Octopus Electric Vehicles are driving the future

There are over 600,000 EVs on the road right now, and this is just the beginning. For the past six years, Octopus Electric Vehicles have been the UK’s one-stop-shop for getting drivers to make the switch. And as of August 2023, they’ve already secured £650 million in investment to take their mission even further.

Octopus EV are on a mission to help drivers discover EVs and make it easy and affordable to make the switch. And to do this, they offer a number of packages, including (but not limited to) their innovative salary sacrifice scheme – meaning you can save up to 40% on an EV.

In short, Octopus EV’s salary sacrifice scheme is a scheme that’s run through your employers that means you can get an EV for less. It isn’t just the shiny new EV you get with the scheme either, from breakdown cover to insurance, there’s much more included.

When leasing any vehicle privately, it’s very rare that you get more than a car included in the monthly price. However, with Octopus EV’s innovative package, you can get so much more:

Want to find a public charger? Or map out a long journey but not sure where the best place or time to charge is on the way? The Electroverse is on-hand to help.

Octopus EV have developed not only an app that does all that, but also a charging card that will make public charging easy at over 500,000 (and counting) charging points in the UK and Europe.

And to simplify further, with a simple tap of the Electroverse card, your charging costs are added to your monthly Octopus Energy bill, making it a complete seamless charging process. Sign-up to Octopus Go and you could even get between a 5% and 8% discount off your electroverse bill.

Currently, we’ve already got public charging in over 25,000 places in the UK, which is incredible compared to 8,000 petrol stations in the UK. The industry will need some time to totally phase out petrol and diesel cars, but we project that by 2050 all cars will be zero% emission, and the Electroverse will ensure a smooth transmission.

Here at Octopus Energy, we want to support the electric revolution and Octopus EVs mission, so we introduced some new EV tarriffs, known as OctopusGo and Intelligent Octopus Go.

OctopusGo is a great starter tariff that provides you with four hours of cheaper electricity. The next step up would then be Intelligent Octopus Go – the tariff that puts us in charge. Using top-tech, we can guarantee you six hours of cheap and clean energy every night, at a super low rate of 7.5p per kWh. You can read more about Intelligent Octopus Go and how it works, over on the Intelligent Octopus Go page.

Some cars can even go one step further with Vehicle-to-grid charging – meaning your car could act as a battery for your home.

You can read more in our blog on V2G charging.

OEV is led by two incredibly talented engineers: Fiona and Claire. They’re trailblazers in an industry that doesn’t often have women at the wheel. Under their leadership, Octopus EV has grown exponentially. Having partnered with car companies like Audi, Volkswagen and BMW to bring customers the most exciting cars and innovative tariffs. Between them, they’ve built a team that looks after each other, and looks after customers.

We spoke to Fiona, CEO, to find out how the EV life was when she first joined Octopus and what the future holds for Octopus EV. From working at BWM to the energy department within government, she has 20 years worth of experience discovering the true limitless potential of renewable energy.

Fiona: There were only five electric cars when I first joined, and you couldn’t buy a new car with more than a 100 mile range. Today, there are over 100 different models for manufacturers and the EV smart charging infrastructure has massively grown.

The tech behind electric cars has also dramatically improved in recent years, and standard range EVs like the Tesla Model One now have a range over 240miles.

Fiona: I’d love to imagine a future where people can lease and borrow each other’s EVs on a public platform. Sort of like an EV airbnb, where on the days or times you’re not using your car, someone can pay you to use it. This will help make EVs easy and affordable for everyone.

There is still a long way to go, but the possibilities for our new electrified world are endless. To make electric vehicles more accessible to all, we will need to invest heavily in charging infrastructure, more affordable EV models and encourage more government incentives to go electric. Above all, we will need an effective strategy to ensure the grid can cope with the very high energy demands of an electrified transport network.