Recharged

I’m a day late posting because I was on Dartmoor all weekend. I was on a Walk Leader course on Saturday that focused on navigation and group management so that you help keep everyone safe. I then camped overnight on the moor because I had a comedy gig in Plymouth on Sunday night; it seemed silly to drive back home on Saturday just to come back on Sunday. It was a bonus that the weather was good.

Last week I mentioned an article ‘Electric dream? What it’s really like to drive 285 miles to The Lakes in a leccy car’, BMW lent the journalist a car to highlight their three-year initiative called Recharge in Nature where they are working with 15 UK National Parks to install electric vehicle (EV) charging points at some of our best-loved beauty spots. On Saturday I parked at Postbridge so that I could walk a few miles north to camp in an area where wild camping is allowed. There was a Pod Point charger that was part of the BMW Recharge in Nature project in the car park.

My two days in nature certainly left me feeling recharged.

I did not plug in overnight to avoid blocking one of the two charge points; the car would have been fully charged well before midnight. When I came back in the morning I did plug in while I waited for the local shop to open. That is when I discovered a drawback with the initiative, you can only pay via the app and there was a poor mobile signal. I had to wonder about the car park to find a spot that worked. I imagine that many beauty spots have a similar problem.

I did not have long to wait for the shop to open so not much charge was added. I stopped on the way into Plymouth for my comedy performance at the InstaVolt chargers located just off Transit Way. As soon as I had enough charge to get home with a bit to spare, I left. InstaVolt costs 85p/kwh whereas charging at home costs 28p/kwh.

Public charging attracts VAT at the 20% rate whereas my domestic electricity bill attracts VAT at the special rate of 5%. The Government really should address this anomaly, especially as it’s people on lower income that are more like not to have off-street parking and therefore be more reliant on public charging. Unfortunately this government has no intention of addressing this issue or making any changes that will encourage the uptake of electric vehicles, as their reaction to a recent House of Lords report illustrates. Crucial car tax changes rejected despite industry demands over ‘perverse’ system.

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The seed of an idea for these blog posts has to grow and I nurture it until it is ready to harvest, then I prepare it so you can digest it. If you found the content useful please consider popping some money into the honesty box. Unlike buying produce at the farm gate, you cannot put the cash in a box because you are reading this online. You can click on the Buy Me a Coffee link below which will take you to a page where by magic (nifty software) a small amount of money will disappear from your account and appear in mine. Don’t worry you are in control all the time. If the post wasn’t helpful, please leave a comment suggesting how it can be improved.

If you like what I say you can buy me a coffee if you want to. Pay for two and I can have cake as well.

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The Electric Dream

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 6^th 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 12^th 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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If you like what I say you can buy me a coffee if you want to. Pay for two and I can have cake as well.

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Motorway charging

Thanks to the wonders of scheduling when this is posted I will be helping at a checkpoint in Lord Stones Country Park, Middlesbrough. The event is the Northern Traverse a 300km footrace following Wainwright’s coast to coast route from St Bees on the west coast to Robin Hood’s Bay on the east coast.

As you can imagine it was a lengthy trip from west Cornwall. I had to pick a van up near Kendal on Saturday morning, drive to Patterdale, help on a checkpoint there on Saturday then move on to Lord Stones midday Sunday. I performed comedy in The Fortesque pub, Plymouth on Thursday evening, rather than return home I a booked a Travelodge at Junction 27 on the M5. On the way there I stopped at Exeter Services to use the excellent bank of chargers there. That meant on Friday I was all set for the journey up the M5 and M6 with a planned stop at Strensham Services to charge. That didn’t happen, I needed coffee so stopped at Costa Coffee, Taunton Deane services. The GRIDSERVE charger there was available so I took the opportunity to give the car a quick top up. Ridiculously there is only one charger at Taunton Services.

Having deviated from the plan I decided to freestyle after that with stops dictated by my need for coffee and my bladder capacity. Long delays on the M5 meant that the distance travelled was not as far as I would have liked between stops. I stopped of at Gloucester Services for a break and a walk along the path they have through the land behind the site. There are currently only two chargers on that site, more are being installed. I think it could be sometime before they are connected. Again woefully inadequate, something the Government could rectify.

The M6 also had its share of jams; lane closures and an accident. I decided to leave the motorway and find somewhere to have lunch. That was a little frustrating because at that point my Satnav malfunctioned and refused to show any road details. When I was able to stop, turning it off and on a couple of times sorted it out. As I seemed to be in a lot of traffic doing the same thing (avoiding the M6 not trying to sort out their Satnavs) I abandoned the search for a country idyll with a charger and settled for a McDonald’s with InstaVolt chargers. That will be my last charge until somewhere on the way home on Wednesday.

