The EV Café

Research shows clean air action has saved 14,000 lives

By The EV Café Team

// 17 Jul 2026

By The EV Café Team

// 17 Jul 2026

Research shows clean air action has saved 14,000 livesResearch shows clean air action has saved 14,000 lives

Local authority‑led clean air action has saved almost 14,000 lives

Latest podcast

Coming 22 Jul

#176 - Will Rowe | Octopus Energy#176 - Will Rowe | Octopus Energy

Scheduled for 22 Jul 2026

What do you get when you cross the world's most innovative energy company with the world's largest battery maker? Swaptopus — a joint venture between Octopus Energy and CATL that's bringing HGV battery swapping to the UK and Europe. And the man growing it is Will Rowe, Entrepreneur in Residence at Octopus Energy, who joins us this week from a tennis club, the day after selling his house. Commitment. Will explains why battery swapping cracks the three problems that have stalled electric trucking: grid connections, charging downtime, and the mismatch between when trucks need power and when power is cheap. Swap a battery in minutes, keep the truck earning, and let the swapped-out batteries do a second job — because a network of stations full of batteries is also a virtual power plant, storing cheap renewable energy and feeding it back when the grid needs it. This isn't just a transport play; it's an energy infrastructure play. He's refreshingly blunt about the road that led here, too. Will previously founded a hydrogen business for exactly this market — and he tells us candidly why it didn't work, why losing two-thirds of your energy is no route to energy security, and what China's thousand-to-one preference for batteries over hydrogen tells us about where this is all heading. His verdict on hydrogen for transport is one you'll want to hear in full. Along the way we get into: - **Why trucks are the easy win** — 32 TWh of new annual electricity demand if the UK's trucks go electric, lowering bills for everyone, while governments obsess over data centres instead - **Autonomy changing everything** — a customer planning to go from 60 to 160 hours of weekly truck utilisation, and what cab-free, 24/7 freight means for an industry whose two biggest costs are labour and fuel - **Bringing Chinese OEMs to Europe** — and conversations underway with four of the five biggest European truck makers - **Geography-specific energy strategies** — why a swap station in solar-rich Spain looks nothing like one in windy Britain - **Growing up dyslexic with a reading age of six**, passing A-levels anyway, and why resilience — and a mum who insisted he could do anything — mattered more than school ever did - **Honest talk about failure** — why it hurts, what it teaches, and why loving the problem matters more than loving your first solution And when handed the EV Café Magic Wand, Will's wish is deliberately unglamorous and absolutely fundamental: **just make electricity cheaper.** Get that right, he argues, and the business case for electrifying everything falls into place on its own. --- **Connect with Will:** [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/will-rowe-55ab9816/) **Octopus Energy:** [octopus.energy](https://octopus.energy/)

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The EV Café weekly news bulletin - 24 July 2026The EV Café weekly news bulletin - 24 July 2026

24 Jul

2026

09:00 - 09:30 (GMT / BST)

London ranked among worst European cities for traffic-related waste

By The EV Café Team

// 17 Jul 2026

By The EV Café Team

// 17 Jul 2026

London ranked among worst European cities for traffic-related wasteLondon ranked among worst European cities for traffic-related waste

Half of all company cars fully electric, says HMRC

By The EV Café Team

// 17 Jul 2026

By The EV Café Team

// 17 Jul 2026

Half of all company cars fully electric, says HMRCHalf of all company cars fully electric, says HMRC

More News

Fleet sector reacts to electric vehicle pence-per-mile tax changes

By The EV Café Team

// 17 Jul 2026

Fleet sector reacts to electric vehicle pence-per-mile tax changesFleet sector reacts to electric vehicle pence-per-mile tax changes

The fleet and leasing sector has cautiously welcomed tweaks to the government’s upcoming EV pence‑per‑mile tax (EVED)

AA calls for learner licence reform to accelerate EV transition without compromising road safety

By The EV Café Team

// 10 Jul 2026

AA calls for learner licence reform to accelerate EV transition without compromising road safetyAA calls for learner licence reform to accelerate EV transition without compromising road safety

The AA warned that current licence rules could slow EV adoption

Most common EV warranty claims are not related to powertrain

By The EV Café Team

// 10 Jul 2026

Most common EV warranty claims are not related to powertrainMost common EV warranty claims are not related to powertrain

Majority of EV warranty claims relate to not EV‑specific systems

Royal Mail cuts emissions by almost a third

By The EV Café Team

// 10 Jul 2026

Royal Mail cuts emissions by almost a thirdRoyal Mail cuts emissions by almost a third

Royal Mail has delivered one of the UK’s most significant fleet transformations

Podcast Episodes

#175 - Paul Jewell | CarCloud#175 - Paul Jewell | CarCloud

Published 15 Jul 2026

Most households and small businesses don't have an automotive expert on hand, just a relative who gets cornered at barbecues or "someone who used to be a mechanic" now responsible for a multi-million-pound fleet. That gap is the problem Paul Jewell built CarCloud to fix. Paul joins Paul Kirby and Sara Sloman to explain how CarCloud surfaces the MOT deadlines, lease endings and maintenance costs that usually blindside drivers, pairing each one with a solution rather than just a warning. He makes the case for the SME sector, not the big fleets, as the real engine of electric van and car growth. He also covers his work in last-mile transport: 10,000 pedal-assisted, motorcycle-grade electric bikes already on UK roads, care workers using them to fit more home visits into a day, and a new grocery sidecar that carries 40 kilos for around 14p per 50 miles. Along the way Paul traces his approach back to selling used cars in Birmingham's subprime credit era, tells the story of a remarkable homeless man who taught him chess and life lessons as a kid, wishes for baseline foods to be sold "net free" with no VAT or profit attached, and sets out CarCloud's next phase: automotive and mobility banking that returns real value to the driver. **Connect with Paul Jewell:** - LinkedIn: <https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-jewell-55476122/> - CarCloud: <https://carcloudsolutions.com>

#174 - Nikolaus Mayerhofer & Alexander Millinger | Aviloo#174 - Nikolaus Mayerhofer & Alexander Millinger | Aviloo

Published 08 Jul 2026

How do you actually know what's left in a used EV battery? Nikolaus Mayerhofer and Alexander Millinger from **Aviloo** join us to draw the line between a real diagnostic and a glorified readout — and why that difference decides what a second-hand electric car or van is worth. NiKo has been building electric things since he was 12, soldering together his first e-bike back in 1987 and developing battery management systems by 19. That four decades of battery engineering — lead acid, nickel cadmium, lithium iron phosphate, NMC — is now baked into Aviloo's three-minute flash test, which pulls up to 50,000 data samples through the OBD port, sends them to the cloud, and returns an accurate, independent State of Health certificate. Eight years of collected data from thousands of vehicles (over 50 million kilometres) sits behind every result, and (from July) a UK warranty backs each certificate. We get into the things the surface won't tell you: - Why **mileage no longer equals battery health** — a study of 600 Model 3s found consumption varying by a factor of two depending purely on how they were driven and charged - How charging to 100% every night, hammering the autobahn, and preheating all quietly age a pack — and why average degradation is fine but the *variance* is the reason you test before you buy - The honest take on fast charging, solid-state hype, and why a Model S still runs a 40-year-old cell format - Battery second life: diagnostics feeding power storage in Japan, reuse from scrapped vehicles, and what happens when OEMs stop making modules - Scaling Aviloo from two friends talking on mountain bike rides to 100+ people and one million tests sold — across the UK, US, Benelux and Asia **Guests:** - Nikolaus Mayerhofer, Founder & CEO — [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikolaus-mayerhofer-014b5635/) - Alexander Millinger — [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexmillinger/) - Aviloo — [aviloo.com](https://aviloo.com/)

#173 - Jamie Sands | Welch Group#173 - Jamie Sands | Welch Group

Published 01 Jul 2026

**Guest:** Jamie Sands — Operator-led zero-emission freight and innovation | TwentyForty | Welch Group **Company:** Welch Group ([welchgroup.co.uk](https://welchgroup.co.uk) · [twentyforty.uk](https://twentyforty.uk)) **LinkedIn:** [linkedin.com/in/j-sands](https://www.linkedin.com/in/j-sands/) --- What does a 92-year-old, family-owned haulier with 70 trucks know about the future of freight that the multinationals don't? Quite a lot, it turns out. Jamie Sands is Head of Solutions at Welch Group — a role that, as he points out, doesn't exist in most operators — and he joins us to explain why a regional independent from the east of England is winning tenders against the big 3PLs on something other than price. We get into the commercial logic underneath the green badge: how Welch turns its fleet into a test bed for startups in exchange for preferential terms, why the "green premium" basically doesn't exist, and how being two steps ahead on scope three reporting now wins business outright. Jamie makes the case that decarbonisation is really an energy and infrastructure problem, not a vehicle one — and that the smart play for an operator is treating charging, energy arbitrage and demand response as new revenue, not just a cost to swallow. There's plenty for the technically curious too: system-level thinking across siloed networks, what L4 and L5 autonomy actually mean for hub-to-hub night runs, why he's done arguing about hydrogen, and why "technology neutrality" can quietly become an excuse to do nothing until the 2035 cliff edge arrives. Jamie also walks us through TwentyForty, the not-for-profit he's built to pull other independent operators into the research, the media and the policy conversation — including the 12 Pillars framework for getting the whole industry talking to itself. Away from the trucks, Jamie talks music, comic books, a Project Hail Mary obsession, staying genuinely calm in an industry that runs on chaos, and the loss of a close friend that pushed him to do work that actually matters. He closes with one wish that doubles as his whole mission: that operators — the people this transition is being done *to* — get a seat in the rooms where it's being decided. Plenty of marginal gains, one or two God complexes, and a reminder that the future we're all hoping for is mostly available right now, if we work together. **Connect with Jamie:** [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/j-sands/) **Welch Group:** [welchgroup.co.uk](https://welchgroup.co.uk) **TwentyForty:** [twentyforty.uk](https://twentyforty.uk)

#172 - Nick Hay | Holman UK#172 - Nick Hay | Holman UK

Published 24 Jun 2026

Days before stepping in as Managing Director of Holman UK, Nick Hay sits down with Paul and Sara for a conversation that ranges far wider than fleet leasing. It's a candid look at what three decades in cold chain logistics teaches you about cutting environmental impact without losing sight of commercial reality — and what it costs the person doing the leading. Nick traces a career built on incremental gains: fitting telematics across an entire 100-unit fleet back in 2005, dragging a 400-truck operation's fuel efficiency from 8.1 to over 10 MPG when people thought he was mad to try, and running Euro 5 trial vehicles from every major manufacturer side by side rather than waiting to see what everyone else did. The throughline is a willingness to test, measure, and stop what isn't working — and to do it in partnership rather than at a supplier's expense, from one of the UK's first 100% lithium-ion materials-handling fleets to joint ventures packing 40 million cases of produce a year. We get into why private ownership changes what's possible in the energy transition, how Holman's shared-risk model differs from a standard lease, and why "horses for courses" matters more than ever when logistics spans a tradesperson's van and a long-haul HGV. Nick is clear-eyed on the obstacles too: grid access, the risk of being an early adopter, reactive government policy, and the speed at which Chinese manufacturers are now moving. Then the conversation turns. Nick talks openly about growing up the self-described black sheep of an academic family, an athletics career that taught him resilience precisely because he didn't make it, and a lifelong wrestle with depression that he learned to mask at work — sometimes, he admits, at a cost to the people closest to him. It's an unusually honest exchange about what compassionate leadership actually demands: the willingness to say you don't know, to apologise when you got it wrong, and to keep believing you can be better tomorrow. His one wish? Government legislation that's properly thought through, with a long-term view instead of constant chopping and changing — the certainty the whole industry is asking for. **Guest:** Nick Hay, Managing Director, Holman UK **LinkedIn:** https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-hay-4b1a52137/ **Company:** https://www.holman.com/uk/

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