An Electric Vehicle Holiday
I decided to take an electric vehicle on holiday and here’s what happened..
For our holiday to Devon, I convinced Elle that we should take an 90 minute train ride each way to pick up an Electric Vehicle (EV) from the EV Experience Centre. At DriveNow, I was lucky to be able drive the BMW i3 around London regularly, but I had never done long mileage so this was my opportunity.
Driving Experience
We were the lucky recipients of the latest Renault Zoe ZE50 with around 220 miles range. The driving experience in an EV, this Zoe being no exception, is superior than fossil fuel equivalents (Renault Clio in this case). The acceleration is better, good for getting out in fast moving traffic, and the regenerative brakes mean that you barely have to move your foot over to the brake. I don’t see how anyone could prefer the driving experience of a regular fossil fuel car after being in an EV.
Thumps up for the driving experience, but we all know that’s not stopping people driving EVs. I admit that on the way down I had the condition “range anxiesma” (new term coined here!) because I wasn’t certain I could make the 189 miles to charging point on the journey. We made it no problem and that was the last time I touched the ECO button.
Charging Experience
Below is an overview of the mileage over the week and the providers I used. I did a fair amount of mileage meaning that I had to charge on public points 7 out of 8 days, which was a hassle. Every day, checking routes on Googlemaps then Zap Map to see if there was a charging point, working out how to access the point and whether we could fill the time whilst it was charging. Faff!
Table showing EV Mileage and Charging
Lesson 1: Overnight slow charging, whether on-street or home points, is the most important part of the charging network for the general consumer. If I had access to either of these where we were staying then I would only have had to charge twice in the day, on my long journeys.
As for the chargepoint experience itself I used BP Chargemaster, Pod Point, Engenie, Geniepoint, and Rolec EV. I only downloaded two apps because I had a Chargemaster RFID and didn’t need either for two providers. The Pod Point app was great, simple to signup and worked seamlessly when charging, so kudos to them. The only time I had a significant problem was with a Geniepoint rapid that I had to call to be reset so that it could charge, Rita provided excellent assistance. Overall, the different access methods didn’t bother me as much as I thought, clearly for Rapids they are all going to be contactless capable in the coming years, which is helpful. But I don’t know the proportion of people that would put up with the experience as it is, still vastly inferior to petrol stations.
One challenge of the charging experience was that in all cases it was separate from the parking from the charging. I fear a parking ticket is on the way for leaving a car on a Pod Point in Tesco for too long, my own fault but the warnings weren’t clear that the time I could charge would be restricted because of the parking restrictions.
Also when using Polar at a Toby Carvery I felt obliged to eat a lamb carvery lunch (which was great to be fair).
I didn’t have the information on what additional things I might have to pay for to get a charge whether it be parking or for a carvery lunch.
Lesson 2: The combination of parking and charging has been overlooked so far as I’m not sure I’ve seen anything in the UK where you can pay for both together. This would just be another helpful step in consumer adoption because the adoption of cashless parking is already significant.
This was not a typical week of driving, but what a person might do if renting a vehicle or using a carsharing service. It brought home to me the potential difficulties that might be face by those services in adopting Evs for multi-day or week rentals. Customers will need to have a great rapid charging network experience, but also easy access to overnight charging which will be more difficult to provide. Perhaps initial beta testing could be for packages with Hotel chains that have that overnight charging available.
Lesson 3: It will be harder for rental vehicles to go EV than I thought. I understood the difficulty around maintaining high utilisation via quick drop-off and pick-up and that there was an advantage of having a much newer fleet and the ability to renew this. I hadn’t properly understood the difficulty of the length of travel, where it will be harder to provide a good network for.
Overall I did enjoy my experience in an EV and the cars are not that far off. 300 miles of charge, coupled with 150kw chargers and great availability of overnight charging will lead to a good experience. However, forgetting the environmental benefits, the overall experience is not as good as fossil fuel vehicles yet and work needs to be done on the pain points around chargepoint availability and ease of access.
