Tesco is the best supermarket to charge your electric vehicle

Electric vehicle owners would be best off shopping at Tesco, according to new research, which found it is the supermarket most likely to have chargers on-site.

However, there is a huge disparity between supermarkets when it comes to charge points.

A report from EV experts Electrifying.com found Tesco is the most likely to have a charger, with 45 per cent of locations having one in the car park.

That’s compared with just 7.2 per cent of Sainsbury’s providing a place to plug in.

The study excluded ‘express’ and ‘local’ stores, and found that Morrisons was close behind Tesco at 40.04.

There was then a big drop to Asda in third with 19.7 per cent, followed by Lidl (15 per cent) and Aldi (10 per cent).

Ginny Buckley, founder of Electrifying.com, said: “Congratulations to Tesco and Morrisons which have both invested heavily to provide customers with good charging facilities. We’d love every supermarket site to offer this, but we aren’t there yet.

“We expected more supermarkets to be doing better, but it’s still great to see how some of them have recognised that offering shoppers reliable car charging is not only good for business but will also help give the nation confidence to make the switch.”

A recent poll on behalf of Electrifying.com, the Department for Transport and the AA found that 72 per cent of drivers would be more likely to consider an EV if there was more opportunity to charge at a supermarket.

Tesco has partnered with Volkswagen and Pod Point to offer free 7kW charging at its stores, as well as low-cost rapid charging.

Louise Goodland, head of retail partnerships at Tesco, said: “We want to make it easy for people to switch to electric vehicles and are delighted to be recognised as the best supermarket for EV drivers in the UK.

“So far we’ve delivered over 23 million miles worth of free, green charges and we’re continuing to roll out EV chargers to 600 Tesco stores across the UK.”