15 minute read
The road to good intentions
Is inter-city travel by EV as easy as with a petrol or diesel car? Not while the infrastructure struggles to deliver the advertised charge speeds. And then there’s the cost. Mark Bursa takes a Kia EV6 to Newcastle and back in order to test the networks
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.
Kia EV6 GT Line
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 services on the A1(M), which has ample availability of 350kW superchargers.
Recent use of the motorway charging networks suggests that they are already becoming overloaded. When I took a BMW i7 to Cobham services, on a wet Wednesday afternoon in January, I found all 12 Ionity and Gridserve chargers occupied, resulting in a 10-minute wait for one to become available. Supply of chargers is lagging behind demand, backing up the stats.
And so it proved to be the case at Warwick. There are two Gridserve chargers there, but they are not the most up-to-date models, being 50kW devices that each allow two cars to be charged. There’s a catch, though. Two of the charge cables have ChaDeMo plugs, and therefore won’t fit our Kia EV6.
ChaDeMo is effectively the “Betamax” of charge cable. It’s neater, and capable of good performance – but it was really only adopted by the three Japanese brands that created it – Toyota, Nissan and Mitsubishi. And its use is rapidly dying out as the industry standardises on the CCS system – a bigger and chunkier cable, but one that most non-Tesla automakers are now using.
At Warwick, only one charge point was free – and you guessed correctly. It was a ChaDeMo. With the other cars looking set, it was a case of stick or twist. Do I wait for a charger to become available, or was there a nearby alternative? I consulted the everuseful Zap-Map, which pointed me to an Instavolt charging station just off the next junction, handily sited in McDonald’s car park. This boasted four DC chargers, each of 125kW, making it a much better bet than the Warwick Gridserve.
On arriving, my range was down to 82 miles. Wetherby Services was 140 miles away, so the plan was to charge up to 80% or thereabouts, giving us ample range to get to the next stop.
Two of the four Instavolts were free, and the system is very user-friendly – just contactless card payment and no need to faff around with apps, as with Ionity. Just plug in, tap and charge.
I ended up charging to 93%, which added 154 miles of range, giving us 232 miles. Not quite enough to get all the way to Newcastle, but more than adequate to get to Wetherby.
Did the 125kW chargers work at the advertised speed? No. In fact the power delivery seemed entirely dependent on how many cars were using the charging station. When only two of the four chargers were in use, the charge point delivered at speeds of between 50 and 70kW. When all four were full, the speed dropped to 20-30kW. The recharge from 34-93% took 49 minutes, and delivered 48.23kWh of charge.
At 63p per kilowatt, this totalled £30.14, plus £6.03 of VAT. This is far from a bargain. An equivalent petrol car would use 3.85 gallons to cover 154 miles at 40mpg. At a 160p per litre petrol price, that would cost around £25.60 – almost £10 cheaper than the EV.
I pressed on, avoiding M1 snarl-ups and arrived at Wetherby 2 hours and 10 minutes later with 106 miles of range in the electric tank. The 144-mile journey used 126 miles of the 232 miles of range we left the Instavolt with, so the car outperformed its own expectations.
Newcastle was still 88 miles away, so a no-risk strategy was employed. I’d grab some food in the services while the car recharged on one of the large bank of Gridserve 350kW chargers.
Like Instavolt, the Gridserve system is a simple tap-and-charge one, without requiring apps or cards. This is one aspect of the charging experience that the networks have addressed. Ease of use is vital. Scanning QR codes and paying via apps are the last thing you need, especially when you’re wrestling with an unwieldy cable in the rain, at an uncovered charging point.
Gridserve’s chargers are billed as ultrafast 350kW jobs – and with very few cars on charge when I arrived at Wetherby, I was hoping for a quick top-up. I went for some food, and as it transpired, ended up spending an hour from the time I plugged in to my departure. Which is just as well, as if I’d been hoping for the 18-minute 10-80% recharge Kia claims the EV6 can handle, I’d have been disappointed.
In reality, a recharge from 43-100% took 41 minutes, delivering 47.5kWh at a rate of 73kW – about one-fifth of the billed maximum speed. Not bad, but hardly competitive in time terms with filling up with petrol. As for cost, Gridserve is a shade more expensive than Instavolt, at 66p per kWh. This meant the cost of adding 56% of charge, or 157 miles of range, came to £31.37, plus £6.37 of VAT, bringing the price to £37.64. So the total cost so far was £73.81 – though I’ve now got a full battery and 263 miles of range.
The remaining 87 miles of the journey uses 100 of those, an indication that when an EV is “full” the range depletes rather quickly at first.
The other downside is the fact that the journey has taken 8 hours. Some of that was due to traffic delays and diversions, and the search for a charge in Warwick wasted a further 20 minutes. The two stops took nearly two hours – in an ICE-engined cars that would have been 30-40 minutes for a single fuel stop and a meal.
