I think I can now confidently say it is a stupid idea to get an electric car. Thanks to @ecotricity’s complete casual failure to maintain their network of charging points, I’m now stranded and unable to get to where I’m supposed to be.
@ecotricity Charge points out of order at not one but two service stations on my route, meaning I have no battery to continue. Guy on the @ecotricity helpline suggested that I try to plug the car in through a window, which would take five hours to reach a full charge.
And yet public policy is moving ahead with phasing out diesel and petrol in favour of EV. There is going to have to be an enormous change before this really happens. More likely the deadline will be delayed and delayed.
I actually considered hiring a petrol car so I could make the journey without worrying about this hassle with @ecotricity charging. Instead, I left seven hours to do a four hour drive as I thought that would be enough 😭
Anyway, all this means I’m going to be rather late to speak @WigtownBookFest later today - but I will make it one way or the other.
@WigtownBookFest Tempted to change the title of my talk to the Wigtown festival to “Why We Get The Wrong Charging Points”
@ecotricity Soooo... dropped back at Gretna by lovely book festival people to recover my car. And oh, what a surprise: the charging point is still offline 😡 
@ecotricity I’m sure everyone is finding these updates fascinating, but there is an important point here: the infrastructure for these cars, which we will all need to switch to, is totally awful - when it exists at all. @ecotricity
@ecotricity While the people on the helpline were very nice and tried - again - to reboot the charger at Gretna services, they’ve now said it isn’t working and that their maintenance team don’t work weekends. So am getting my recovery service to tow me to another charger.
@ecotricity I love* the fact that these guys are the sole suppliers of most motorway service station chargers yet their maintenance guys don’t work weekends!
* = despair of
Anyway, Bertie and I are having a whale of a time here.
So, while I wait... this is the Zap Map which tells EV users where the nearest charge points are. Blue is standard and takes 5 hours to full. Purple/green is rapid charger. Any charger that’s not working comes up red.
All the red icons (i.e. chargers that aren’t working) on this map are managed by @ecotricity. They also happen to be the only chargers available on the motorway network
Now, the range of my (still not cheap) Nissan Leaf is around 150 miles, though this reduces dramatically on a motorway. It takes 45 mins to do a charge that takes you from empty to almost full on a rapid charge.
So you need to work out when to stop to charge so that a) you don’t run out before you get there or b) you don’t charge too early when your battery is still reasonably full and then have to stop again, which takes up more time.
obviously petrol drivers have to make the sane calculations on the motorway, but with a much longer range.
What complicates all this inordinately is that if you get to a service station and both of the two (I’ve never seen more than two) chargers are out of order, you then need to drive to the next. If you’ve left enough battery, that’s fine.
But yesterday i drive from Todhills, where the @ecotricity chargers were both out of order, to Gretna, where they were out too. I’d factored in enough battery for one faulty stop. I hadn’t for two.
Now, tech is in its infancy and there aren’t loads of EV drivers so I like to be optimistic that all this will be different in a few years’ time. But then again, having just written a book that looks at his glib politicians can be about whether a policy will actually work...
At the very least, it will be very difficult to persuade anyone beyond early adopters like me who don’t do loads of driving to move from ICE to EV. People have cars to give them freedom and flexibility. The amount of planning involved in having an EV does not answer that need.
Finally, as breakdown guy is here, I’ve had a lot of tweeters (all, I’m afraid to say, men) telling me that I a) should have bought a Tesla, which I can’t afford b) should have used another charger, when @ecotricity have a monopoly on motorways and c) shouldn’t have gone EV
Oh and d) shouldn’t be mean about EV as it’s an important part of targeting air pollution, even though it’s kind of my job as a journalist to highlight when well-meaning policies aren’t working as they should.
FINALLY at a charge point that works! 🎉
