Advertise on podcast: EV Café Takeaway

When Nathan Gore-Brown opened Tesla's first Queensland store, EVs held 0.1% of the Australian market. Last month, plug-ins took around 35%. A former Jaguar and Aston Martin engineer, Nathan now represents AVILOO in Australia and New Zealand through TEST EV. Stefan Holzschuh, who has taken AVILOO into more than 40 markets and now runs the UK, joins at the start before a fire alarm pulls him out. Covered in this episode Why Australia is moving faster than outsiders think: rooftop solar, 500,000 home batteries in a year, and tax-free EV salary packaging How the AVILOO flash test checks battery health, cell balance and sensors in three minutes, and a car it rated 12 points healthier than the car's own reading How auction houses, dealers and pre-purchase inspectors are using battery testing to sell used EVs faster Chinese brands taking over Australian dealer forecourts Nathan's magic wand wish: get rid of the myths about EVs Nathan Gore-Brown LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathan-gore-brown-1403a622/ TEST EV: https://testev.co Stefan Holzschuh LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stefanholzschuh/ AVILOO: https://aviloo.com/en/

When Gurjeet Grewal stepped up as CEO of Octopus EV, there was a three-month window to prove the point. Gurjeet set a deliberately ambitious target for March plate-change, and the business posted the biggest month in its history. Paul and JC hear how Gurjeet got there, from investment banking and leveraged finance to lean startups and then Octopus. Gurjeet credits curiosity to childhood summers with family on other continents, and grit to a mother who worked multiple jobs. They also get into the business. Octopus EV has built the UK's largest EV-only fleet, consumer leasing now makes up a quarter of monthly orders, and it's launching in Germany. Gurjeet explains why only 14% of people believe home charging beats petrol on cost, and what the industry needs to do differently. In this episode: Treating the first three months as CEO as an audition Why networking should never be transactional Consumer leasing, used EVs and getting cars to everyday drivers Helping more people of colour into senior roles A magic wand wish the show hasn't heard before Connect with Gurjeet: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gurjeetgrewallon/Octopus Electric Vehicles: https://octopusev.com

Peter Jones built an events business twice. Two years after launching his first show, his bank manager told him he'd built a skyscraper on a sandy beach and gave him 24 hours to liquidate. He lost the house, the car, everything - then scraped together £16,000, bought the IP back at auction, and started again. Nineteen Group is now heading for 400 people and owns the Commercial Vehicle Show, Installer and International Security Expo. And last July, in front of 120 of his own staff, Peter couldn't force a smile. He told them he was done and sat down. At Nineteen's Wimbledon HQ, Paul gets the unedited version: the hamster wheel, the storm Peter took a 45-foot boat into and had to be pulled out of by the RNLI, and the leadership rebuild that followed. Plus the EV bit - where commercial vehicle electrification is heading, why charging still has "a lot of road to go," and what it takes to bring the big truck manufacturers back to the NEC. Peter Jones (the real one, not the Dragon:)https://www.linkedin.com/in/peter-jones-0b501010/Nineteen Group:https://www.nineteengroup.com

