This week was a busy driving week, all done with home charging. On the 10th, 12th and 14th I plugged in overnight and that was me sorted. On Tuesday (12th) I had a short drive to Boscence Farm Community for a finance sub-committee meeting. I haven’t quite got rid of the accountant in me. I love the drive there, it is through some lovely countryside and the village of Townshend or Penn an Dre Egloskrowenn to use the Cornish name. To visit the village is to go back in time. Then in the evening I drove to Truro for my community radio training course, coming back via Lanner to drop off a fellow attendee.
Wednesday evening involved a 140-round trip to Holsworthy in Devon to perform stand-up comedy at the White Hart pub. Then on Thursday it was a shorter trip to Falmouth to discuss the possibility of starting a comedy programme on Source FM radio. Friday involved a short drive to Bissoe for a business netwalking event and cake in the St Piran Café afterwards. Then in the evening a trip to nearby St Agnes to perform comedy at the Driftwood Spars pub. And finally on Saturday a morning trip to Indian Queens for a campaigning workshop organised by the Cornwall Wildlife Trust. Mysteriously on the way home I forgot to take the Camborne West turn off the A30 and found myself in Hayle having lunch at Be Kind the Vegan Coffee Caravan. Thankfully, that was the end of the driving for the week.
The Holsworthy trip illustrated how much the charging infrastructure has improved over the 30 months since I first got the car. In the early days I would have had a touch of range anxiety as the only chargers on the route were the very unreliable GeniePoint one in Holsworthy, the two often in use Shell Recharge ones at Fraddon Services on the A30 just over 20 miles from home and the solitary Shell Recharge a little closer to home at Carland Cross. Now, in addition, there are 2 superfast BP Pulse chargers in Holsworthy, 12 Instavolt chargers in the Bodmin retail park just off the A30 and 12 Gridserve chargers at the Cornwall services (6 rapid and 6 fast). It was interesting to read that EV drivers are now covering a similar annual mileage to drivers of petrol and diesel cars.
Now that there is more information and data available about electric vehicles the media will move away from EV bashing articles to more considered pieces. One criticism of EVs is that while the tailpipe emissions are zero (there is no exhaust pipe) the extra greenhouse emission from their manufacture make them not so green. There is an incredibly detailed and robust report produced by Volvo on the life cycle assessment (LCA) of the carbon footprint of their EX30 model which should help dispel that myth. The report is 47 pages long with a further 32 pages of appendices. For big picture people there is a one-page Executive Summary. Although if you do not at least glance through the whole document you will miss gems like this “The goal of this study is to contribute to transparency by disclosing the carbon footprint of the EX30, which has the intended function to transport passengers and their belongings.” What would a car do other than transport passengers and their belongings? Might it unintendingly write a bestselling novel?
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Electric driving 