On Friday afternoon we set off from Lancaster in our new Hyundai Ioniq electric car on our way to Glasgow.
Our first stop was at the Gretna services where we plugged the car in to an Electric Highway (EH) charge point and went in for a coffee. Half an hour later we discovered that it had only charged up just over £1's worth of power despite it saying it was a rapid charge, so it made little difference to our battery. We then continued north and made it to the Abington services though by this time we were getting warning messages as were down to about 7% - ie nearly running on empty.
We found there was no shortage of charge points for Tesla drivers at Abington - about 6 of them - whereas there were only a couple for other types of car. To our dismay it appeared that there was only one connector we could use and helpfully it was offline. Just as we were about to look at the other charge point someone in a SUV drove up and plugged his car in. So it was the best part of an hour later after he had finished that we had a look at this other point only to find that it had different connectors which didn't look compatible with our car. We were right next to a Days Inn so decided to spend the night there as it was getting late. We tried phoning the EH number but found it was only staffed during office hours. Very useful.
Sam managed to get through to the Hyundai helpline who arranged to get someone from a local garage to come out and help us, with him finally arriving at around 11pm. But he knew little about EVs. Fortunately there was a chap with a Tesla who came over and explained that we could use one of these other connectors on our car so by midnight we were all charged up and ready for bed.
In Glasgow we used two different charge points - one slow and one rapid - so we were all charged up for our return journey on the Sunday afternoon. We just needed one stop at services near Carlisle where we used a rapid charger and were ready to get back on the road after 45 minutes or so.
But over the weekend I had to install about 3 different apps with one not liking our bank details - fortunately we had another bank card we could use. Despite the EH app telling us that we could pay contactless it was only at the Carlisle services that we could pay without using an app and that wasn't an EH one.
Unlike stopping to fill up with petrol or diesel, you have no real idea what state the charge points will be in until you drive up to them. There are apps like Zap Map which show you the location of them all round the country along with the status of individual points but the information can be days or weeks out of date.
So our first long distance trip was certainly a baptism of fire. If the government is serious about persuading people to switch to EVs then we really need a lot more charge points and for them to be properly maintained. And for more of them to accept contactless payment.
