An electrifying journey

The internet’s awash with anti-EV content right now which prompted me, contrary as I am, to finally pony up and buy one. 

And what a baffling, confounding and ultimately smug journey it’s been so far. 

Choosing the car was the easy part. We only had a few requirements, the key one being that it should be able to get from our home in Renfrewshire to my in-laws’ in Ayrshire and back on one charge, in the winter, with the heating on. 

Talk about narrowing things down – that left almost nothing apart from Teslas and a handful of bigger-battery options, so we went mainstream and chose the tried-and-tested Nissan Leaf, with a promised 230-mile range. 

A 2020 model with 13,500 miles on the clock came in at £16,489 – more than I’ve ever spent on a car before, but about the same as a comparable petrol Volkswagen Golf. 

So it’s a lot of money, but you soon make that back with petrol prices north of 140p a litre, right? 

Well, probably. 

The first thing I learned was that charging on the go is wildly expensive – in some cases, according to my back-of-an-envelope scribblings, comparable to filling up with cheap supermarket fossil juice. 

The second is that unless you’re sticking to well-used service stations, about one in three chargers won’t work. They’ll either: 

• Be completely, inexplicably broken 
• Not accept contactless cards, and instead require an RFID card which has to be applied for online and then arrives through the post (not much use if you need a power boost in a hurry) 
• Insist you download another app and register all your details before you can charge (this is entirely a starting-out issue though, once you’re up and running this should be far less of a problem – and if you’re fazed by it, Octopus are trying to bring dozens of providers together in one easy app)  

• Have strange quirks, like the one at Morrisons in Dundee which despite having two cables will only charge one car at a time (ask me how I know: as I plugged in, the woman in an Audi SUV who was already charging was booted off. She took it well, to be fair – there’s an eye-rolling good humour among most EV drivers, who know their journey’s going to take a little bit longer than it did in their old car)  

That’s the bad stuff. The good stuff far outweighs it, though.  

First up, ‘range anxiety’ is nonsense.  

I’m driving the EV well beyond battery range. Most people won’t do that – in fact, the average car trip made in England in 2019 was just 8.4 miles. 

If you can use Zapmap, you’ll never be more than a few miles from a charger – and you’ll do the VAST majority of your charging at home. 

Second, EVs are quick. At 218bhp, the Leaf is the most powerful car I’ve ever owned. Take off the ‘eco’ mode which maximises battery life and you’re flying. 

Third, stopping to recharge on long journeys really isn’t an issue. On a 265-mile trip to visit family in Sheffield I stopped once, for an hour. That’s about 20 minutes longer than I would have stopped to have lunch in the past. 

On work trips it pans out even better: the odd stop to charge lets me check emails, make calls and grab a coffee. 

Fourth, that smug, zero-emission feeling is real, and it’s a potent drug. 

One thing I wanted to talk about is home charging – another area which has caused me some head-scratching in recent days, but one which has the potential to deliver almost-free travel. 

Right now we’re all paying 35p-ish per kWh of electricity – that means about 8p per mile of EV travel. 

Installing a home charger costs about £1,000, which is undoubtedly a lot of money, but new homes are now required to have EV chargers, and it’s something homebuyers will be looking for in the future. 

Charging with a 3-pin plug is possible (we can half-fill the battery overnight like this) but it’s dangerous as plugs and cables can heat up. 

A home charger gives you access to much faster charging (typically 25 miles of range per hour) and also, crucially, smart tariffs which bring the cost of off-peak power down to around 10p per kWh – around 2-3p per mile of driving. 

So am I a convert? Probably, yes. A better charging network would be a boon, but time will deliver that as more EVs enter the market and the economics of running that network improve. 

Until then, home charging and 2-3p a mile are a huge incentive – and don’t forget that eco smugness… 

• Blog by Nick Sharpe, Director of Communications and Strategy