Electric Car Trip 2

Our second trip away from home in our Hyundai EV, this time down to Buckinghamshire. What we learned from the previous trip was that if possible you should look to charge up your battery once it gets to 40-50%. It's a bad idea to leave it until the equivalent of the low fuel light coming on in a petrol car, the reason being that you may get to a charge point only to find it isn't working. You're then stuck with an almost flat battery as happened to us on our trip up to Glasgow in December.* 

So on the journey south we stopped at Keele services, 80 odd miles from home and charged up with no problem. I had seen on one website that Keele only has Tesla charge points but as we discovered on our return journey, this is only true on the northbound side. 

We were spending two nights at a hotel in Buckingham which was near charge points at Tesco's. It mainly worked ok apart from on one occasion it cut out after 10-15 minutes. It can be confusing as to whether you use the charge point app or the Hyundai app to start and stop the charging. As we found out, if there is a control panel on the charge point then it's best to use that. It seems that these different apps don't always talk to each other.

We had stopped at the shiny, new Rugby services on the way down to use the loos but were impressed with the numerous charge points so decided to stop there on our return journey. As ever, most of the points are Tesla and on the first Electric Highway one we tried to use, the card reader was not working. 

One thing we've discovered is that there is a community of EV drivers who are generally happy to talk to one another, share experiences and give advice which is useful if charge points are malfunctioning or if you are a newbie to the world of EVs. Most of the non-Tesla points were occupied but we managed to find an EH one which was accepting contactless payments. So we plugged in and went for a coffee. 

Our next brief stop was at Keele but as previously mentioned, it was Tesla only.  Fortunately it was only a dozen or so miles to the next services. We had a bit of difficulty there as we couldn't get the first one to start charging but there was a free one next to it which worked ok. 

When we came out we had fun getting it to stop. I tried to cancel the charging on the Hyundai app and I got the message, "Can't stop charging." A couple had pulled up at the next charge point and we were able to help them as it was their first time charging up away from home. As the bloke said to me, the message I'd got reminded him of the song "Can't Stop Dancing". 

It can certainly feel like we are being taken on a merry dance by these unregulated EV charge point companies.

* Read about our trip to Glasgow last December.