The article is mostly (not entirely) complete garbage. A few houses may need significant expenditure - most will spend between £7-900. About the savings made in the first year on fuel for the average driver.

Most homes will have the capacity to run a 7KW charger from their existing incoming supply with a new connection to the consumer unit required.

In context - 7KW is about what an electric shower or oven/hob consumes. At this rate most EVs will comfortably charge overnight.

I had a 7 kW home charger installed last year (for £600 after the grant was taken into account) and there was no problem with the supply -- as you would hope, given that even at full blast the charger draws less current than our 9.5 kW shower! (Note that the car regulates charging so that it does not always go at 7 kW.)

It is simple (perhaps simplistic) to compare a 7kW charger with a 9kW shower. But remember that a shower is in use for maybe 10 mins tops, while a charger may be in use for 10 hours, meaning a current (regulated by the car) generating heat in the main supply cable, which may be fairly old at some properties. Added to the normal domestic load during the day, that cable may be working nearly full time. Worth considering perhaps.

As has already been noted, this article is essentially nonsense. I had a 7 kW home charger installed last year (for £600 after the grant was taken into account) and there was no problem with the supply -- as you would hope, given that even at full blast the charger draws less current than our 9.5 kW shower! (Note that the car regulates charging so that it does not always go at 7 kW.)

As for the cost of the charger, look at it in this 'back of an envelope' way. The electric car is doing about 3.5 miles per kWh in the winter (naturally, it was rather more when the weather was better). On my current electricity tariff, that means the 'fuel' cost is 5p per mile in round numbers. Let's be cautiously pessimistic and suppose that it will double to 10p per mile when my fixed rate tariff ends in a couple of months.

For comparison, my turbo petrol (non-hybrid) Toyota Auris averages around 40 mpg in winter. With petrol around here being £1.50 per litre, that means a fuel cost of 17p per mile. So, even with my pessimistic assumption about future electricity prices, the saving of 7p per mile would pay for the charger after about 8,600 miles, which is is only slightly more than my projected annual mileage for the electric car.

I think this MSN 'article' is a repost of the Telegraph article we were discussing not too long ago on a related thread on EVs, etc.

As such, it maybe worth holding off duplicating all the (old) arguments back and forth, possible closing / amalgamating this thread with the other one(s) - there are quite a few other than the one specifically where I also referred to the Telegraph article.

Just a suggestion.