For as long as I can remember, transport was irrevocably linked to fuel—filling up a tank, planning fuel stops and dreading the blinking fuel light on the dash. For over a century, petrol dominated our driving experience, and it’s only lately that the push to EVs—once considered an impractical luxury—has begun to change that. However, despite most drivers saying they will never return to ICE vehicles, the move to EVs has not been seamless. The biggest reasons: high cost, range anxiety and convenient ownership model of the vehicle and charging eco system.
Enter Octopus Electric Vehicles in the United Kingdom (UK). In just a few years, this offshoot of the energy disruptor Octopus Energy has grown from a start-up into the UK’s leading EV-only leasing company—putting over 45,000 drivers on the road and signing up more than 7,500 employers to a salary sacrifice scheme that makes electric cars almost 40% cheaper —and allowing consumers to dream of owning a BMW 5 Series instead of a 1 Series.
I met with Fiona Howarth (Founder & Director) and Gurjeet Grewal (CEO) to find out how Octopus Electric Vehicles quietly became the most complete provider in the EV transition here in the UK and increasingly internationally—and why they believe the revolution is only just beginning. Because if Octopus EV is right about the future, your car won’t just take you places. It will power your home, stabilize the national grid and even quietly earn you money while you sleep!
Different from Day One
When Fiona Howarth set out to build what would become Octopus Electric Vehicles, she did so from a peculiarly honest position. One of her ambitions was to be the go-to energy company for EV drivers. “When we met,” she says, “I was probably still trying to figure out what we were even trying to do.” That candour, while it would make some corporate leaders feel uncomfortable, turned out to be a competitive advantage for Fiona. Rather than arriving with a fixed blueprint handed down from the combustion age, she chose to listen—to customers, to the grid and to the quiet but inescapable logic of a world reorganizing itself around electricity. That led to the first energy tariff designed for EV drivers – Octopus Go – a simple off-peak tariff, launched in 2018, unlocking energy costs to power a car for less than 1p per mile. This has been superseded now by Intelligent Octopus Go, that needs no human intervention but uses AI to seamlessly optimise the EV charging based on energy costs and grid capacity. And instead of putting money in public charging, the energy innovator launched Octopus Electroverse—an EV charging service that lets users find, access, and pay for public electric-vehicle charging through a single app and a single RFID card. Today, Octopus Electroverse supports over 1.4 million chargers worldwide and continues to grow daily.
Fiona’s vision of creating a single destination for the entire EV experience—from the vehicle itself to the energy tariff that powers it, and from the charger mounted on the garage wall to the app that locates an available socket in a parking lot—is already taking shape. Her goal of making the switch to EVs easy and affordable for consumers led her to launch their own leasing company in April 2021, believing it was the best way to ensure customer satisfaction. “We were the sister company to Octopus Energy,” she says, “the most awarded energy company for the best service ever.” She also extended this approach to Octopus EV, providing an integrated solution that includes charging, the contract, or, in essence, everything consumers once expected from a traditional car dealership.
Gurjeet Grewal became CEO last year, while Howarth remains Founder and on the Board. Grewal says, “We’re still the only place that does it all under one roof.” He says this not boastfully but with a note of genuine puzzlement—as though the gap in the market were so self-evident that its continued existence required explanation. “And as we continue to expand into new technologies like vehicle-to-grid, that’s still true. We’re still the only place that can do it all in one place, seamlessly, for a customer.”
Howarth and Grewal want to eliminate what they think is one of the biggest barriers to people making the shift to EVs—cost. Their leasing arm was launched with this specific aim in mind and offers salary-sacrifice arrangements that reduce a driver’s monthly outlay by 30 to 40% before a single unit of electricity is used. And, together, they’ve scaled it to over 7,500 clients, including big names like McLaren, BCG and Bain & Co. Octopus EV services SMEs all the way up to big corporates; they’ve raised over £2 billion to fund those cars.
The timing, for once, feels favorable. The company captured around 5% of new EV registrations in the UK last year, which is up to 7-8% this year. But more striking than the market share is the changing economics, which have allowed Octopus EV to price their vehicles at par with, or even below, ICE vehicles on popular leasing platforms.
