The road to good intentions

Mark Bursa

Electric car sales are booming, with 267,000 vehicles sold last year, up 40% on 2021. And as more and more EVs are introduced, that percentage will rise.

In 2022, one in six cars sold was an EV. By the end of 2022, there were more than three-quarters of a million EVs on the road, and the million units milestone is likely to be passed this year.

Great news for the environment – but there’s a problem. The rate of installation of charging infrastructure is lagging behind the growth in EV sales. The charge point rollout continues to lag behind EV uptake, with the SMMT estimating there was one standard public charger for every 36 plug-in cars on the road, down from 31 in 2021.

Not all charge points are equal, of course. There is a huge spread of technological capability, ranging from AC home chargers that “trickle charge” overnight at a rate of around 7kW, to DC rapid chargers that you might find on motorways, which typically run from 50kW right up to 350kW.

It is in the latter area that much of the high-profile investment has come, with operators such as

Gridserve, Ionity, Osprey and Instavolt installing banks of rapid chargers wherever they can find a suitable parking area, whether it be motorway services, pub car parks, McDonalds restaurants or garden centres.

These networks are becoming established with a view to making EVs viable for longer journeys, not just urban trips. With many EVs now boasting a decent range or 300 miles or more (on paper at least), inter-city EV travel should be relatively painless.

OK, even the fastest charger is going to take longer than a splash and dash at the petrol pumps, but most journeys from, say, London to Manchester are going to require a comfort break, and in theory, that should provide sufficient time to top up the battery.

Professional Driver magazine has sought to put the networks to the test. Even in the distant days of a decade ago, when 80 miles of range was as good as you could hope for from your Nissan Leaf, we took a car on a daring trip to the midlands, dicing with the recalcitrant and often broken Ecotricity chargers and overnight charging via three-pin plug. We have experienced “range anxiety” in full effect.

These days it’s less of an issue, so we set the bar higher. A return journey from Professional Driver HQ in Weybridge, Surrey, to Newcastleupon-Tyne, a journey of 304 miles that normally takes around 5 hours.

My chosen electric transport was a Kia EV6 GT Line, with 77kW battery. This is a state-of-the-art EV, capable of a quoted WLTP range of 328 miles and the ability to use the fastest 350kW chargers to the full. Kia quotes a 10-80% recharge time of just 18 minutes on a 350kW charger, of the type increasingly being installed by the likes of Ionity and Gridserve.

I was not treating the trip as an endurance test. There would be no attempt to drive with maximum frugality in order to get there without charging (328 miles was greater than the planned journey, but it’s very rare that an EV delivers the WLTP range).

Instead the plan was to travel the same way as with a petrol or diesel car, with a planned refreshment stop en route where the car could be recharged.

The car was delivered with around 75% charge, showing 180 miles of range. The journey took place in late March, when the weather was still chilly, and this does have a negative effect on range.

The route plan would take us round the M25, up the M1 and A1(M) in the most direct way, with a stop after about 100 miles. A one-stop strategy looked feasible on paper, but that would depend on the charge point location.

The M1 corridor in the East Midlands is not particularly well served with rapid chargers. Many of the service areas have, at best, 50kW chargers, and the process of upgrading the old Ecotricity Electric Highway network to more capable Gridserve chargers is still ongoing. Leicester Forest East seemed an obvious target, 112 miles away and leaving 192 to go. However, traffic conditions intervened. The M25 was its typically clogged self, so a re-route via back roads took us on a route involving the M4 to Maidenhead, the A404 to Wycombe and the M40. Furthermore, it looked like there was further congestion around Leicester, so the M42 looked a better bet, bringing us out at East Midlands Airport and bypassing Leicester Forest East.

What’s more, I’d only reached Slough and the extra miles of detour meant my range was down to 164 miles. A one-stopper seemed out of the question, and with East Midlands via the M40 around 140 miles away, getting there without a stop looked rather risky.

So a two-stop strategy would be employed. A recharge at Warwick services, and then on to the freshly installed Gridserve charge station at Wetherby

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