A familiar site across the UK’s road network, Little Chef, the chain of restaurants, is to begin rolling out a network of electric car charging points across its outlets.
Plans to install the charging points marks the biggest deployment of charging stations by any restaurant chain worldwide. Supported by energy company SSE and charging point provider Chargemaster Plc, the firm hopes to bring the latest in EV technology to its restaurants, supplied with low carbon electricity.
Initially the roll out will see the installation of 126 charging points in Little Chef restaurant car parks by February 2012. According to the firm, this will mean that 90 per cent of the UK will be no further than 30 miles from a Little Chef equipped with an EV charging point. The vision is for every one of the 162 Little Chef outlets to have an EV charging point by the end of 2012.
Little Chef restaurants will feature charging points which can support up to 7 kW fast charging, meaning motorists can recharge their cars while they fill up their stomachs too.
With plug-in cars now available in the UK and further models set to launch, UK motorists can run on electricity by checking out EVs produced by the likes of Vauxhall, Renault, Nissan, Mitsubishi, Peugeot and Toyota.
Charging facilities will be provided for free until December 2012.
Little Chef’s Managing Director, Tracey Mulligan comments: “This represents an important stage in the brand development of Little Chef, we recently launched a completely new brand identity and introduced a top quality grab and go foodoffering, designed for today’s motorist. Our approach to ethical sourcing of our food is absolutely in line with offering electric car charging points. This is just the first phase, we want every Little Chef to offer this service for motorists and are working with the best in the market place, Chargemaster and SSE to deliver this.”
Norman Baker, Transport Minister said: “I welcome this big thinking from Little Chef, giving a taste of the future in the move towards a first class national recharging network for plug-in cars. The Government has provided £30m of funding for electric car charging infrastructure through the Plugged-In Places programme in cities and regions across the UK. This private-sector-led initiative is just the kind of ingredient we need to drive the development of our national network of recharging infrastructure. It is great to see another example of UK enterprise coming forward to make the most of the opportunity”.