My conclusion after experimenting with motorway charging without a solid plan is that it is like the little girl with the little curl. If you are unaware of the Wordsworth poem the lines I am thinking about are “When she was good she was very very good. And when she was bad she was horrid.” The Exeter services experience was very very good, the experience at Taunton Dean and Gloucester Services would have been horrid if there had been anyone else using the chargers.

My McPlant burger was horrid and I doubt it will ever be good let alone very, very good.

I did read some interesting articles during the first part of the week. There was a great myth-busting one from a group of environmental enthusiasts in the village of North Ferriby in Yorkshire. Well worth a read. Unlike the popular press they provide links to the data they have used. And there was a wealth of data on new car sales from New Automative. I haven’t digested it yet. If you want to chomp on the data follow the link. It does confirm what I have said previously; the early adopters have adopted, the early majority have yet to engage, the late majority will be just that – late to the party and the laggards will remain in denial for a long time.

Cornwall are about to get some electric busses so my non car journeys may soon be electric as well.

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If you like what I say you can buy me a coffee if you want to. Pay for two and I can have cake as well.

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Another quiet week

Only two car journeys this week, one on Tuesday evening to Truro for my Digital Skills course and the other on Friday to St Austell to write comedy with a fellow stand-up performer. Just a short battery top up during the week so I had plenty of charge in case I needed to go anywhere else.

Last week I said, the media have now calmed down about electric vehicles and are writing more balanced and informative articles. It was good to see this myth busting article in Top Gear Mythbusting the world of EVs: are people turning back to petrol? If you cannot be bothered clicking on the link the answer is no. A survey of 1,619 EV drivers in Britain found that “91 per cent of respondents with a driveway wouldn’t go back to combustion, and even 88 per cent of those who have no driveway – and so overwhelmingly have to public charge – also said they wouldn’t go back.”

A couple of papers, The Times and the Mail I think, got excited about an electric vehicle misbehaving itself. I don’t think the journalists were motoring correspondents, they described the errant Jaguar E-Pace as an electric vehicle, it is a mild-hybrid. The I-Pace is Jaguar’s fully electric vehicle. It subsequently turned out to be driver error according to a report in Car Dealer magazine. It’s worth clicking on that link to see the video of the frisky Jaguar mounting a Porsche then ramming a Tesla. The footage was captured by the Tesla’s onboard camera, it takes a little while for the action to start.

The other story that caught my attention was Volvo producing their last diesel vehicle. It was on the GB News website. I only knew about it thanks to a post on X. Can we still call them tweets or should we now call them x’s. If there are any apostrophe buffs reading this that is the one of the very few occasions when an apostrophe can be used with a plural. Had I used a capital X the apostrophe would have been wrong.

With that dramatic video and the thrill of correctly using an apostrophe in a plural that is enough excitement for me so I will end here.

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If you like what I say you can buy me a coffee if you want to. Pay for two and I can have cake as well.

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A normal week – thankfully

It was good to be back to a relatively quiet life this week. Over the previous two weeks I had five comedy gigs, hosted netwalking events, attended a conventional networking event, went on digital and political lobbying workshops, chaired a charity finance sub-committee meeting and met with friends.

This week I had only two trips in the car, one to the far side of Truro for a digital workshop (where I learnt sound editing) the other to Helston for a hustings organised by the Cornwall Wildlife Trust. I also had two bus trips one to central Truro for a business networking event and the other to Hayle on Saturday for my traditional lunch at Be Kind the Vegan Coffee Caravan. That meant I only needed to charge the car this weekend ready for next week.

The media have now calmed down about electric vehicles. I think they have moved along the change curve, what I like to call the u-bend of life, and are now in the acceptance phase so they are writing more balanced and informative articles. For those still stuck in the anger section the news report from Bedfordshire Fire & Rescue Service on 21 March 2024 must have been a bitter pill to swallow. The Fire Service reported that they have finished their investigation into the fire at Luton Airport that destroyed a lot of cars and interrupted flights. They say it was “started accidentally” and “the vehicle involved was diesel-powered – it was not a mild hybrid, plug-in hybrid or electric vehicle.”

The hype now seems to be in the other direction; this article EVs drive UK new car market to 20-year high seems to have got a little bit carried away with the headline. February saw a 14.0% increase in new car registrations reaching 84,886 units, the highest since 2004. Fully electric vehicles accounted for 17.7% of total registrations so I don’t think you can say they are driving the market to new highs. The article rightly notes that “most of this growth attributed to fleet purchases.” And there is the problem, the private market has stalled; the early adopters have adopted and the majority are being put off by a combination of the cost of living crisis, high electric vehicle prices and a lack of a comprehensive charging infrastructure. The government has introduced quotas for manufacturers but has done extraordinarily little to encourage the average motorist to buy electric.

