Nightmare journey
25 January 2022
The occasional series of posts about users’ experiences of driving electric vehicles (EVs) for business use continues to attract a lot of reaction.
Clearly, many professionals in hire and in related industries are exploring the EV concept and appreciate the real-life experiences that I’ve been reporting from Peter Beach, the sales and marketing manager with Genquip Groundhog, who started driving an electric car nine months ago. He recently decided that he will switch back to a diesel or hybrid model some time this year when supply chain disruptions ease.
One of the people who added to the ongoing debate that the topic aroused on social media was Laura Holt, whose work as a freight train driver takes her all over the country. She switched over to driving an EV in October 2020 when she was based in Scotland, but having moved to south west England last summer, she has found the infrastructure to be inadequate inadequate south of the border and she also intends changing her vehicle.
“As someone who drives 50,000 a year, I want to protect the planet and so an EV makes sense,” Laura told me. “When I lived in Scotland it was no problem at all because the infrastructure is perfect. But in England and Wales, it isn’t good enough yet.
“I have a Kia e-Niro, which is a lovely car. I’m planning to change it for the same model as a hybrid, which is also a fraction of the cost.
“In Scotland I paid £20 a year for a ChargePlace Scotland card which let me use any Scottish government owned charge point for free. Wherever I went there were usually enough available and they are all rapid chargers.
“I used to be based at Newbiggin between Dundee and Arbroath, and commuted to Mossend near Motherwell every day. That’s 90 miles each way and I never had an issue. There are charge points at most supermarkets and many other locations.”
Laura says that when she relocated to Somerset to take up a new role, “that’s when I fell out of love with the EV. It’s been a nightmare.”
Her main frustrations – echoing those of Peter Beach in earlier posts such as here chiefly concern the number of charge points available, their condition and location, and the increasing queues to charge up because there are more EVs on the road now.
Laura says this makes it difficult to plan a longer EV journey with confidence.
“The worst occasion was, ironically, during the fuel supply shortage in September when I had to wait for nine hours through the night at Gloucester Services on the M5 to charge the vehicle. I’d been to visit my mother in Castle Donington in Derbyshire, but on the way back I couldn’t find a working charge point. The car’s battery was draining every mile.
“The charger location app kept indicating that they were working at each services on the motorway, but when they initialised, it said there was a malfunction.
“Eventually I reached Gloucester Services with one mile of range left. If I hadn’t made it, I could have phoned the AA or another breakdown service, but some EVs can’t be towed and you have to wait for a flatbed truck to transport you off the motorway to the nearest charge point.
“In fact, the recovery services had already towed nine other vehicles which had also run out of battery to the services. The drivers had experienced the same difficulties that I had in finding a working charge point. The cars were offloaded as close as possible to the charge points and then we all had to take our turn of 45 minutes each to get just enough charge to going again. So that was a seven hour wait.
“It was the middle of the night, freezing cold and I couldn’t run the car heater. I was sat in a dark area of the car park, almost as far away from the main building as you can get.
“I got chatting to an elderly couple who had been towed there. She was in her seventies and her husband was in his eighties. They just didn’t feel safe late at night in a remote area of a services at 4am.
“I had left my mother’s house at 5:30 in the evening and got home at 9:22 the next morning. It should have taken three hours! I had my dog in the car as well. And because I’d stayed at the services for more than two hours, I got charged extra for parking!”
Laura has been back to the service station since her nightmare journey and found that there are now more charge points in place. But she, and others, wish there was more standardisation.
“You go to service areas and you see a line of ten or more dedicated Tesla chargers. They use the same connection as my car, but I can’t use them because of a software incompatibility. I could buy an adapter but that costs several hundred pounds for what is effectively a bit of plastic with a silicon chip.”
The final straw in Laura’s EV journey was when a BMW owner effectively ‘hijacked’ her charge point at another motorway services. She went for a cup of tea while her car was charging but on returning found the cables disconnected and draped over her car bonnet. The other driver had pressed the emergency stop on the charger and connected their car instead, using the set of cables on the other side. Charming!
Laura has also noticed that the price of charging away from home seems to have been edging higher and higher.
● Peter Beach reports some positive news about the installation of charging points in public locations. Having complained to one service provider about the shortage of suitable facilities and their frequently poor state of repair, he received a reply stating that work was under way at all its locations to install new charging hardware and software and to fit the latest fast chargers in place of legacy units.
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