Leading the charge
19 March 2021
After a successful first long distance journey, Pete Beach encountered some frustrations with his new electric car. Or at least with the charging infrastructure.
Last Friday I reported how Pete, sales and marketing manager with Genquip Groundhog, has replaced his diesel vehicle with a fully electric one to help the environment and reduce running costs. You can read the original post here. There was a fascinating follow-up discussion earlier this week, too.
“Over the weekend I went to the northbound M1 Woodall Services near where I live in Sheffield just as a test,” Pete tells me. “But it was very disappointing. The suitable charge points were in a poor state of repair and kept giving error messages when I tried to connect up. The system called for a service engineer but that’s no good when you’re in a hurry.
“There were only two charging points and one of the connections wasn’t suitable for my car.
“Then I drove to the southbound services and the charging points were in an even worse state with cables strewn all over the place. And the same error messages came up when I tried to connect. I ended up recharging at a local Tesco, in an area that was clean and well-kept.
“Tesla have their own charging system and at both service stations theirs seemed excellent, being easy to find, clean and there were about a dozen charge points. But having a Jaguar, that’s no use to me.”
On a more positive note, the charging infrastructure as a whole seems set to expand. This week Britain’s largest independent chain of petrol stations, Motor Fuel Group (MFG) which operates 918 forecourts, announced that in the next decade it will invest around £400m in 150kW and 350kW chargers across its network.
This will give MFG approximately 3,000 charging points at around 500 sites. The 150kW versions are said to give 100 miles-worth of power in ten minutes, while the 350kW chargers can ultimately give similar refilling times to fossil fuels, it is claimed.
Pete, who drives up to 40,000 miles annually, says: “In future, I plan to recharge the car at, say, 130-mile intervals throughout a longer journey to make sure I don’t risk running too low.”
I’ll continue to update Pete’s progress in a future blog post, as it has aroused so much interest.
Meanwhile, look out on the site next week for a story about a hirer that is taking more of its vehicle fleet electric.
• Surprisingly, the Government announced yesterday that it is to cut - yes, cut - grants aimed at encouraging people to buy electric vehicles. The Department for Transport will reduce grants from £3,000 to £2,500 and restrict them to cars under £35,000. The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) has described the decision as "the wrong move at the wrong time".
