The switch has been flicked on 24 new EV charging bays at Gloucestershire's award winning M5 service station – and the move marks a significant step forward amid efforts to boost Gloucestershire's EV charging infrastructure.

Now offering 12 charging bays apiece at its northbound and southbound sites, Gloucester Services, which is run by the Westmorland Family, has just celebrated its 10th year of operation and the business has apologised to followers for delays on the recharging service due to factors beyond its control. The 24 charge points brings the total of the two sites to 40, given 16 existing Tesla plug-ins.

Gloucester Services was tipped by Which? as the best in the UK in 2019, nudging the Westmorland business's pioneering original Tebay Services in Cumbria into second spot while its third operation, at Cairn Lodge in Lanarkshire, took the third ranking.

First becoming operational in 2015, Westmorland partnered with the Gloucestershire Gateway Trust charity (GGT) to developed the CGT's brainchild of a motorway service area on the M5 that would create employment opportunities and sustainable income for communities close to Matson. The unique partnership delivers up to 3p in every £1 in non-fuel sales to the GGT for community projects and charities.

A spokesperson for Gloucester Services said: "We're sorry we've not been able to do this sooner, we've been working for some time to bring you more electric charging points. The power needed to our rural locations and the infrastructure to support this has taken time to organise and was particularly an issue for us at Tebay Services, much of which was out of our control."

Each of Westmorland's Gloucester sites now have six charging points supplied by Hertfordshire-based infrastucture provider Evolt Network, with each point able to charge two vehicles at a time. To overcome a persistent headache among EV users where the splitting of a charge point leads to a 'trickle' of energy, the chargers offer a respectable 300kW ability, meaning that dual use still emerges at 150kW.

While a 300 kW EV charger can charge an electric vehicle (EV) in 30 minutes, faster times may be achieved if the car being charged has the ability to exploit such a rate: for such newcomers as Kia's EV6, a boost from 10% to 80% will take 16 minutes.

The speed of EV charging is dependent on the capacity of the car's battery unit: used in split mode at Gloucester Services with a 150kW charge, some 200 miles of boost could be added in 30 minutes for a typical model fitted with a 40kWh battery.

The upgrade at Gloucester comes amid news that there has been a record increase in the number of ultra-rapid electric EV chargers of 150kW or more at motorway services across England.

The RAC and Zapmap say 200 additional 150kW+ chargers have been installed since the beginning of the 2024 – marking a 51% increase over the previous eight months and a new record.

● Some 55 sites – almost half (48%) of the 114 motorway services in England – now have six or more ultra-rapid chargers, with many offering the very fastest speeds of up to 350kW. But four MSAs do not have any charging provision of 50kW of more, incuding Welcome Break's Leicester Forest East M1 north and southbound. Welcome Break says it continues to experience obstacles bringing sufficient power to the locations.