The Three Click Rule

Why most EV charging problems are not problems

Dragged, kicking and screaming, out of corporate hibernation and back into the world of EV charging, I wanted to reflect on what working in both the sales and the support side of the industry has taught me, and put some words onto paper for the first time on this topic.

I was deep in a world of strategy decks, KPIs, roadmaps, and pipeline reviews, constantly sense checking priorities and aligning on next steps. Everything had an owner and a follow up. After nearly a year away, I finally circled back.

Time away has a habit of simplifying things. What stood out most was how familiar everything still felt, even with new ideas starting to surface, that early uncertainty was easy to recognise. After enough conversations on both sides of the industry, it becomes obvious that most EV charging issues are not really issues at all. They are moments where people are unsure what should be happening next.

Take something as simple as a trapped charging cable for instance, this can suddenly turn what should have been a nice easy trip to the supermarket into a big panic. Drivers left in limbo, momentarily marooned in a sea of cars at your local Tesco, all because your cable is being a bit clingy (we all get like that sometimes).

Calling the customer support number on the charging point can often be a pain, and IF you make it through,  the remote signals sent to the charging point to remedy your trapped cable can be unreliable or unresponsive a lot of the time.

There is an often overlooked solution that I like to call the Three Click Rule (a name I have been quietly pushing for years with limited success). It is one of those moments where the industry has quietly failed to pass on a useful bit of knowledge. The idea is simple, lock and unlock your car doors three times to give the car a nudge and let it know you want to unplug. Before involving a CPO or reaching for the emergency stop button, it is always worth trying this first. Emergency stops are there for safety, but using them can take a charger out of service and affect the next person who arrives. In many cases, those three clicks alone are enough to free the cable and get you moving again.

For the rare occasions where the cable remains stubborn, even after the Three Click Rule, there is a secondary solution, one which I have unfortunately not coined a cool name for yet. All battery electric vehicles manufactured for the UK and EU markets must possess a manual release mechanism. This can be a switch, plug, or often a pully, a physical thing to pull which will manually release the cable from the car’s charging port.

For most vehicles, the manual release is tucked away somewhere sensible but not obvious. It is often found in the boot or behind a small trim panel near the charging port, and on some models it sits under the bonnet. Your vehicle's user manual will usually tell you exactly where the release is, but most people never realise it is there, or that the Three Click Rule exists at all. It is a good example of how many EV charging problems are really just small gaps in information rather than anything actually going wrong.

But what happens when common sense is the thing that falls short. I was at a public charging point the other day and I had to swipe my contactless card to start the session. Most people reading this will be used to active card checks or petrol pumps authorising up to £120 or similar. With EV chargers, tapping your card takes a pre-authorisation payment, often around £30, which is held temporarily. The actual cost of charging is then calculated based on how much energy is delivered, and the original hold is released.

In this example, I was tapping my card against the reader with no joy, and I just couldn’t figure out why. I’ve been doing this job for years, I’ve seen more charge points than I care to admit, and I even had a dream about a charger once, but I couldn’t get the thing to work for love nor money.

It transpires that my card had hit its three swipe limit and needed to be inserted into a reader before it would work again. This is the sort of thing that becomes immediately obvious at a supermarket checkout or a self service till, because you are prompted to enter your pin. In the cold and the wet, trying to get a charge started with a crying child in the back of the car, that same bit of common sense is much easier to miss.

Most modern terminals come with PIN functionality now but if this happens to you on a terminal with only a card reader (like it did to me), this can also be resolved by finding a nearby terminal to enter a PIN on, using an alternative card, or online wallet such as Google Pay/Apple Pay.

It is another example of how a small gap in knowledge, or a moment where context is missing, can quickly turn what should be a straightforward charging session into an unnecessarily stressful experience.

Most EV charging problems are never quite as dramatic as they sound in the moment. They tend to show up when you are cold, late, distracted, or already juggling something else, and that context matters. More often than not, nothing is actually broken, it just feels that way at the time.

This small blog post feels like a decent way to step back into the EV world and get a few thoughts down. I will keep writing pieces like this, looking at specific moments and situations that tend to cause more stress than they need to. Nothing grand, just observations from time spent on both sides of the industry.

Signing off, Ben