Today I've called into the services on the M11
near Bishop Stortford and Stansted Airport. These are the Birchanger or Birchanger..
I'm not sure how you pronounce it. I've never been to these services. But anyway, I think it's
Birchanger Green it's called and I'm just going to look at the electric
vehicle charging here because this is one of those motorway services which has seen
huge expansion over the last few weeks. So at this site there's always been two Gridserve rapid chargers to the
right
hand side of the services and then at the back next to the hotel,
there are four Tesla Superchargers and now on the other side of the
car park, this lot has appeared. There are 16 Applegreen 150kW chargers there and 20 Tesla Superchargers. So it's a Sunday and this services is very busy
and as you can see the car park almost looks full and actually so do these Applegreen chargers. I would say at least two
thirds of them are in use. There's not many spaces there now. Uh it's good to se
e all these different types
of electric vehicles charging. But unusually, it's pretty
quiet on the Tesla chargers. There goes another flight from Stansted airport. But there are only... oh there's
now four of us here charging. So these Applegreen chargers are CCS2 only and I
saw on ZapMap that they're currently 77p per kWh. But the signage there says you can
save 5p if you pay using the app versus contactless payment
down there on the screen. The pricing of the Tesla Superchargers though c
hanges depending on the
time of day and how busy it is. It is all displayed in the vehicles. But because I get free supercharging on my
car, as you can see there, it's zero cost, it strips the pricing out so I don't know what
these superchargers are currently costing. So as electrical grid connections
get improved at motorway services we're seeing this huge expansion in EV chargers. Particularly over 2023, the whole UK
infrastructure really took a jump forward. So at this site, we had those
original two
Gridserve chargers and four Tesla Superchargers and it suddenly jumped from that to 20 new Tesla Superchargers 16 Applegreen chargers and keeping those original six chargers as well.
So it's great to see. So at this motorway services now, there's
a total of 44 rapid charging bays. These ones here and the original
ones over the other side of the site. So I'm going to disconnect and get on my
way, that's because I'm fully charged. That's shut by itself of
course. I keep forgetti
ng that. But anyway, I hope you found this video useful. If you have please do click the thumbs up button. That really does help. Do subscribe to the channel. If you want to see
other videos on the UK charging infrastructure, I'll put a link in the video description below to a playlist where you can
see other videos I've made.
Comments
I used the new apple green chargers a couple of weeks ago for my Cupra born, with my battery down at 40% charge & having been driving for a couple of hours I was pulling a disappointing 45-50kw. Luckily we only needed to wait an extra 5-10 mins , following a coffee/loo stop. Very welcome addition to these services, as we use them on a regular basis when heading towards London.
Interesting to see the electric motorcycle charging up......
Finally I will be able to get to Heathrow or London reliable as I've been using alternative routes due to the lack of chargers on the M11
Finally they have more than a few chargers 👍
Nice to see a type 2 connector for us older Zoe drivers still In operation
They just need to resurface the rest of the car park as well!
wow that is such good news 👍
They’re certainly giving us electric vehicle drivers the charging points now!! Birchanger, pronounced Birch Hanger, looks like a good bet when on the M11.
I always thought it was pronounced 'birch-hanger'. (I'm probably wrong!)
I see you miss your Model S, even customised the Model Y colour to the MS green. 😊
AppleGreen have been weirdly inconsistent with their support for CHAdeMO. In Abington they've installed 8x 250kw Tritium chargers, with both CCS2 and CHAdeMO on both units. Where as at other sites (e.g. Gretna Green) they've installed ABB units with dual-CCS on ALL the new units and zero new CHAdeMO plugs. Gretna has only 1 CHAdeMO plug and 12 + 3 public CCS + 4 Tesla units. Hopefully GridServe will recognise this and start swapping their dual-charging 50kw units over to have one of each plug at sites with dozens of CCS... And here AppleGreen have used a third brand of chargers, again fitting them all with just CCS2 (dual-charging units again). It seems that somebody at AppleGreen has decided that they'll only include CHAdeMO if it wouldn't also prevent a CCS2 vehicle from using a bay due to a lack of CCS2 plugs...
Only tried AppleGreen chargers once and it was weirdly inconsistent in the charge rate it was giving. Going up to 170kW and then dropping to single figures kW the next.
It’s a shame about the terrible exit though. I spent nearly 15 mins getting out of there once so now I use trumpington instead
It's BERCH-ANG-ERR - soft g (almost silent) and a silent 'h' - lived round here for over half a century and never heard a local pronouce the h or the g. Thanks for the video, hope the horrendous roadworks didn't cause you too much trouble.
Pronounced Birch-hanger
Its pronounced Birch - ang - er. 'ang' as in 'hang'. so a bit slang like me, dont pronounce the H.