This year marks OVO's fourth EV Rally. We find out from Patrick Reich, Head of Commercial for EVs, for his views on how the challenge has evolved over the years, as well as what teams can expect from OVO as official Charge Card Partners

This is the fourth year that OVO will have participated in the EV Rally; what made you decide to get involved again this year?

It is a great initiative that raises more awareness for EVs amongst the general population and hopefully dispels some of the commonly-heard myths about EV ownership, their range, complexity, and so on.

Electric vehicles form a key part of OVO’s decarbonisation strategy and it’s an important initiative for us to get more people talking about the benefits of EVs and hopefully helping more drivers make the switch. Plus, the rally is a lot of fun and gives lots of our internal folk the chance the get involved!

Having been on three rallies before, how have you seen the experience change or evolve - has it become less of a challenge?

It’s really interesting as on the first rally everyone was immaculately planning their routes and their stops and as the years have gone by, you can see that's become less and less prevalent. Teams just trust the infrastructure on route and go for it, so i’d say it's definitely become less of a challenge - but in a good way.

What have you learnt from past rallies that will help you with this year’s one?

Bring sweets and treats! A bit of merch for the other teams doesn't go a miss either.

This year the focus is less on miles travelled and more on innovation and clean energy. As OVO has a focus on green energy, how important is renewable energy in the EV narrative?

OVO is on a mission to provide cheaper, fairer and greener energy to customers. Renewable energy is therefore at the very core of our company. We have led several important initiatives over the last years to allow our customers to make the switch to EVs. For example Charge Anytime was the first UK type-of-use EV offer, allowing customers to charge at cheap rates at any time throughout the day, not just at off-peak times at night.

We also launched our Bank EV miles offer, allowing customers who are not yet ready to switch to EVs to start accumulating (banking) EV miles monthly. That way, when these customers are finally ready to make the switch, we reward them with free miles on us. This and loads more is what we’re doing at OVO to allow as many customers as possible to make their next car an EV.

OVO is the Rally's Official Charge Partner with Charge Anywhere - please could you tell us what teams can expect from this?

Charge Anywhere is OVO’s public EV charging product that makes charging away from home simpler and cheaper for drivers. The app offers access to over 50k charging stations in the UK and another 400k in Europe. This means that teams at the EV Rally can expect a seamless charging experience along the route at any of the 50k charging locations we support.

Please tell us about Team OVO - who is driving and in what vehicles?

We don't have the vehicles locked in just yet, but in terms of people, as you know we do things differently and we swap drivers everyday to give more OVO peeps the chance to take part, so we’ll have around 40 people taking part in total.

Please tell us about OVO's future plans and how it can help fleets with their net-zero ambitions?

OVO has ambitious plans to introduce even more innovative products into its EV portfolio. Earlier this year, we launched a public charging dashboard for fleets, allowing fleet managers to manage all their fleets’ charging needs in a simple way. Instead of having to deal with individual receipts generated from each charging session, we provide a single, VAT-compliant bill at the end of the month. Fleet drivers are also not left out-of-pocket for any of the charging they do for work. We are already seeing the costs and time-savings this generates for our clients and we intend to continue to improve and build on this further.