Little Chef Goes Electric

One of Britain's most iconic roadside brands, Little Chef, are going green on our asses... rolling out the biggest deployment of high technology electric vehicle (ev) charging points by a restaurant worldwide, across its UK estate. The project is being carried out in partnership with SSE, the leading generator of renewable energy and Chargemaster Plc, Europe’s most innovative provider of charging technology. Initially, 126 charging points will be fitted to Little Chef diners, then the rest of the chains. Eventually, this will mean 90% of the UK will be no further than 30 miles from a Little Chef equipped with an ev charging point. The vision is for every Little Chef to have an ev charging point by the end of 2012. There is an increasing number of electric cars on the country’s roads and over the next three years major motor manufacturers including Vauxhall, Ford, Renault, Nissan, BMW, Mercedes and Toyota will have plug in cars on the market. And by the end of this decade it is widely forecast that one in ten new cars will be electric. Little Chef is the first national restaurant chain to recognise the need to provide roadside ev charging facilities to service the requirements of this growing band of ‘electric’ motorists. The service will be provided free of charge (until December 2012). Little Chef’s Managing Director, Tracey Mulligan comments: "This represents an important stage in the brand development of Little Chef, we recently launched a completely new brand identity and introduced a top quality grab and go foodoffering, designed for today’s motorist. Our approach to ethical sourcing of our food is absolutely in line with offering electric car charging points. This is just the first phase, we want every Little Chef to offer this service for motorists and are working with the best in the market place, Chargemaster and SSE to deliver this." Norman Baker, Transport Minister said: "I welcome this big thinking from Little Chef, giving a taste of the future in the move towards a first class national recharging network for plug-in cars. It is great to see another example of UK enterprise coming forward to make the most of the opportunity."