Kerbo Charge Shortlisted for two Transport & Energy Awards
Shortlisted twice at the Transport and Energy Awards 2026
We have been shortlisted in two categories at this year's Transport and Energy Awards: Kerbo Klik for Best New Product, and Kerbo Glide for Best Accessibility Strategy or Project. Winners announced at Warwick University, 12 November 2026.
Both entries come back to the same problem. Around 40% of UK households have no driveway, roughly six million of them terraced, and new petrol and diesel car sales end in 2030. Cross-pavement channels solve the physical side of that. What we have learned over the past two years is that the channel in the ground was never going to be the whole answer.
Best New Product: Kerbo Klik
By late 2025 the constraint was no longer the product but the process of ordering one - our January 2026 survey of 3,000 drivers found the most commonly cited reason for not having ordered a Kerbo Charge was the difficulty of the application process, ahead of price and the product itself.
Kerbo Klik is an enterprise platform sitting between residents, local authorities and national partners. Residents get one online journey: eligibility checking at address level, Street View-assisted siting, document upload, digital acceptance of the council's own agreement and licence, payment, and a portal to track progress.
Authorities get a configurable workflow engine rather than a fixed product. Each sets its own permitting route (e.g. Section 178 or Section 50), its fee level and payee, its legal wording, its approval gates and its officer permissions. Applications arrive triaged, evidenced and ready to determine in a shared dashboard rather than as email attachments.
It also gives national partners a single route in. Vauxhall EV buyers can select a £500 voucher towards a Kerbo Charge and redeem it inside the Klik journey, and our partnership with VW Financial Services will work on the same basis.
Since launching in January 2026, Klik has gone live with twelve local authorities, among them Surrey, Leeds, Suffolk, West Berkshire, Cumberland and Hartlepool, and has processed nearly 2,000 applications.
Best Accessibility Strategy or Project: Kerbo Glide
The second entry began with feedback about our own product.
In June 2025 Motability Operations published Home charging for all, drawn from four workshops with its Headlight research community. Seventeen people, twelve of them Scheme customers, tested five cross-pavement products, ours among them. The report found that inserting a cable at ground level required bending or kneeling some participants simply could not do, and that self-closing lids, which exist to protect pedestrians, demanded strength and dexterity several did not have. It also recorded that the insertion tools then under development across the industry did not provide sufficient assistance to significantly improve product accessibility.
We treated that report as the design brief! Motability Operations set out ten design recommendations, we adopted them as requirements, and we worked with them as the specifier rather than as a customer giving feedback.
The hardest constraint was the lid. It protects pedestrians, including disabled pedestrians, but it is also what makes the channel difficult to use, and leaving it open during insertion simply moves risk from one group to another. So we stopped treating it as a channel problem and treated it as a cable problem. Kerbo Glide is a passive, plough-shaped guide that fastens to the resident's own charging cable and is pulled through the channel from standing or seated height, with one hand, without the user ever touching the lid. No battery, no motor, nothing to fail.
Prototypes were 3D printed and tested on live installations rather than in a laboratory, then sent free of charge to Scheme customers who used them at home and reported back. Glide launched in January 2026 and is made in Britain.
Motability Operations supports more than 890,000 disabled customers, runs over 100,000 electric vehicles, and estimates that around 200,000 Scheme customers live in housing suited to a cross-pavement product. Most have yet to make the switch.
Wish us luck on 12 November!
