Every year the weekend before Christmas we go to Bromsgrove in Worcestershire and take my mother in law out for a festive lunch. She is now 86 years old and she doesn’t go out much.
It’s about 120 miles from our little bit of north London to Bromsgrove, but most of it is motorway, and before we bought our electric Nissan Leaf, the journey took a couple of hours.
The Nissan has a claimed range of 160 miles but, at 70 mph, it’s more like 100 miles, and in cold weather, when you have the heater on that drains electricity, even less than that.
Which meant that the specter that haunts all electric car drivers, range anxiety, was on our minds before we set off.
Every year the weekend before Christmas we go to Bromsgrove in Worcestershire and take my mother in law out for a festive lunch. In the photo: Eleanor Mills
It was below freezing the day of our trip to see Grandma and we had to turn on the heater, but even allowing for one stop charge, the trip should take three hours. So I set off at 9 am with my husband and teenage daughter, decked out in Christmas sparkles, loaded with goodies and looking forward to lunch.
We plan to charge at Oxford services, about 50 miles away. But when we arrived, one of the two electric chargers was broken and three cars were queuing for the one that was still working. Fortunately for us, the three waiting cars needed to use a different type of plug than the Nissan, but although the Chademo plug we needed was free, two of the other cars were blocking access to it.
This kind of situation will look awfully familiar to the dozens of Tesla drivers photographed this week waiting for up to three hours in Hertfordshire, Cumbria and Westmorland due to the large number of cars on the roads due to hopeless trains.
Despite there being a large network of highly efficient Tesla superchargers in the UK, when you have too many electric cars and not enough chargers, the result is utter chaos, with many drivers caught between the frustration of having to wait ages and the fear . that if they continue with their journey they will run out of power on a lonely highway.
We plan to charge at Oxford services, about 50 miles away. But when we arrived, one of the two electric chargers was broken and three cars were queuing for the one that was still working. Pictured: Packed cargo bays
I couldn’t bring myself to continue without charging into Oxford and happily one of the waiting drivers agreed to move so I could charge. But having gone in for coffee, when I checked the car I found that the charging had stopped.
This, it transpired, was thanks to a new controller plugging into the other half of the charger and somehow cutting me off. Cue more heartbreak and a growing sense of trouble ahead. After 45 minutes, we were out. We finally made it to Grandma’s house, took her to lunch, and then dropped her off at home. At that point we realized that the charge was so low due to the cold that we would need to turn it on before we left.
We’re pretty savvy about finding local chargers on Google Maps and found one at a nearby Asda. So we plugged in the Nissan, dug in at Grandma’s, and ate chocolates while we waited.
By the time we hit the road it was starting to snow and the weather warnings were dire. It was too cold not to have the heating on so we knew we would have to stop in Oxford to load up one more time. This time there were six cars, all trying to charge from a bomb (the others had not yet been repaired).
A woman was crying. She told us that her car was almost without power. She had driven from Birmingham to Marlow that morning in her Jaguar to see her elderly father, and she had been in the Beaconsfield toilets, where neither porter worked. Her car was supposed to have a range of 300 miles, but that was about half that due to the cold.
Although there is a large network of highly efficient Tesla superchargers in the UK, when there are too many electric cars and not enough chargers, the result is total chaos.
She was terrified of running out of cargo on the freeway, alone with her two-year-old son.
This time we had to wait an hour before we could start charging, by which time it was 6pm, nine hours after we first left home. Worcestershire and back is always a long day, but this was ridiculous.
Then it got worse. The only charger that works is dead. We call the emergency number. It was finally answered. After 20 minutes, they put it back into service. At that time, about ten cars were waiting, unable to advance any further.
I turned to comfort the crying woman, to find a maniacal smile spreading across her face. ‘This is for me. This car is coming back tomorrow,” she said. I’m going to buy a hybrid. I will never do this again.
Another two hours passed before we finally set off. A trip home that should have taken two hours had taken five and a half.
I write this more with sadness than anger, because when I bought my green car two years ago, it felt like the future: fast, quiet and smooth, it’s like driving a spaceship. And back then it was cheap (£7 to charge overnight, now it’s £15, and more like £30 with a fast charger).
The irony is that we early adopters of electric cars did what the politicians told us we should in an attempt to save the planet, promising that we would also reap big financial rewards. However, we are now paying a high price, both in terms of stress and financial.
Back then, we got £3,000 off the sales price, due to a subsidy that was abolished by the Government this summer: we paid no vehicle tax (which EV drivers will have to pay from 2025) and no vehicle charges. congestion in London (it may only be a matter of time before Mayor Sadiq Khan comes looking for us). EV drivers whose cars are worth more than £40,000 when bought new, which is a lot of them, will also have to pay an annual lump sum of hundreds of pounds a year in tax from 2025.
Now most of the economic advantages are gone and the billing situation is a joke. Even in London, which has more shippers than most of the rest of the country combined, it’s not easy. In the north of England and rural counties like Norfolk, it can feel like a stuffy desert. That’s pretty scary if you’re driving somewhere remote.
The government boasts that there are around 35,000 public electric chargers in the UK, but many of these are weak and can take up to 24 hours to fully charge a car. Only 6,400 of those 35,000 are what are known as ‘fast chargers’, the kind found at service stations, which charge a typical electric car in about an hour.
Crucially, those 35,000 chargers have to service 420,000 pure electric cars on the road today. Although many homeowners will have home chargers, as my trip to Worcestershire demonstrated, you will sometimes have to rely on charging on the go, and that’s when the infrastructure can prove disastrous.
There are rare signs of what the electric future might look like – outside of Swansea and Exeter there are service stations with 12 fast chargers for cars like mine – but it should be like this everywhere.
The electric dream is turning into a nightmare due to the high demand for chargers and their poor maintenance. Now it is felt that a cash-strapped government has lost the drive and the will to provide much-needed support. If Tesla can build that many chargers, why can’t UK plc? Parliament has decreed that, by 2030, no more diesel or gasoline cars will be able to be sold, but admits that by then there will be 190,000 fewer electric chargers than promised.
Worse than that, many analysts fear that National Grid won’t be able to generate enough electricity to power the chargers they install, and the way things are going, all these new cars probably won’t be able to rely solely on wind or solar power. Energy.
Personally, I’ll give it a year, and if it’s still that bad, I’ll borrow a gas car to go see Grandma.