Would the return journey be any better? I was down to 67 miles of range by the time I set off, so the first port of call was a local charger in Newcastle. Zap-Map identified another nearby Instavolt-McDonald’s pairing, and as that had worked rather well on the way up, I tried it.
Sadly the two Instavolts at the Newcastle Maccy D’s were less powerful – just 50hkW. And in reality, with two chargers in use, the device delivered at just 27kW. A McDonald’s car park in Byker is perhaps not the most attractive location, so once it got to 50% (122 miles of range) I bailed out, planning to return to Wetherby and use the Gridserves again.
The Instavolt took 49 painful minutes (and £15.35 inc VAT) to take the car’s charge from 29% to 50%. It would have taken the best part of an hour and a half to inch up to 80%. Given the underperformance in real-world terms of so-called ultra-fast chargers, it pays to target the fastest ones –at least 100kW – in order to get a full charge in minutes, not hours.
This point would be illustrated effectively when, an hour and a half later, I reached Wetherby with 35 miles of range left. Range anxiety? No, that’s plenty of headroom. This time, nine of the 12 bays were occupied. This seemed to have no effect on the performance of the 350kW chargers, which delivered this time at 71kW – a similar speed to the earlier experience.
So once again a charge from 17% to 100% took 47 minutes, delivering 69.46kWh at 66p, giving a VAT-inclusive price of £55.01. Don’t you just hate it when the penny clicks over?
With 263 miles of range and a 235-mile journey back home ahead of me, again, a one-stop strategy wasn’t going to work. An electric splash ’n’ dash would be required once again, and this time the chosen location was Milton Keynes, where close to the M1 there is an EV charging hub including a BP Pulse station and a bank of 350kW Ionity chargers, probably the most effective of all the charge points networks.
Just over two and a half hours later, I arrive, to find the BP Pulse hub seemingly closed and in darkness. The Ionity chargers were working, though, and I plugged in with 88 miles of range left and 34% of charge. This might have been enough to handle the remaining 63 miles of my journey, but as I wished to avoid late-night squeaky bum time, I thought it best to be prudent.
The Ionity proved to be the fastest of all the chargers used on the trip, delivering 48.6kWh in 31 minutes, taking me from 34% to 91% and adding 166 miles of range, taking me back up to 229 miles. It cost £35.97, including VAT, with Ionity charging a little more again than Gridserve – 74p/kWh.
One hour and 45 minutes later and I’m home, though with three stops, the journey has taken even longer than the outbound leg – nearly nine hours, two-and-a-half of them at charge points. At the end, I still had 166 miles of range. The 63-mile journey used precisely that much range. Overall, I’d covered just under 700 miles, and the five recharges had cost a total of £180.14.
Compare that to a diesel of petrolengined car capable of 40mpg, covering 700 miles. A diesel would use around £127 of fuel, while a petrol engine would use £116 of regular unleaded at current pump prices.
And remember, a large portion of that goes into government coffers as fuel duty. Only the 20% VAT component is paid by charge point operators – the rest is clear profit. As EVs replace ICEs, the Government will want to replace that lost duty, and that could see a substantial hike in charge point prices.
This is hardly a ringing endorsement of the switch to EVs. With a 40-50% cost premium, the EV remains at a substantial disadvantage to the conventionallyfuelled car in price alone, never mind the convenience. The round trip took 17 hours, many of them (at least five) spent waiting for the car to recharge.
OK, I could have planned my trip more accurately and made sure the car was charged to 100% before setting off. That could probably have eliminated two of the stops. If I’d had access to an overnight charger in Newcastle I could have recharged overnight at a much cheaper rate. And If I had a subscription to Ionity or BP Pulse (which are available to car buyers, but not to motoring writers’ test cars) I could have taken advantage of cheaper rates rather than the charge point “rack rates”, bringing the cost down quite substantially.
What else have we learned? The Kia EV6 performed faultlessly. EVs are very effective motorway cruisers. They’re big, heavy and “planted” on the road.
Range anxiety is largely a thing of the past – but “charger anxiety” is not. The networks are inadequate and in danger of being overwhelmed by demand. The motorway service area honeypots need to be populated like Wetherby, with 12 ultrarapid chargers, not like Warwick, with its two inadequate chargers.
And charging time remains a problem. The chargers clearly do not deliver anywhere close to the advertised rates, and the idea that a car can be fully charged at 350kW in a handful of minutes is fanciful at best. You’re in for a 45-minute charge at best, with the charger chugging along at a fraction of its maximum capacity. And if you are carrying a paying passenger, that’s not really likely to be acceptable.
Until these issues are addressed, and we have ample chargers that do what it says on the tin, quickly and simply, people will be loath to make the switch. Some believe we could see demand for EVs hit a plateau until the charging infrastructure catches up.
Under normal market conditions, that might be no bad thing. But in the background is the 2030 deadline for the end of ICE new car sales (2035 for PHEVs). Which gives us just six and a half years to match demand with supply. The clock is ticking.
