charging unit.

So things have changed somewhat. Let me know what you think. Info@evmusings.com

This season we're looking at raising the awareness of carbon literacy with our listeners. And one way we're doing that is with a carbon fact as read by carbon literacy trainer Anne Snelson.

Anne: Did you know about 7% of the world's emissions are due to cement?

It's a massive producer of carbon dioxide due to line calcination and the temperature it meets.

Gary : It's time for a cool EV or renewable thing to share with you listeners. Warwickshire has become the first professional cricket club in the United Kingdom to operate an all-electric fleet of grounds equipment to maintain its pitches.

he iconic stadium net zero by: 2030

You love a good sports story with a happy ending, right?

I hope you enjoyed listening to today's show. If you have any thoughts, comments, criticisms or other general messages to pass on to me I can be reached at info at evmusings.com. On the socials I'm on Twitter @musingsEV. I'm also on Instagram at evmusings where I post short videos and podcast extracts regularly.

Why not follow me there? Thanks to everyone who supports me through patreon on a monthly basis, and through Ko-fi.com on an ad-hoc one.

If you enjoyed this episode why not buy me a coffee? Go to Ko-fi.com/evmusings and you can do just that. Takes Apple Pay, too!

Regular listeners will know about my two ebooks- ‘So, you’ve gone electric’ and ‘So you’ve gone renewable’.

They’re 99p each (or equivalent) and you can get them on Amazon

Check out the links in the show notes for more information as well as a link to my regular EV Musings newsletter and associated articles.

I know you’re probably driving or walking or jogging now. But if you can remember- and you enjoyed this episode drop a review in iTunes, please. It really helps me out. Thanks.

If you've reached this part of the podcast and are still listening, thank you.

Why not let me know you've got to this point by tweeting me at musings EV with the words 'subscribe or die!'.#ifyouknowyouknow. Nothing else.

Thanks as always to my co-founder Simone. You know he's back from his summer holiday. Following in the footsteps or tire tracks of the great Chris and Julie Ramsey, he decided he wanted to wanted to take his Model Y through the middle of the Sahara Desert on a journey known as the road to hell.

I thought he'd struggle with it but he seemed to find it quite good fun.

It was a fantastic journey. The weather was great. We all had a lovely time.

Thanks for listening. Bye.