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You're taking an electric car for the week? But you've got over 1,000 miles to drive and need to get around the M25!"
The decision to run a Nissan Leaf as my only source of road transport for one of the busiest weeks of the year was greeted by a great deal of scepticism in the BusinessCar office. And rightly so. The week's journeys included my usual 118-mile commute home, a weekend Christmas shopping trip to London, a new car launch in Worcester, and travelling to Farnborough Airport for an early flight to Portugal.
I'd be the first to admit that I'm not a typical EV driver, but with such a diverse mix of rural, motorway and urban routes on the cards, the week had shaped up to be the perfect test to see how versatile electric cars really could be when using the public charging on offer.
It's worth mentioning now that most people who run an EV will rarely use the public infrastructure on offer, and recent Government incentives have made it easier to get the right charging facilities fitted at the workplace. But on those occasions when you need to stray from routine, we wanted to find out how reliable the public infrastructure really is.
To see current public charging at its best, a trip to London was a must. I pulled together a route, with help from the Source London app, which took me to 20 different charge points at a variety of locations across the capital, including supermarkets, retail parks, on-street parking and a tube station.
Downloading apps like Source London, Zap-Map and Plug Share are a must for living with an electric vehicle. They detail working charging points, which ones are in use or under maintenance, and what type of charging is available at them (AC or DC). They can also work with Google Maps to direct you to the points.
Let's start with the good news. All the charging points bar one appeared to be working as they should be. They're also very easy to use - some offer a cable to plug into your car, while others require you to have one to hand. Scan your Source London card and follow the instructions - it couldn't be simpler.
What isn't always clear, though, is how quickly the points will take to charge your car or how much current they offer. In one instance I stopped outside a hotel and had a coffee - an hour later I returned and the car had only five miles added to its range. The charging was just too slow and this was the case for around 70% of the points tested. Even if you spent a couple of hours at these locations, the available range on returning to the vehicle would not be sufficient.
On a couple of occasions, notably at the tube station and supermarkets, charging bays were taken up by non-electric cars, which was a huge frustration. A Waitrose charging bay had cones blocking the spaces to stop this happening, but at High Barnet tube station, there wasn't a single electric car in the three available bays, so the app tells you there are spaces available when in reality they are taken up.
Members of Source London pay a monthly subscription fee of £4 and 3.6p per minute when charging on new points. The minimum charge is for 20 minutes and you can stop charging anytime you want, rather than having to pay for a full hour when you just need a top-up.
You also only pay when using the recently added charge points, meaning the older and slower units are free to use until they are upgraded. It's not clear which ones these are when using the app, though. Some points can also be reserved up to 40 minutes in advance.
EVs are not designed for the motorway, but sometimes key appointments or family visits mean a trip down an M road is a must.
This is when range anxiety really hits, when you're not sure if you can travel 40 miles from a 75-mile predicted range, which was about the average amount added after a 30 minute plug-in at a motorway fast charger in the 30kWh Leaf.
There were a couple of close calls. For example, the range disappeared completely at seven miles in one instance, when I was one mile away from Baldock Services on the A1, and full panic mode ensued.
Most of the motorway services charge points are run by Ecotricity, which recently changed their pricing structure from free to £6 every 30 minutes.
I travelled a fair few miles on the motorway in the Leaf and, even when driving very cautiously at 50mph and being overtaken by lorries, needed to stop to charge twice on journeys of around 100 miles. That means for a 100-mile journey it cost £12 each time to get to the destination, more than you would currently need to spend on petrol or diesel to travel the same distance.
The most frustrating thing about using Ecotricity isn't paying for the service, though: it's the app you need to work the charging points. On a particularly long, 115-mile journey, which took six and a half hours instead of the Google Maps-predicted one hour and 45 minutes, I arrived at an Ecotricity charger with an 11-mile range to find that the app was temporarily out of service.
With no other charging points in range, my first thought was to call the helpline. "We are currently closed, our opening hours are."
Oh. A couple of restarts on my phone and deleting and downloaded the app again showed no improvement. I was just going through my phonebook, thinking of the closest person to come and ask to pick me up, when the app came back online again - some 45 minutes later.
This highlighted a big flaw in the current Ecotricity set-up - there's no plan B, no way of manually logging into the charger if the app is down and no other means of getting electricity to your car. You also have to have a working phone with wi-fi or a strong enough 3G or 4G signal to scan the QR codes and pay. It's all very frustrating.
There are certain things that significantly impact on an electric car's range. Driving style and the type of roads you travel on is a big one; however, weather is another large contributing factor. Winter significantly dents an EV's range and having equipment like aircon on will impact it too - so, winter coats, wooly hats, several layers of additional clothing and gloves need to be with you at all times.
One thing this test has shown is that you need to allow at least double the amount of time you would normally give for a diesel or petrol car completing the same journey when travelling long distances, especially if you're venturing on the motorway.
Charging time needs to be factored in, but if you want the range to last, you need to drive more slowly, especially on the motorway, and that needs to be worked into the journey time. You also need to plot your charging points, which we found sometimes meant travelling off the initial route for a number of miles to get to a fast charger. On one occasion this added a further hour to the journey because of a traffic jam that would have otherwise been avoided.
For electric vehicles to work as a company car, rather than a business tool, you need to travel the same number of miles each day and then be able to charge for a lengthy period at your destination. Essentially, your life needs to run like clockwork. The problem with that, of course, is that nobody's life really runs this way all of the time. What if you have a family emergency, or want to take a half-day holiday?
Running an electric car away from a normal set routine requires three things: patience, watertight planning skills, and a calm disposition.
Our advice is unless you're planning on using one as a second car or as part of a set route for business deliveries, or for visiting sites that have the appropriate charging facilities, the current infrastructure is just too compromised and unreliable to be realistic. The good news is that significant investment is on its way and the infrastructure will be far more sophisticated and practical in just a few years' time, so there shouldn't be too long to wait.
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