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