This week saw the big drive back from Lordstones Country Park in the North Yorkshire Moors on Thursday. After an excellent breakfast at the café there, I drove the hire Citroen Relay van back to Kendal and picked up my car. The first stop was at Charnock Richard services on the M6 to charge. There were 16 Applegreen Electric (a new network to me) chargers there, only one of which was in use. There were also 3 GRIDSERVE chargers and a bank of Tesla Superchargers. I was soon on my way and heading south on the M6 then the M5. I stopped again at Strensham services; there are only 3 GRIDSERVE chargers there, but my back up plan, if they were all in use, was to go to the northbound services a few miles away where there are 9 GRIDSERVE chargers. As it was all the chargers were available. After yet another coffee I set off for my stopping point that day, a Travelodge at Stonehouse near Stroud. Volunteering on the Northern Travers event had been great fun but involved long shifts and disturbed sleep, I did not want to drive tired, hence the planned overnight stop.
In the morning, I set off refreshed and stopped off at Exeter services to charge the car and join a Zoom meeting via my phone. There are 24 GRIDSERVE rapid chargers there, a couple of fast chargers and a massive bank of Tesla chargers. By the time my meeting finished I was good to go and cover the final 103 miles of the 402-mile journey.
On Thursday I spotted an article on MSN ‘Electric dream? What it’s really like to drive 285 miles to The Lakes in a leccy car’. Having just come back from the Lakes that interested me. As soon as I started reading it, I had a feeling of déjà vu. The article was dated 6th April 2024, but I was sure I had read it last year. A little searching and I found it was first published on the Metro website on 12th May 2023 and again a few days ago. The journalist was loaned the fully electric BMW iX1 for the trip. It has a range of between 259 and 270 miles, almost 50% more than my Zoe and she had 117 less miles to drive.
Talking about the return journey this is what she said.
While our car was an absolute dream to drive, the charging point recommended by the sat nav didn’t work particularly well, or quickly, so we ended up making two carefully planned pit stops – adding on a total of two hours to our journey – as we wanted to make sure we could make it back with a bit of juice to spare. (Then there’s the payment apps to figure out, which aren’t the easiest to decipher if you don’t know what you’re doing.)
I’m not sure why the stops added 2 hours to the journey, the BMW iX1 will charge to 80% in half an hour. One half an hour charge would have been more than enough to get them home as they left the Lake District with a full charge.
My experience returning from the Lakes was a lot better than the journalist’s; I think for a few reasons. One, the charging infrastructure has improved in the 11 months since her journey and contactless payment is the norm now. Also, I seldom rely on my in-car Satnav for information, it is unreliable; it will happily tell me there are no charging points in the area when I am parked next to one and it doesn’t say how many there are at each location. I plan a little, identify locations with multiple chargers and live the electric dream.
Together in Electric Dreams – Giorgio Moroder and Philip Oakey
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Some positive news – Norway could become first country to have more electric cars than petrol among all the doom and gloom about electric car sales slowing. Demand for electric cars slows sharply as customers revert to petrol. It is hardly surprising given the cost of living crisis, people feeling the effects of interest rate rises as their fixed term mortgages come to an end and the Government’s staggering reluctance to do anything to stimulate private electric vehicle sales.
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Electric driving 