Beyond the Horizon: What’s Next for Octopus EV
Gurjeet’s vision for the future is clear. And bold. He wants the company to be the biggest destination for all things EV. Not just in the UK but across all their markets. “Only 14% of people in the UK believe that charging at home is cheaper than petrol,” says Grewal, with the measured frustration of someone who has spent years watching a self-evident truth struggle to penetrate public consciousness. However, that’s probably good news for the company, which is already on the right track, having close to doubled its market share since last year. The future vision is to forge partnerships with OEMs, expand internationally, leverage the EV base to build a 2nd-life EV business and expand into V2G services.
Vehicle-to-grid, or V2G, technology—the ability of an electric car to return stored energy to the home or the grid—has long been the theoretical pillar of the EV revolution. Octopus is among a handful of companies moving it toward the practical. A partnership with BYD – launched last year around their Dolphin car – offers customers the chance to lease a car & V2G charger. This unlocks free energy in return for allowing customers to use the car battery when it is idle. A collaboration with Ford in Germany goes live this summer, with further OEM partnerships in development.
Howarth believes that the V2G business model between OEMs and Octopus EV offers a significant opportunity, as the market is new and still evolving. She envisions a series of launches over the next couple of years, with the market ramping up post that, making V2G more commonplace. Regarding the one main friction—taxation for the electrons that pass through a car battery and back into a house is currently levied twice—she says, “Those things are being ironed out, and that will make it much more compelling for customers.”
Fiona thinks the industry is entering a genuinely exciting moment in which the energy and automotive sectors are converging in ways that could change how people think about both driving and powering their homes. She believes that increasingly volatile energy prices make a compelling case for using an EV battery to help balance the grid. And, of course, if you’ve already paid for that battery in your car, the logic of putting it to work is hard to argue with.
The Used EV: Old Car, New Energy
There is also, both founders note, the used-car market—a frontier that remains largely uncolonized. A recent AA survey in the UK found that only 4% of consumers would trust a pre-owned battery-electric vehicle, despite many remaining under manufacturer warranty and carrying significantly lower running costs than their petrol counterparts. “Used EVs are typically undervalued”, Grewal says—true, as they are priced, on average, around ten per cent below equivalent ICE vehicles despite being cheaper to run. Octopus was the first EV leasing business in the UK to offer second-hand electric cars through salary sacrifice. And in the last year, they’ve seen a 177% increase in demand for second-hand leased EVs, as drivers look for even greater value.
Building From Belief, Not Just Business Plans
In her free time, Howarth loves to ski. As a young girl, her mother would take her skiing, and in the mountains she received a piece of advice that would years later find its way into her boardroom. “Always take yourself off-piste. Push yourself to the harder terrain—the moguls, the unmarked runs—and when you return to the groomed slope, it feels effortless.” And she’s used that to great effect at Octopus EV. Every first in her professional life—from the first funding round to her first car lease—felt unfamiliar. Daunting. But each time, the next ‘run’ was easier. “The first time you do something, that’s the hardest it will ever be,” she says. Fifty thousand leases later, she’s still skiing—and still seeking the steeper slopes.
Grewal’s leadership style is tempered with a slice of humble pie. That comfort with not-knowing, he believes, is instrumental in navigating genuinely uncharted territory. “You have ten people around the table, each an expert in a micro field,” he reflects. “The only way to bring that together is if you’re not scared of asking.” Hobbies, he argues, are the training ground for exactly that curiosity—places where you begin again as a beginner, where expertise is stripped away, and wonder takes over. At Octopus EV, he’s not listening quietly to a report or watching a presentation in silence—he’s asking the questions, even if he feels he’s not the most qualified to do so. And his being openly curious rather than defensively confident is a large part of what’s got the business to where it is today.
Conclusion
Somewhere tonight, a car on a random street here in the UK is silently feeding power back into the grid while its owner sleeps! That, in a nutshell, is Octopus EV. Not a distant, policy-driven utopia—but something real, affordable and already underway. The revolution, it turns out, doesn’t roar. It hums. And Howarth and Grewal are humming along with it.
