Thinking about the long runs

Electric cars are useless. This was the caustic opinion of the journalist Giles Coren when he announced his intention to go back to petrol after experiencing problems charging up his £65,000 Jaguar iPace.

Writing in The Times, he said: “The cars are useless, the infrastructure is not there and you’re honestly better off walking. Even on the really long journeys. In fact, especially on the long journeys. The short ones they can just about manage.”

In January Coren sparked a debate about the lack of public chargepoints which resonated with many EV drivers who had run into problems over the Christmas and New Year period. Disappointed drivers took to the airwaves and social media to share tales of long distance visits that took many more hours than planned, or which were abandoned altogether, because there was a paucity of chargers on main roads.

While Mr Coren has reverted to a petrol vehicle, this is only going to be a short-term option because the sale of fossil-fuelled vehicles will end by the end of the decade.

To support the transition to electric vehicles, the government’s ambition is that there will be 300,000 public EV chargepoints in place by 2030. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has estimated 27,000 charging points will have to be installed each year to meet demand. To meet these targets, a concerted effort is needed by chargepoint network operators, motorway service operators, retailers and local authorities.

The signs, as evidenced in the pages of this magazine, are that there is a genuine desire to provide rapid, reliable and increasingly interoperable infrastructure.

Mark Moran Editor