Charging

The great thing about electric vehicles is that they can be charged at home overnight. Just as we all do with our mobile phones you get used to the routine of charging and that way the car, and the phone, are always ready. For most people, most of the time this is going to be all the charging you need. It’s cheap and even cheaper if you have a tariff offering cut-price overnight electricity.

If you are out and about locally, say in a local shopping centre for instance, there are often charging points available, which are often free, which can be used to top up.

EV charging at a retail park in Charlton, South London

However, sometimes you are going to travel further and that will often mean charge en route. How frequently, and indeed if, you need to charge will depend on things like how long the journey is and what the range of your car is.

Older and smaller EVs may have a range of 100 miles or so; bigger and more modern cars may have ranges of up to 300 miles.

And it also matters what the weather is like. EVs are more efficient in the warm and dry and less so in the cold and wet, though the effect is nothing like as dramatic as myths would have you believe.

Needless to say, once you get used to it, charging on the road is not much of an issue. The GOMs (“guess-o-meters”) on EVs do a good job of predicting what the range of the current journey is likely to be and to provide map directions to the nearest charger as part of the in-car navigation. Rapid chargers then can recharge a car in typically 20-40 minutes, time for the loo and something to eat and drink.

Ecotricity Rapid chargers like this are available at most motorway services and other companies are busy building their own at sites on popular routes

And then there is the overnight stay where sometimes it is possible to get access to overnight charging – either through a standard plug which provides a charge, though a slow one, or at a “destination charger” (similar to the system most of us have at home) but provided by a hotel, pub, restaurant or whatever.

The number one issue for most people thinking about switching to electric cars is charging. Once you have an EV you realise things are much simpler than you thought.