We drove 90 miles last Monday in our electric Renault Zoe – along the M8 and the M74 to our weekly child-minding commitment. We came home with 53% still in the battery and we’ll run around locally on that for a day or two before charging overnight at 5p per unit.
The Zoe is smooth, silent and swift. But I’m not completely convinced that this is the future. I suspect it’s like the ‘battle of the formats’ when VHS overcame Betamax in the struggle for a single video recording format. People may talk wistfully about hydrogen power and fuel cell technology. But the investment is going into EV’s and that’s how it’s going to be – regardless of the merits of the issue.
Cost and range are the two big issues in the EV world. Cost is a bit challenging – for people like us who have always run second-hand diesels until they would run no more. But there are remarkable cost savings which offset the up-front cost, Range, as you can see, is not a daily concern. The car claims 245 miles but of course never does anything like that particularly In cold weather when temperature greatly reduces the range. The problem comes when you actually want to go somewhere beyond the immediate range of the battery – my sister in Cambridge or Donegal. That sort of trip requires significant advance planning and quite a bit of extra time. First stop is the Zap-Map which tells you where the charging points are, how fast they are, whether or not they are in service and whether they are currently occupied. Even a brief survey presents a dismal picture. Far too many charge points – particularly off the motorways – are out of service.
Which magazine took aim at this in its April edition. People see the problem as being about the range of the cars – but it is actually as much if not more about the viability of the charging network. There is no single plug format or charging speed. There is limited ability simply to arrive and make a contactless payment – you have to sign up to each charging network in advance. Tesla has installed its own charging network which excludes all other makes. And of course there is the problem that too much of the charging network is out of service anyway.
if the government is serious about a general move to EV’s by 2030, this is going to have to be dealt with – as is the challenge of providing access to home chargers for people who do not have a private driveway.
Until then, people will stay away – or will do as we have done which is to run a second car alongside an EV – open to the accusation of ‘virtue signalling’