There is some good news, GB News reported last week that Within three years, electric vehicles will be a cheaper option than petrol or diesel cars, according to new data. Many manufactures have new models ready to release and many of these will be at lower prices than current models. I am looking forward to the release of an electric Renault 5. The Renault 5 was an iconic car way back in the days of my young adulthood in the 70s. If Ford bring out a decent electric Capri, I’ll be in seventh heaven.

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If you like what I say you can buy me a coffee if you want to. Pay for two and I can have cake as well.

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Out and about

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 (12^th) 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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If you like what I say you can buy me a coffee if you want to. Pay for two and I can have cake as well.

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Keeping it short

I had a busy week, three trips to perform comedy, two in Falmouth and the other in Bude, and a trip to Truro for a training course. They were sufficiently spaced apart to allow me to charge at home. That is when electric vehicle driving is at its best. Get home, plug in then drive away with a full battery in the morning, knowing that it is only costing a few pence per mile.

After two consecutive late nights of comedy (Friday & Saturday) plus being at my daughter’s today I have decided to take a day off and will not be writing any more today.

See you next week.

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Living the dream, the electric dream

Only two trips in the car this week, but on the same day so it needed some nifty charging. On Friday morning I drove to Bugle near St Austell (a 70-mile round trip) to write comedy material with Gavin Harris who was the person that suggested I take up stand-up comedy about 18 months ago. After lunch I drove home and stopped off at Morrisons in Pool to use the GeniePoint charger (I currently get a discount). I popped into the store to get a few bits and pieces, did a couple of Italian lessons on Duolingo then the battery was full, so it was back home to shower and change, have something to eat then set off for Plymouth to perform stand up at Steel Brew, Royal William Yard.

I had planned to stop at the Shell Garage on the A38 near the Devon border to add a little bit of charge to give me plenty of leeway should there be any diversions due to nighttime road closures. However, when I got there two of the three chargers were in use and the middle one which was out of use last week had not been repaired. I drove on planning to stop there briefly on the way back. A few miles down the road at Carkell I spotted an EV charging sign and pulled into that garage to discover six 150kw chargers and two 300kw chargers, none of which were occupied. I plugged in, did a couple of Italian lessons on Duolingo and was soon on my way to the gig. I think it must be a newly opened installation as it is not shown on my Zap Map app.

The comedy gig went well and I was still buzzing when I got home at 12.30 am, so I plugged the car in to charge before having a hot chocolate and going to bed. Yes, that is my rock & roll lifestyle. In the morning, I was up at 7.15 and walked to Heartlands parkrun where I was the barcode scanner. It is satisfying doing something useful while the car is on charge.

Next week I have three comedy gigs; Monday, Friday (both in Falmouth) and Saturday in Bude, but I think I should be able to get to all those by charging at home in between. I also have a digital skills workshop in Truro on Tuesday evening; I can travel to that on the bus.

Last week I mentioned talking to a woman who had just started driving an electric car and that her experience with the car had been a lot more positive than she had expected. She has written a blog post about it so you can now get a first-hand account of her experiences with the electric car.

That is it for this week, there have been no EV articles that attracted my attention this week. I think the media has been too preoccupied with political shenanigans.

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If you like what I say you can buy me a coffee if you want to. Pay for two and I can have cake as well.

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A busy week

I feel as though I’ve driven much more this week than in recent weeks; however, when I checked my mileage, it is not a great deal more. This week I have driven about 260 miles whereas it was 220 the week before, so not a big difference. Last week I drove to Plymouth to perform comedy, this week, on Thursday I went passed Plymouth and on to Salcombe to perform comedy at the lovely South Sands Hotel – stunning views. The last part of the journey was slow so that is probably why it seems as though I have done a lot more driving, I have spent more time in the car.

The Salcombe trip meant that I had to charge on the way and that didn’t go well. There is a Shell garage on the A38 just before you reach Devon which has 3 rapid chargers. When I arrived two were occupied and I soon discovered that the third was out of order, despite the green light on top indicating that it was okay. Fortunately, one of the chargers became available just as I was deciding what to do. Unfortunately, it then proceeded to deliver charge at 15kw rather than the 50kw it should have. I didn’t wait until the battery was fully charged because I wanted to get to the hotel early so I could spend some time with my friend who works there. The last time she was in Cornwall we missed each other. As soon as I had enough charge to get to the hotel and back in range of a variety of charging options to get me home, I set off.