Bob Murphy was working on electric vehicles before most of the UK had anywhere to plug one in. Back in 2011, having retrained as a mechanic at Edinburgh College, he fell into a small research project that put four EVs to work as staff pool cars. Nobody knew whether they could make it from Dalkeith to Dunbar and back. There was no public charging network to fall back on. The college ended up installing its own chargers and running a five-acre solar field on site, and some of those early Mitsubishi i-MiEVs and Citroën C-Zeros are still being stripped and rebuilt by trainee technicians today. From there, Bob spent years selling and siting charge points across Scotland, which he counts as one of his proudest bits of work, and it took him to almost every corner of the country. He now works as a technical executive at Scottish Power, advising on charging networks and infrastructure, and he is a familiar face at industry events and in the WhatsApp groups where he answers questions from anyone, silly or not. Paul and John talk with Bob about: Why a lifelong petrolhead who once owned a four-litre Jaguar XJ6 and a pair of modified Ford Kas became a convert, and what a Hyundai Ioniq 5 N ring taxi lap of the Nürburgring taught him about EVs and fun The wider home energy picture: home chargers, solar, batteries and heat pumps, and why an energy company is encouraging customers to use less Hyperfocus, problem solving and the undiagnosed ADHD Bob credits for the way he goes deep on everything from i-MiEV battery cells to Star Trek lore Pressing the reset button after a career or relationship change, leaning on friends, and a 2024 spent travelling solo to a different country every month Pushing for the Scottish Power job when he felt he wasn't good enough, summed up by a Scottish phrase you'll want to remember: shy weans get nae sweeties Plockton, the west coast, and where to point the car when you need to get away Bob's wish with the EV Café magic wand: less ignorance, more empathy Along the way there is a kilt, two West Highland terriers, a shortbread tin, a tour bus full of cameras at Fort Augustus, and the podcast's most contested answer yet to Star Wars or Star Trek. Connect with Bob on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/bob-murphy-300031b0/Find out more about Scottish Power:https://www.scottishpower.co.uk

Counting charge points tells you almost nothing. That frustration led Chris Rimmer and his colleagues at CENEX to build Are We Nearly There Yet? - reports that express public charging progress not in kilowatts or headline totals, but in years ahead or behind demand, local authority by local authority. (At recording: near-home charging sits about a year and a bit ahead. A little ahead. Not loads.) Chris has spent nearly eight years at CENEX, the not-for-profit consultancy set up in 2005 to drag zero emission vehicles out of the lab and onto the road. His particular skill is compression - turning meter points, grid flexibility and battery degradation into one sentence a politician can act on. He talks to Paul and John about the route in: physical geography and oxbow lakes, a graduate scheme at E.ON, a call centre at 24, a living lab of 75 Milton Keynes homes. A year in Mexico working for a Christian charity reset his sense of who bears the cost when the climate shifts. Connect with Chris: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-rimmer-58468233/CENEX website: https://www.cenex.co.uk

What happens when you take an electric van that can wheelspin off the line and make it drive like the diesel it replaced? According to Kevin Hennelly, commercial director at The Vehicle Group (TVG), you get calmer drivers, fewer accidents, longer tyre life - and up to 30% more range from the same battery. Kevin lifts the lid on TVG, a "very well hidden" UK engineering company whose Aladdin's cave of products includes the Oculus camera (the only vehicle camera made in the UK) and EcoLimit, a power control system that tames EV acceleration, limits reverse speed, and can even put an overloaded van into limp mode until it's back at the depot. He talks through the real-world numbers: a refrigerated home-delivery fleet in London seeing 120–130 miles where unmodified vans manage 90, a water company getting over 200 miles per charge instead of the expected 150–160, and the knock-on savings in charging time, infrastructure, tyres, downtime, and insurance claims. Connect with Kevin: LinkedInThe Vehicle Group: thevehiclegroup.com

Chris Chandler is Principal Consultant at Lex Autolease and the electrification SME across all three Lloyds Banking Group motor brands: Lex Autolease on the B2B side, Tusker in salary sacrifice (22,000 vehicles at acquisition, 100,000 the week we recorded), and Black Horse in retail finance. Between leasing and salary sacrifice, that's a serious chunk of the EVs on British roads. Paul and JC get into: Why cars sprinted and vans crawled - benefit-in-kind versus a purely transactional purchase, and why commercial vehicles are far less price elastic than company cars The moment the tax went up and "the tap just turned off" - then came back down and switched on again Why converted diesel platforms were never going to cut it, and what changes when a van is engineered electric from the ground up Charging that should just work: plug in, it charges, no apps, no cards, no accounts V2G, home solar and batteries, and why a leasing company is now asking customers what's behind the wall socket Designing CO2-based company car tax in 1999, and why CO2 beat the other 18 candidates on the list Biodiesel, waxing fuel, bacterial growth, and the argument for a 5% blend across everything rather than 67% in a handful of refuse trucks Chris Chandler on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-chandler-756b9813/Lex Autolease:https://www.lexautolease.co.ukLex are principal sponsors of the Greenfleet EV Rally.

