Anyone who drives an electric car has met the problem: the map says a charger is free, and when you arrive there are two cars ahead of you. A free app developed by a three-person team in Tidewater is trying to remove that guesswork by forecasting how busy each public charger will be over the next few hours.
The app, called PlugWait, draws on live status feeds that charge-point operators must now publish as open data, together with historic usage released by Wrenhaven City Council for its own chargers. A model trained on more than two years of records estimates the likely wait at each of roughly 1,400 public charge points across the region, from the Harbourside car parks to rapid chargers at Asher Valley service stations.
Its developers say predictions are within ten minutes of the actual wait about four times out of five. Accuracy drops at sites where chargers frequently break down, because the operators' feeds often report a faulty unit as available.
Data the operators had to share
The app would not have been possible a few years ago. National rules introduced last year require operators to publish availability and pricing in a standard format. Felix Arbogast, PlugWait's lead developer and a former transport planner, said that change did most of the hard work.
We did not invent the data. We just asked it a question nobody else was asking.
The app makes no money yet. Its developers have kept it free and without advertising, funded by a small innovation grant and by evening work. They are now talking to fleet operators, who manage dozens of electric vans and want forecasts built into their route planning software. Any commercial deal, the team says, would not change the free version for ordinary drivers.
The council has noticed. Councillor Ravi Desai, the cabinet member for transport, said officers were using anonymised figures from the app to decide where to put the next 120 on-street chargers, with Northfield and Millbrook expected to be priorities. Taxi drivers have been among the keenest users. Oksana Rudd, who drives a private hire car out of the station rank, said she now plans her charging stops around the forecast and saves around half an hour on a long shift. The team plans to add a feature that warns drivers when a charger has reported repeated faults.