How do you charge your electric car if a fox steals your smartphone? This may not be a question you have given much thought to, but the answer is: you can’t. OK, so the fox isn’t strictly necessary—there are other ways to render yourself phoneless—but without one, it’s usually impossible to charge your car.
And this is just one problem with driving an EV; I experienced plenty more when I drove one to Italy.
France did not cover itself with glory. There I encountered six service stations on the trot with only one working charger between them; some had actually removed their chargers following a safety issue last year.
Italy was differently bad: no chargers on the motorway, long detours to non-existent chargers, QR codes rendered unreadable in bright sunlight, and a gatekeeping app that wanted my tax code. A valid Italian tax code. The two-day trip took five days, and 12 close shaves with a nervous breakdown.
But it’s not just in France and Italy that EV-driving is full of problems. The UK has plenty of its own, which will need fixing pronto if this really is to be the future of travel—and if we’re to stand any chance of fulfilling the UK’s net zero commitment.
The problems start with how to access the chargers. Exactly why credit cards were ditched in favour of phone-dependent apps and “RFID cards” is unclear, but the result is a network that’s inconvenient, difficult and occasionally impossible to access.
RFIDs are electronic access cards, and you can whistle for kilowatts unless you have the right one—which you must have applied for 10 days in advance to give it time to arrive by post. At least apps can be downloaded on the spot—so long as you’ve got good enough signal and the 19-odd apps required to charge a car haven’t over-clogged your phone, causing it to down-tools. Even if you can get them installed, apps are not to be trusted about locations: you might be standing next to a charger, but the app refuses to turn it on, claiming that the nearest one is 20 miles away. The day before I wrote this it happened to me twice—with two different apps and two different chargers.
But access is not the only fly in the eco-ointment.There’s a lot of talk about rapid chargers delivering 20-minute recharges every 200 miles, but it ignores some inconvenient details: 350kW-chargers exist, but cars able to charge that fast do not, so they reduce power to the maximum a car can take. My Renault Zoe might have a rapid-charging connector (many don’t), but it takes about an hour to add 100 miles, whether the charger is capable of 50kW or 350kW.
The more expensive the car, the quicker it can charge. We may need policies to ensure rapid-charging does not remain a privilege of the rich—or we risk creating a level of mobility-inequality not seen since serfs walked barefoot and lords galloped about on armour-plated horses. Indeed, there’s a growing gap in who can charge up at all, even at motorway service stations. There’s usually a long line of superchargers in perfect working order for the exclusive use of costly Teslas, while the rest of us have to try our luck with subpar chargers that are often broken, sometimes for weeks at a time. If it was petrol pumps just for Mercedes, there’d be riots on the street.
It could be much better than this, and in some countries it already is. On my return journey I drove through Switzerland, which had rapid chargers at all service stations, and clear signs for them in advance. As I continued through Germany and Belgium, the knot in my stomach unwound as I found rapid chargers at regular intervals—and hotels with charging facilities. The journey took half the time, and I cancelled my holiday plan to buy back my old diesel car.
So it’s clearly possible to get it right, but how? Sam Hampton, a specialist in EV charging networks at Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute, thinks what is needed are cars with “bigger batteries for longer range, and increasing the number of chargers at locations” on major routes across the whole country. Adrian Keen from Instavolt—recently voted What Car’s most reliable network provider, and one of the few to offer credit card access and do all their own maintenance of charging points—thought three things undermined confidence: “endless barriers to access, unreliable kit and chargers in dodgy places”—which perfectly sums up the first half of my European odyssey.
Credit card access is currently advisory, but it needs to be mandatory, or the eco-techno-geeks will continue making EV-life a misery with their unreliable toys. The network needs oversight to improve coverage, and service stations on major routes should have a statutory duty to provide a minimum number of rapid chargers and keep them in working order.
The government says new petrol and diesel car sales will have to stop by 2030, and campaigners suggest there is no more time to lose in getting our existing cars off the road. Given how lovely EVs are to drive, if all those improvements were in place, no one would ever want to drive a petrol- or diesel-powered car again.
And in case you are wondering, a fox really did go off with my smartphone.
