Erik Fairbairn is trying to make sure cars ‘don’t do any damage to the planet’

Erik Fairbairn has crashed a lot of cars. Hundreds probably. But all with a notion of making them safer. And now he’s trying to ensure “they don’t do any damage to the planet”. Which is how he came up with the idea for Pod Point, the electric vehicle charging system, of which he is CEO, long before electric cars became commonplace.

Fairbairn describes himself as “a reformed petrolhead”. But his first car was electric too. He was about 10 and the car was one of those remote controlled ones that he used to zoom around the back garden. “I destroyed them regularly so I had to get used to putting them back together,” says Fairbairn. “But they probably made me think: electric can work, the internal combustion engine is not the only way.”

His first grown-up car was a second-hand blue Rover Metro. And he could do his own maintenance or even build his own car, having studied mechanical engineering at Sheffield University. But he soon turned his hand to deconstructing cars at the research and development sector of Ford, in Dunton, by festooning them with cameras and then aiming them at walls at high speed to see what happened. “The basic idea,” says Fairbairn, “was to make the bit at the front softer and the bit where you sit a lot stiffer.” They started with computer modelling but in the end there is no substitute for taking a real car and smashing it to bits. “Cars are enormously safer now,” says Fairbairn.

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But he wasn’t really satisfied working for a big corporation and branched out on his own. After a brief stint at the Judge Business School in Cambridge he set up ecurie25 in 2005, based on the City Road in north London. It was a perfectly sound business proposition, but it also enabled Fairbairn to indulge his love for fast cars. It was a “supercar” club. The idea was you joined (for £10k) and you were then entitled to take out a Ferrari 430 Spider for the day or the weekend. Or leave everyone for dead at the lights in a Porsche 911. Or swan around in a Lamborghini Gallado. “It was more passion than sensible planning,” admits Fairbairn. “You could sample all the best toys of the car world without the hassle of actually owning one.”

And it worked, but it was mostly City boys splashing their bonus on membership. They had over a hundred members and business was accelerating and it was all great fun, but Fairbairn had a moment of disenchantment. He realised that he wanted to run a business “that would make my mum proud of me”, and “loaning out flash cars to wealthy people” probably wasn’t it. So he sold the business to a competitor (and it is still thriving, if you fancy going for a spin in a Ferrari, as the Auto Vivendi Supercar Club) and tried to work out what to do next.

Of course, it had to be something to do with cars. But now he had a “mission”. The important thing about business, he says, “is not what you do, but why you do it.” In 2009, Fairbairn saw that the future was electric (he thought hydrogen was a possibility but further down the road). And electricity had to be increasingly based on renewables, on wind and solar. “We were already talking about the hole in the ozone layer. And we weren’t seeing a massive improvement in fuel economy. After one hundred years of the internal combustion engine, 35mpg was about as good as it was going to get. We’d hit the limit. We needed a different tech.”

None of the big manufacturers were even dreaming about electric at this point. It was going to be hard to get into designing the new generation of cars. So Fairbairn came at the problem from a different angle. He asked himself the crucial question, how would the electric cars of the future re-charge? Would it be like a petrol pump at a petrol station, but with electricity coming out of it?

Answer, no. Fairbairn worked out the maths. A car is standing still at a petrol station for about 90 seconds while you fill up. The same amount of electrical energy pumping into a car in that space of time would be enough to light up a whole housing estate (roughly 5-7 megawatts). And you’d need cables thicker than you could lift. And if you could lift them you’d be burned to a crisp on account of the huge amount of heat being generated. “I couldn’t work out how to do it,” says Fairbairn, “but I kept working at it.”

He calculated that owning an electric car would in effect double the amount of electricity the individual was consuming. But wouldn’t that put a huge strain on the grid? Wouldn’t you need more power stations? In the developed world, the amount of electricity being consumed peaks at around 6.30pm, when people come home and start cooking and there are still industrial facilities at work too. Imagine if lots of people come home and park their cars and plug them in all at the same time. The system would crash.

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The answer (it seems obvious now, but it wasn’t then) was to plug the car in but not allow it to charge up till more like 2 or 3am, when demand is low. The idea being to flatten out the spikes over a 24-hour period. There is no more “filling up” – instead it’s all about “topping up”: whenever it’s not being used you plug it in and don’t wait till you’re running on empty. “Cars do nothing most of their lives,” says Fairbairn. All you need is a charge point everywhere you park.

The Pod Point network for charging electric cars was born and it was a brilliant system – and the only problem was that there were no (or very few) electric cars to charge. Fairbairn was years ahead of reality. “For 10 years it was a challenged business.” Somehow he managed to keep the whole show on the road until real transport caught up with his vision. “An idea is not very useful until the rest of the world cottons on to it.” Pod Point is now rolling out around the nation (and Norway) and Fairbairn’s faith is vindicated. “It wasn’t foresight,” he says modestly. “We just thought it was important. What we first thought of back in 2009 is exactly what we’re doing now. So we’ve been consistent.”

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2020 was a tough year for the car market. But the electric car market has been stellar. “From an EV perspective 2020 has been transformative,” says Fairbairn. At the beginning of the year, electric cars were 3 per cent of the market – now it’s more like 16 per cent. “The revolution is happening now. We’re still at Day 1 of the electric car as a mass market proposition. But we’ve made massive progress in moving people away from the internal combustion engine.”

Erik Fairbairn no longer drives a Ferrari Spider or a Lamborghini Gallado. You will only see him at the wheel of a Tesla or a BMW i3. Which you would expect. But the funny thing about him is that he is never happier than when on 2 wheels rather than 4. He loves to take his whole family out on their bikes or go mountain biking or – when the weather is too relentless – he brings the bike in, mounts it on a “trainer” in his living room, clicks on his Zwift app, and goes virtual cycling instead. Thereby doing no damage to the planet at all. Fairbairn reckons it was probably going out on his bike as a kid and getting a facefull of diesel fumes that first prompted his idea that there had to be a better more zero-carbon way. And he’s not buying an e-bike either. “I still love pedalling,” he says.

@andymartinink