Angela Muresan arrived in the UK in 2015 with broken English and a job picking and packing in a warehouse. Ten years later she's a presenter, content creator, and the face of Be.EV — and the story of how she got there involves a notebook full of borrowed email templates, a self-funded industry event that left her with £20 in the bank, and a one-way ticket taken purely because an ex once said the UK was the one place he'd never go. Angela talks about ADHD — what it cost her before she understood it, why she now calls it a superpower, and how an unlikely combination of therapy and ChatGPT helped her make sense of her own brain. She explains the gamble behind Race to Zero, the event she organised alone with no marketing experience specifically so the industry would come to her (it worked), and why her proudest achievement has nothing to do with work. Along the way: why she refuses to be boxed in as "an EV person" or "a petrol person", the sameness problem with modern car design, her plan to convert a classic — ideally a '69 Shelby Mustang — to electric, and what she'd do with a EuroMillions win. And when handed the EV Café magic wand, her one wish isn't about chargers or range. It's about ending the tribalism — petrol versus electric, us versus them — and just getting on with building a cleaner future together. Connect with Angela: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marketingwithangela/ Website: https://www.angelamuresan.com Be.EV: https://www.be-ev.co.uk

A co-founder of EVA England, incoming chair of the Recharge APPG in Parliament, and one of the earliest UK adopters of home solar, battery storage and electric driving — Warren Phlips received one of the very first consumer Tesla Powerwall 2 units in the country (number three, he's told, just behind a certain Robert Llewellyn) — he has spent the best part of a decade quietly pulling the EV transition in the right direction, almost entirely as a volunteer. But this conversation goes far beyond charge points and policy. Warren talks candidly about the moment that changed everything: sitting alone in a hospital room, holding his newborn daughter while doctors fought to save his wife, and deciding then and there that his job was to make the world better rather than build a fortress around his family. Everything since — the advocacy, the lobbying, the 20-plus hours a week given freely to EVA England — flows from that decision, and from a promise to his daughter. Along the way: From avionics engineering and FTSE 100 software to government security work — and how none of it explains the hats How showing off a Renault Zoe and some solar panels at an eco open home quietly converted a neighbourhood The five principles Warren tests every policy against: fair, accessible, equitable, safe, accurate A live debate on the newly announced VAT cut on domestic electricity — good news, but is it fair to the millions who can't charge at home? Recognising privilege, and choosing to spend it on other people Lucid Destiny, his new consultancy helping companies navigate the EV transition without losing sight of the consumer at the end of it Why his daughter is named after Ayrton Senna And a Magic Wand wish that might be the best one yet: removing fear itself Connect with Warren:LinkedInEVA England:evaengland.org.uk

Alun Davies once told his team that electric vehicle charging "would never catch on" — and sent someone else to do the first installation jobs. Today he leads ElectrAssure, the electrical contractor behind nearly 2,000 charging sockets for National Grid, the chargers that greet every electric Volkswagen arriving on UK shores, and some of the first DC rapid chargers for Western Power Distribution. This week, Alun sits down with Paul and John to trace the line from qualified electrician to business leader — and it's anything but a straight one. Along the way: a theatre degree, a stint as sound engineer for the England football team's press conferences (and Girls Aloud), a summer spent on commercial roofs, and a cherry picker licence that landed him an apprenticeship in the family firm. Alun talks candidly about the roundtable moment six years ago when nerves nearly got the better of him — and how a "nuts and bolts" perspective turned out to be exactly what a room full of fleet managers needed to hear. He opens up about running a business with his wife (a former deputy head teacher, now Ops Director), why they've agreed never to switch off from work, giving up alcohol in 2022 to think more clearly, and measuring success by the energy in a room rather than the numbers on a spreadsheet. There's also a school report that shattered a 20-year self-image, a son whose GCSE English presentation was titled "Why Electric Vehicles Are Rubbish", and the revelation that this softly-spoken sparky is the lead singer of a heavy metal band, Before the Sirens. Whether you're wiring up a depot, scaling a family business, or just wondering how a self-confessed class clown ends up advising National Grid, this one's worth your fifty minutes. Connect with Alun and ElectrAssure Alun on LinkedInlinkedin.com/in/alun-davies-electrassureElectrAssureelectrassure.co.ukBefore the SirensYouTubeSpotifyApple Music

