EV Charging for Car Parks & Retail
Charging in a public car park or retail site is a different business from charging at home or at work. The driver is a stranger, they are staying between thirty minutes and three hours, and they will not download an app to plug in. Get those three facts into the specification and the bays pay for themselves. Miss them and you end up with expensive hardware that nobody uses.
We supply pay-per-use charging hardware from £940, contactless payment terminals from £335, and rapid DC chargers from £6,890 — with free UK delivery and trade pricing on multi-unit orders.
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Contactless payment is not optional
The single biggest determinant of whether a public charge point gets used is whether a first-time driver can start a session without preparing for it. App-only access loses a meaningful share of arrivals at the download step — they park somewhere else instead. Card payment removes that entirely: tap, charge, leave.
Two routes. Buy a charger with the terminal built in — the Rolec Securicharge contactless range from £2,455, or the Nayax EV Meter Pay at £1,320 for a single 22kW socket and £2,140 for the dual. Or add a terminal to chargers you already have: the Charge-M8 Sigma kiosk at £335, Nayax VPOS terminals from £450, or the Evec PAY-WALL and PAY-TWR units. Where there is no wall or charger to fix a terminal to, the e.Park Universal Payment Post at £375 carries one on its own upright.
Our best-selling car park and retail chargers
Billing by the kilowatt hour
If you charge drivers per kWh rather than a flat fee per session, the charger needs MID-certified metering — that is what makes the reading legally acceptable for billing in the UK. It is a hardware decision at purchase and cannot be retrofitted. A flat per-session price avoids the requirement, and on short-dwell retail sites it is often simpler for everyone. See our guide to MID metering and billing.
22kW or rapid DC?
Dwell time decides it. A supermarket or retail park where people stay 45 minutes to two hours is well served by 22kW AC at a fraction of the cost — that adds 75 to 90 miles of range, which is more than most drivers came for. Rapid DC earns its cost where the stop is short and the driver's purpose is charging rather than shopping: forecourts, roadside, destination charging on through routes. The Charge-M8 Omega 30kW is £6,890 and the 60kW dual gun £13,338; the Evec vecBOLT Duo 40kW with payment terminal built in is £10,500. Be realistic about the electrical supply before you specify DC — that, not the hardware price, is what usually kills rapid projects.
Pedestals and the cost per bay
Car park bays sit in the middle of a surface, so pedestal chargers are the norm rather than the exception — the Evec range runs from £1,120 for a 7.4kW single socket to £1,615 for the EDP02-N 22kW dual. On any car park the expensive parts are the groundworks, the cable run and the connection, not the charger, and those costs are incurred per location. That is why dual socket units almost always win, and why back-to-back posts at £355 are worth considering for wall-mounted chargers serving two adjacent bays.
Protect the hardware
A charge point standing in a bay, used by drivers unfamiliar with the layout, will eventually be reversed into. A hooped barrier from £155 bolts to the existing surface in front of the unit and takes the impact instead — against a charger, post and installation running well into four figures. Yellow for visibility on busy sites, black where appearance matters. Specify them across all bays at the outset; retrofitting after the first incident costs more and you have already paid for the damage.
Running costs to plan for
Public charging has ongoing costs that home charging does not. Payment terminals typically carry a monthly fee of around £10 plus a percentage of each transaction. Chargers with OCPP back office connections may carry a per-connector charge. The Nayax EV Meter Pay is £10 a month including the terminal and one OCPP connector; the dual is £17 for two connectors, which is £8.50 per charging point — the more sockets you run, the lower the cost per bay. Factor these into your pricing per kWh from the start, and read our guide to choosing an OCPP back office.
Talk to us about your car park
Tell us the number of bays, typical dwell time, whether the site is single or three phase and whether you intend to charge drivers, and we will specify the hardware and price it. We supply car park operators, retail sites and their installers across the UK with free delivery and trade pricing.