ZipCharge has revealed its new ‘GoHub’ – a wall of individual mobile EV charging units that hope to make plugging in an electric car easier for those without off-street parking. 

The firm showed off its ‘Go’ charging unit last year, which is a small portable box that can add up to 20 miles of range to an electric car, and can be stored in a vehicle’s boot when not in use. 

Now, ZipCharge has revealed plans to have ‘hubs’ of these chargers, which can be rented at all hours of a day, and can be reserved using an app. Users will then take the unit away from the hub so they can charge their car elsewhere. 

Up to 10 chargers can be stored in a hub, which the firm says can ‘comfortably fit into a regular parking space’. The firm aims to install them in supermarket and shopping centre car parks, though says they have been ‘conceived with every community in mind’. 

Users will pay £1 to have access to a ‘Go’ charger, which is capable of a 4kWh charge, and aims to be cheaper than typical slow public EV points. 

On top of this, ZipCharge claims these units will be ‘three times cheaper and three times faster to install’ than fixed on-street chargers. Sustainability is also promised, with these hubs set to use ‘end-of-life’ batteries from the portable Go chargers, while they can also reduce dependency on the national grid. 

ZipCharge co-founder, Jonathan Carrier, said: “We intend to serve hundreds of millions of people around the world so everyone can access convenient and low-cost energy. The ZipCharge Go and the GoHub enable the storage of clean energy, which can then be distributed for a multitude of uses from charging an EV to powering equipment. 

“We predict our portable power banks will outsell fixed home chargers by 2030, in the same way mobile phones overtook landlines. That’s because the Go can be used for more than charging EV charging, it’s a portable energy storage device for personal energy management. We have the bold ambition to deploy 100,000 GoHubs globally by 2030 to support EV charging, local grid resiliency and energy democracy.”