What does it take to steer a £50 million business towards its founder's vision of lasting 100 years? Andrew Clint, CEO of myenergi, joins us fresh from the company's 10th anniversary celebrations to talk about the next 90. Eighteen months into the role, Andrew explains why myenergi — best known for zappi, the first solar-aware EV charger — is refocusing on Lee Sutton's original ambition: a complete home energy management system. That means vehicle-to-grid on the horizon, the libbi home battery, Grid Pay rewarding customers for grid flexibility, and software that quietly optimises solar, battery and EV charging without the homeowner lifting a finger. His maths is compelling: a full ecosystem could save households around £1,500 a year — close to a zero-bills home. Andrew is candid about why so many charging companies have come and gone while myenergi endures: knowing exactly what you are, and what you aren't. He also digs into how AI is accelerating the business, from a new data lake on AWS to machine learning that learns a household's habits. Andrew also discusses walking away from British Airways after missing out on a job, growing a De La Rue division from £30m to £90m, and the mother whose question — "is that really the best you can do?" — still drives him today. Connect with Andrew:LinkedInFind out more about myenergi:myenergi.com

Dan McLaren left school with no qualifications, spent his early years as a greenkeeper at a private members' golf club, and now looks after half of the BP Pulse network as Network Optimisation Lead. Dan talks about growing up dyslexic in a school system that dealt with it by "putting you in a class with less people", and about the father-in-law who took him on as a project — daily five o'clock phone calls, hard questions, and a £600-a-month leg-up that let him start again from the bottom in the motor trade. It's a powerful case for why everyone should find themselves a mentor, and why Dan now makes time to be one for the younger generation coming up behind him. We also cover: Falling into EV by accident — how a fixed-term contract at the Electric Vehicle Experience Centre in Milton Keynes (taken mainly because it came with a car) turned into a career, once Dan swapped a cautious rental policy for a simple philosophy: bums on seats sells EVs. Life as "Dan Dan the EV Man" — taking on the myths and misinformation head-on via TikTok, why he actually quite enjoyed the naysayers, and why he stepped back from it to make a bigger difference from a commercial seat. Where BP Pulse goes next — the shift to purely rapid and ultra-fast charging, why it's about the right charger in the right place rather than the most chargers in the ground, partnerships with M&S, Q-Park and Transport for London, and an honest reflection on the reputational baggage that comes with being one of the industry's earliest movers. Playing to your strengths — how Dan turned dyslexia into an engine for ideas, relationships and front-of-room energy, and learned to let the analytical people do the analytical bits. Plus, Dan receives the legendary EV Café magic wand and uses his wishes on happy kids, a healthier heart, and making BP Pulse the biggest and best charge point operator in the UK. Connect with Dan LinkedIn: Dan McLaren BP Pulse: bppulse.com TikTok: Dan Dan the EV Man

