Do long road trips and EV’s mix?

From Scotland to Hertfordshire and beyond, Joju’s Commercial Director and Co-Founder, Joe Michaels, discovers the answer in some unusual places and shares it with us this World EV Day.

Summer’s coming to a close although you wouldn’t know it this week. Enter a mini heatwave, welcoming the kids back to school still in shorts and skirts.

Last month, school couldn’t have been further from our minds as we set off on our family holiday – a great couple of weeks including a lot of messing about in water: lakes, lochs, rivers and sea.

 

I drove up to Scotland via the Yorkshire Dales and then down to Devon and back to Hertfordshire. All in all, we covered about 1,300 miles including day trips and frankly, there was nothing particularly remarkable about that journey… except that it was in an electric car, and my first long haul in an EV at that.

Despite fairly constant range anxiety, the whole trip happened without incident and with the aid of a variety of chargers – from a three-pin socket when overnight charging in a youth hostel, to a private domestic socket at a stopover, and a couple of motorway rapids too. Shout out to the very convenient 50kWp rapid at the Wolverhampton Racecourse Holiday Inn, fully topping up the car in the time it took us to eat a takeaway in our hotel room! In fact, a couple of motorway charges were combined with timely meals and rest breaks.

Travelling on what must have been some of the busiest traffic days of the year, only once did I get to a charge point which was already occupied and rather than wait around, we trundled off to another service station rapid about 20 miles further along the motorway. No hassle. No problem.

I can’t say it wasn’t stressful. After all the hype about lack of infrastructure and travelling with two small kids, I didn’t want to spend several hours sitting on the side of a motorway waiting to be towed… or to experience hours queuing for a charge. But none of that happened.

I did use three or four brands of charge point and ended up with as many new apps on my mobile. And yes, each charge point did have a different process for getting the charge started. That tested my patience and my low-tech skills, but without planning my journey around charge points (except for choosing the Holiday Inn because it had a rapid) we travelled the country, north to south, without any drama at all.

I didn’t have to subscribe to a single service and was able to arrive and pay by debit card at every charge point. The prices varied, but they were always considerably cheaper than a petrol mile for mile equivalent, and anyway, that didn’t really bother me as over 90% of my charging I do at home on a reduced EV tariff. I was polluting less than in a petrol or diesel car too.

 

Was I feeling quite pleased with myself about daring this journey and in using technology that so many people still seem sceptical of? Yes I was… until yesterday that is. Yes, yesterday, I met someone who had driven to and from Venice in a 3 year old IGolf with only a hundred mile range…

Do long road trips and EV’s mix? Well, there’s some perspective for us all!

 

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