My Electric Car Hell

I wing things, a lot. I can’t be bothered to wade through loads of paraphernalia so I glean the basics and off I go

I gave up my petrol car easily and for various reasons; Planet saving for one, Money saving is another — I would save money on fuel. Hips saving — it’s an automatic and as my hips aren’t what they used to be the non-use of pedals appealed. It just made sense.

What do I know ?

I felt enough had been mentioned in the media and by friends who seemed to have done their research and say with conviction, that plenty of public places have chargers, plug in go shopping and it’s free, charging only takes half an hour. Statements I foolishly believed to be true. I learnt two things on the weekend of my trip. One is that I should do more of my own research and the second is that a mile feels much longer when driving along praying that the charger gods will somehow have erected a point in the next lay-by

Electric cars are not forgiving. Unlike when driving a petrol car you are afforded a few more miles for luck when ‘empty’, once a battery is flat, that’s your lot! I even asked my son how many miles after the car reaches zero do I have? He found it funny but pointed out that once the battery is dead, it’s not going to move. Good point and fairly obvious once I thought about it. Also, the other things to factor in are heating and the driving mode which both cause the battery to drain if, like me, you’re a nippy driver and hard on the accelerator

It seemed I was learning a lot in a short space of time and I wasn’t sure I liked all of it

On the morning of my return journey, I needed 90 miles to get home but only had 30. I took the car to the shopping centre and hooked it up to one of the electric points while I went off to have a look around. It would only take 45 minutes to an hour to fully charge (based on zero fact, just what I had heard) so I took my time and returned a couple of hours later. The car had only gained a few miles! How could that be? Was the charger faulty? or was it because it was a council-run car park and they were stingy on the electricity!

I managed to plug it into a socket at my friend’s place but as I discovered, a 3kw charger takes a long time to get even a few miles on the clock. I also got advice from one of their neighbours who happened to own an electric car and whom I wished I’d met when I arrived. He had done his research. He was very informative and would have proved invaluable had he been able to produce a charging point out of his jacket

It’s probably worth noting that I spent an hour or so trying to find out if there were faster chargers and where they might be! It’s also probably worth noting I should have done all this before I left home! For a novice like me I downloaded apps I probably didn’t need and I didn’t understand hardly any of the blurb I was reading but I gleaned enough to know I was in trouble!

Just enough to get by

I learnt that there are 3 types of chargers for public access — Slow, Fast and Rapid ( there may be more so worth doing your own research as this is not based on anything extensive, just what I found for myself)

A charger that’s around 3kw take about 10–14 hours

A 7kw-22kw will be deemed Fast and charge in about 4–6 hours (hardly ‘fast!’)

A Rapid charger of 50kw-120kw + will take about an hour

I knew I needed to locate a rapid charger. But where are they?

So amidst much ‘will you be ok ?’ and ‘It’s put me off buying an electric car’ and ‘at least we are learning through this’ I said goodbye to my friends. I called into a Supermarket car park full of hope, but they only had one that would take 6 hours. Clearly, the rapid ones were not everywhere! So I made the decision to press on and hope

Praying to the Charger Gods

The A14 was dark, with no central reservation lighting. Traffic was steady. I drove at 50- 60mph, turning the heating off and glancing every few seconds at the mileage on the dash, comparing it to the number of miles showing on the sat nav, which didn’t help my nerves at all

My friends had kindly offered to follow me in their car which gave me a certain sense of security but if the car was going to run out of battery they could hardly bring me a can of electricity! So the journey was fraught with trying to conserve the battery I had whilst finding a place with a suitable charging point

Finally and with only a few miles left on the clock, I was relieved to see a garage. I was cold but the shaking was more to do with my nerves than the temperature. After a few attempts at trying to make it charge, I realised it was out of order! and the awful realisation quickly dawning on me that I may now not find a place to charge my car at all and it would be abandoned by the side of the road! Dark, cold, and no choice

The next service station was 19 miles. I had 28 left! So with panic setting in I pulled onto the A14 once again, now dropping the speed to 40mph. Other drivers are less than sympathetic. They seem to assume you are driving slowly on purpose and beep loudly as they tear past waving an arm or giving a middle finger sign. It seemed endless. I was aware it was quite dangerous to drive so slowly especially past slip roads with traffic entering onto the carriageway but I had no choice. It would have been more dangerous to grind to a halt in the slow lane without any warning or lights. Do hazards even work without electricity? I had no clue

Charger Gods exist!

Eventually, the services loomed. Yes! I pulled off and saw a sign ‘EV charging point’ I leapt out, grinning. I didn’t realise then that all of them were out of order. They were newly installed and not in operation and therefore weren’t of any use! Over by the entrance to the facilities were another two charging points. I had 9 miles left and if they weren’t working it was going to mean leaving the car and somehow getting it recovered. Do the AA come out and have chargers? Do they recover it? I had no idea and I didn’t want to contemplate it either

So I drove over to them, praying to the car charging gods for the umpteenth time that night. A glimmer of hope. There was another car plugged in and charging! I hooked up. Yes! It was working! and it was easy to use! And when they work they don’t have endless confusing messages on the screen, it doesn’t repeat the same message over and over and you can pay by card easily! And cheaply! although by that point I would have paid anything! And it was a rapid charger, taking 45 minutes to charge 82% of the battery

I was running around the car punching the air, hugely relieved that I would finally be able to get home!

Battery charged, sanity empty

It had been a fraught, lonely scary experience of driving an electric car on a long journey. Yes, it is helping the environment, but it made me question my whole decision to own one. I have no confidence in it and from now on I won’t be using it for long journeys. Instead, I will borrow a petrol car because I know I will find garages everywhere, I will feel safer in that knowledge and I can get there and back without fear or worry which defeats the whole purpose of why I chose one in the first place — to help the emissions and mother earth

If the Government want us all to be driving electric cars by the time Big Ben chimes into 2035, there has to be a vast improvement in the provision of facilities to allow us to do so confidently, without fear of being stranded in a place, alone. Which for a woman, especially, is a fear we face every day — but that’s a whole new article!