What do you get when you cross the world's most innovative energy company with the world's largest battery maker? Swaptopus — a joint venture between Octopus Energy and CATL that's bringing HGV battery swapping to the UK and Europe. And the man growing it is Will Rowe, Entrepreneur in Residence at Octopus Energy, who joins us this week from a tennis club, the day after selling his house. Commitment. Will explains why battery swapping cracks the three problems that have stalled electric trucking: grid connections, charging downtime, and the mismatch between when trucks need power and when power is cheap. Swap a battery in minutes, keep the truck earning, and let the swapped-out batteries do a second job — because a network of stations full of batteries is also a virtual power plant, storing cheap renewable energy and feeding it back when the grid needs it. This isn't just a transport play; it's an energy infrastructure play. He's refreshingly blunt about the road that led here, too. Will previously founded a hydrogen business for exactly this market — and he tells us candidly why it didn't work, why losing two-thirds of your energy is no route to energy security, and what China's thousand-to-one preference for batteries over hydrogen tells us about where this is all heading. His verdict on hydrogen for transport is one you'll want to hear in full. Along the way we get into: Why trucks are the easy win — 32 TWh of new annual electricity demand if the UK's trucks go electric, lowering bills for everyone, while governments obsess over data centres instead Autonomy changing everything — a customer planning to go from 60 to 160 hours of weekly truck utilisation, and what cab-free, 24/7 freight means for an industry whose two biggest costs are labour and fuel Bringing Chinese OEMs to Europe — and conversations underway with four of the five biggest European truck makers Geography-specific energy strategies — why a swap station in solar-rich Spain looks nothing like one in windy Britain Growing up dyslexic with a reading age of six, passing A-levels anyway, and why resilience — and a mum who insisted he could do anything — mattered more than school ever did Honest talk about failure — why it hurts, what it teaches, and why loving the problem matters more than loving your first solution And when handed the EV Café Magic Wand, Will's wish is deliberately unglamorous and absolutely fundamental: just make electricity cheaper. Get that right, he argues, and the business case for electrifying everything falls into place on its own. Connect with Will: LinkedInOctopus Energy: octopus.energy

Most households and small businesses don't have an automotive expert on hand, just a relative who gets cornered at barbecues or "someone who used to be a mechanic" now responsible for a multi-million-pound fleet. That gap is the problem Paul Jewell built CarCloud to fix. Paul joins Paul Kirby and Sara Sloman to explain how CarCloud surfaces the MOT deadlines, lease endings and maintenance costs that usually blindside drivers, pairing each one with a solution rather than just a warning. He makes the case for the SME sector, not the big fleets, as the real engine of electric van and car growth. He also covers his work in last-mile transport: 10,000 pedal-assisted, motorcycle-grade electric bikes already on UK roads, care workers using them to fit more home visits into a day, and a new grocery sidecar that carries 40 kilos for around 14p per 50 miles. Along the way Paul traces his approach back to selling used cars in Birmingham's subprime credit era, tells the story of a remarkable homeless man who taught him chess and life lessons as a kid, wishes for baseline foods to be sold "net free" with no VAT or profit attached, and sets out CarCloud's next phase: automotive and mobility banking that returns real value to the driver. Connect with Paul Jewell: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-jewell-55476122/ CarCloud: https://carcloudsolutions.com

How do you actually know what's left in a used EV battery? Nikolaus Mayerhofer and Alexander Millinger from Aviloojoin us to draw the line between a real diagnostic and a glorified readout — and why that difference decides what a second-hand electric car or van is worth. NiKo has been building electric things since he was 12, soldering together his first e-bike back in 1987 and developing battery management systems by 19. That four decades of battery engineering — lead acid, nickel cadmium, lithium iron phosphate, NMC — is now baked into Aviloo's three-minute flash test, which pulls up to 50,000 data samples through the OBD port, sends them to the cloud, and returns an accurate, independent State of Health certificate. Eight years of collected data from thousands of vehicles (over 50 million kilometres) sits behind every result, and (from July) a UK warranty backs each certificate. We get into the things the surface won't tell you: Why mileage no longer equals battery health — a study of 600 Model 3s found consumption varying by a factor of two depending purely on how they were driven and charged How charging to 100% every night, hammering the autobahn, and preheating all quietly age a pack — and why average degradation is fine but the variance is the reason you test before you buy The honest take on fast charging, solid-state hype, and why a Model S still runs a 40-year-old cell format Battery second life: diagnostics feeding power storage in Japan, reuse from scrapped vehicles, and what happens when OEMs stop making modules Scaling Aviloo from two friends talking on mountain bike rides to 100+ people and one million tests sold — across the UK, US, Benelux and Asia Guests: Nikolaus Mayerhofer, Founder & CEO — LinkedIn Alexander Millinger — LinkedIn Aviloo — aviloo.com