The EV Café Takeaway

Every charging session involves a handshake drivers never see: identifying the vehicle, working out who pays and at what price, and settling the bill across roaming partners whose figures don't always agree. Björn Albertsson co-founded Metergram, a 50-person services company that works only on EV charging software for operators, eMSPs and utilities worldwide.

Recorded live at Fleet & Mobility Live 2026 at the NEC in Birmingham, this conversation explains what "software-defined charging" means once a depot adds battery storage, solar, V2G and demand charges. It also looks at what happens when a fleet's charging, fleet management, transport management and monitoring systems don't work together.

In this episode

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

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:

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:

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:

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:

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: