Episode notes
Dev Chana started his career as an oil broker in Kensington. Three decades later he's running E.ON Drive Infrastructure in the UK, and his ambition for public charging is unexpectedly modest: he wants it to be boring. Reliable, standardised, unremarkable. The kind of refuel you don't post about because there's nothing to post.
Paul and Sara catch up with Dev after first meeting his team in a rain-lashed Welsh car park during the EV Rally, where the curb-free bays, weighted cables and a small dog set the tone for what EDRI is quietly building.
What's on the table:
- How a 10-person team has put 300+ bays in the ground in three years, when the industry average to install a single charger is 18 months
- The 39p–44p/kWh opening price, why there's no app or membership, and what "no faff, no fuss" actually costs to deliver
- Accessibility decisions baked in from day one: no bump stops, five-metre cables, CCTV on every HPC site, drainage that doesn't dump a puddle at the driver's feet
- Why EDRI tiers its food and beverage partners instead of building its own forecourts — and why two early petrol-station sites won't be repeated
- Vans now make up 25% of utilisation. Nobody invited them. What that's telling EDRI about the next phase of the network
- The Shanghai motor show, BYD's jumping supercar, and what the XPeng/VW partnership signals for European OEMs
- Dev's car-club mates who told him EVs would never take off — and have now switched their dailies
- The mentors who shaped him: Ann Buckingham, who pulled him into the sector, and his father's moral compass
- Where consolidation in the CPO market needs to land for the consumer experience to finally standardise
Dev is a self-confessed petrolhead with a V8 from the early '90s and a 1981 classic with fewer than 15 survivors. He's also the leader most likely to tell you the industry isn't done learning — and to ask what you'd change.
LinkedIn: <https://www.linkedin.com/in/dev-chana-1228b94/>
Website: <https://www.edri.com/>