On the way back I stopped at the same place and the charger was back working at full power so I was soon on my way home. On Friday morning I had a short trip to Hayle for a networking meeting. I met someone there who had recently started driving an electric car, she had not been looking forward to it, but as it was a company car had no choice in the matter. Her experience with the car had been a lot more positive than she had expected. Before getting the car she had read a lot about them being okay on local trips but a nightmare on longer trips due to problems with charging. She had recently come back from a trip from Cornwall to Liverpool and said that she only needed to stop the same number of times as she normally would have done for a loo break and coffee. She did have one problem; she was driving a white Tesla and when she returned to her car after a coffee, she didn’t know which was her car in the line of white Teslas. As she was fiddling with the app to unlock the car she noticed the person in the driver’s seat giving her a strange look. Not being able to remember her licence plate number she had to try several cars before she found hers.

After the Friday event I plugged in at home to get the battery up to full. My charging spreadsheet is showing that since the end of November I have added 394kw from home charging and 304kw from public networks. There is a massive difference in cost £112 at home and £199 away – and that away figure would have been more had it not been for the two occasions I had the time to use fast chargers (slow) which have much lower prices. ZapMap have recently published figures showing how electric car charging prices on the UK’s public network changed during 2023. They have gone up! There is an interesting graphic showing cost per mile depending on how much you charge at home and how much on public networks. 80% home charging 20% rapid/ultra-rapid public charging – 7p per mile. 50% home charging, 25% slow/fast public charging 25% rapid/ultra-rapid public charging – 11p per mile. 100% on public chargers (80% slow/fast, 20% rapid/ultra-rapid) – 18p per mile, which is more expensive than a petrol car doing over 40mpg with petrol at £1.40 per litre.

The only other that news that caught my attention was about Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the chairman and chief executive officer of the INEOS chemicals group. No, it wasn’t about his stake in Manchester United, it was about him announcing that INEOS Automotive has unveiled its brand new 4X4 vehicle, the INEOS Fusilier which is electric. If you think it looks a lot like a Mercedes G class that could be because it has been developed in conjunction with and will be manufactured by Austrian firm Magna, who also builds the G-Class.

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If you like what I say you can buy me a coffee if you want to. Pay for two and I can have cake as well.

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All change

I was a passenger more than a driver this week which was nice. It was half-term so I wasn’t driving my minibus on the school run. Instead, I volunteered on a children’s activity break at Go Beyond. Once I had driven there the car remained in the car park all week and I travelled to activities such as rock-climbing, trampolining and adventure play as a passenger in one of the charity’s minibuses. The weather did improve enough on one of the days to allow us to walk down to Par beach and enjoy the sea air. If you have the time to volunteer on one of their residential weeks you will have a fun and rewarding time. If not, a donation will help them provide deserving children with a respite from their difficult circumstances.

On Friday I drove home, stopping off to charge at a rapid charger ready for a trip that evening to perform comedy in Plymouth. I collected another Cornwall based comedian on the way; it was good to have some company on the journey, particularly on the late-night return trip. And that was all the driving I did this week. On Saturday I plugged the car in at home and this morning it is fully charge.

There can be a bit of hanging about when volunteering at Go Beyond

I was too busy this week keeping the children amused and having fun to have any time to read any articles about electric vehicles. This morning I was directed to an article in Science about a potential development in battery technology: Superionic lithium transport via multiple coordination environments defined by two-anion packing. I could only access an abstract of the article as I do not have a subscription to Science, am not a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and did not want to pay to read the entire article. I think I got the gist from this bit:

“Li7Si2S7I is a pure lithium ion conductor created by an ordering of sulphide and iodide that combines elements of hexagonal and cubic close-packing analogously to the structure of NiZr. The resulting diverse network of lithium positions with distinct geometries and anion coordination chemistries affords low barriers to transport, opening a large structural space for high cation conductivity.”

This new material, which is made from more readily available and less toxic elements than currently used, will allow for faster charging and safer batteries.

That research is unlikely to result in any practical solutions in the short-term; however, it does illustrate a crucial point. More research is taking place around electric vehicles because there will be practical solutions and because funding is available. Developments in the electric vehicle world are likely to be rapid and immense. Think about the early days of motoring. Originally cars were handmade and for the few with gasoline being bought at the chemist. It did not take long before cars were mass produced and for the many with an extensive network of petrol stations. Other support infrastructure soon developed; the RAC was founded in 1897 followed by the AA in 1905. Green Flag is young by comparison it is only 53 years old. And of course, there is an extensive network of repair garages, MOT centres, tyre specialists, exhaust fitters, valet companies, car washes, auto-part sellers (e.g. Halfords), etc.

In a few years we will look back at the early electric vehicle infrastructure and think it primitive.

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If you like what I say you can buy me a coffee if you want to. Pay for two and I can have cake as well.

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