EV Charging Infrastructure: What’s Actually Holding UK Rollout Back?

[stellapenso]

I was reading about EV charging infrastructure in the UK and had a question about where things actually stand, since coverage swings between "charging deserts everywhere" and "the network is expanding rapidly," which cannot both be fully true. Here is what I understood from my reading, and I would appreciate anyone correcting me or adding context.

A large part of the challenge seems to be uneven distribution rather than a simple shortage of chargers overall. Urban areas and motorway service stations are reasonably well covered, while rural areas and some regions outside London lag well behind. Home charging looks like a major dividing line, since people with a driveway or garage can charge overnight fairly cheaply, while people relying on street parking depend far more on public infrastructure that is often more expensive and less convenient.

Grid connection delays come up constantly as a bottleneck, because installing new charging points, especially rapid chargers, often needs significant grid upgrades that can take months or years to approve and complete. There also seems to be a lot of activity around software, including charger reliability monitoring, dynamic pricing, and route planning tools that account for real time charger availability, since an installed charger does not guarantee it works when a driver arrives.

My question is whether the bigger opportunity for new companies is in deploying charging hardware, which looks extremely capital intensive, or in the software and services layer that sits on top of infrastructure that utilities and larger players are already building.

Has anyone here worked in or invested in a UK EV charging company? What are the real bottlenecks, whether grid capacity, funding, or something else, and what looks genuinely promising rather than overhyped?

Found a fairly clear explanation of this on Entrepreneur Plus while I was reading around the topic, helped me understand the founder side of it a bit better.