The EV Café Takeaway

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: LinkedIn The 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.uk Lex 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