These days, charging your electric vehicle (EV) is something you can do while going about your everyday life, whether that is at home, during a weekly shop or while watching a film at the cinema. This is possible with more than 120,000 EV chargers available at 46,000 locations across the UK. A LONG TIME COMING The first EV chargers were already in place around the early 20th century. However, the EV charging infrastructure we know today came into place within the last 10 years where a significant step change has been seen since there were only 2,000 EV chargers in 2015. Making this transition and installing the necessary infrastructure for the EV market to become a reality requires systematic effort. Putting the physical infrastructure in place is a significant endeavour in itself. However, this is not where the work ends. People need to accept and make use of new technical developments, and this is where legitimisation comes in. Making something widely accepted requires the coordinated efforts of EV charge point manufacturers, operators, local authorities, government, and others. A research project I undertook with Katy Mason, from Salford Business School, and Frank Jacob, from ESCP Business School Berlin, showed how the EV infrastructure market has been legitimised by blending familiar aspects of the refuelling market into EV charging. BREAK THE MOULD, RESHAPE THE PAST We found that incorporating EV charging into existing infrastructures, such as petrol stations, car parks and houses, helps to legitimise it by connecting charging to familiar situations. Instead of introducing entirely new usage scenarios, EV chargers were added to situations people know how to navigate. This also has the advantage of showcasing the market’s infrastructure. Like petrol stations, EV chargers are now a common sight and part of our infrastructure landscape. EV chargers, thereby, serve as a physical market representation – seeing it makes it a reality. Physical market representations are not achieving this alone. Early-stage markets are often made more graspable via media reporting, government funding, market-specific symbols and vocabulary. For instance, car symbols were altered to include a cable, a plug and a lightning bolt to symbolise EVs. Similarly, the phrase ‘range anxiety’ was introduced to capture drivers' worries of running out of battery – a common consideration of non-EV drivers when evaluating to swap to an EV – thereby, offering a term to describe this phenomenon. Further, new technologies are legitimised by drawing parallels between them and their origin market. The design of EV chargers and the process of charging resemble refuelling petrol and diesel vehicles in a few ways. This is most evident in the way EV chargers are designed, especially for rapid and ultra-rapid chargers. They mirror fuel pumps quite closely, with towering column units whose cable must be plugged into a car. However, it is not just their appearance 28 |
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