Shell V-Power is great stuff and was worth seeking out, back in my pre-EV days. Haven't been to a petrol station in years now and I can't exactly say I miss it
I must admit that I'm intrigued that the charging point simply plugs into a socket further down. In the UK, a charge point needs to have its own dedicated feed back to the distrbution box, with inline circuit breakers, separate earth and all sorts of things!
I'm sharing my wife's car these days as I gave up mine in anticipation of the Polestar. 'Had to fill it up on the way to work which slowed me down and I was already thinking how much I was looking forward to not having to bother anymore with the hassle.
Here in the U.S., you can install a charging station either way: you can direct wire it or use a receptacle. I'm not absolutely sure you need a dedicated circuit, but that's the only thing that makes sense to me. I opted to use the receptacle. There are two downsides:
1. there's a maximum amperage of 50 amps using two hot or powered 120 volt lines, directly out of phase, for 240 volts. A continuous load (defined by a draw lasting 3 hours or more) is limited to 80% of the circuit rating leaving 40 amps for charging.
2. a receptacle has to be on a ground-fault circuit interupter breaker which can sometimes not play nicely with charging stations.
The benefit, though, is that it's easier to swap out a charger or send one back for repair and to do so, you don't need an electrician.
If you direct-wire the charging station, you can hook it up to a larger circuit and get a faster charging amperage. You also don't need the GFCI. But I'll be fine with the 40 amps and like the versatility, so I went with the receptacle installation.
My receptacle has four pins: hot1, hot2, neutral, and ground. The charger only needs hot1 and hot2 for normal use and the ground for safety. I could have used a 3-pin receptacle instead. Early glimpses of the charging cable, though, indicate that the U.S. cable will have the four-pin, NEMA 14-50 plug.
It's also a long run back to the circuit breaker panel (the service entrance)... 200'... so I asked for and had installed #4AWG THHN, copper wires. Those are pretty heavy compared to what's normally used, but I wanted to minimize voltage drop.
The circuit breaker is located back where the wires enter the house just after the meter as is standard in the U.S.
