“Oh, I rarely use those,” said Manoj Varathodiyil, gesturing at a pair of public electric car chargers at a West Midlands service station.
Instead, the GP has plugged his car into a “supercharger”, one of a network built by US electric carmaker Tesla, exclusively for the use of the firm’s customers.
Varathodiyil, who went electric because of concerns over air pollution and fossil fuels, is one of Britain’s vanguard of 160,000 early adopters learning to live with a plug-in car.
Most of those drivers charge at home (87%) and work (8%). But the government wants to ban sales of new petrol and diesel cars by 2040 and recently laid out its Road to zero plan for getting there, envisaging “a massive expansion” of public chargers. For the 43% of households without off-street parking, that infrastructure will be vital if electric cars are to become the future norm.
But what about today? Is the road to zero riddled with potholes? To test the state of infrastructure now, the Guardian embarked on a grand tour of Britain’s car parks, service stations and hotels by driving an electric car from Brighton to Edinburgh.
Things started badly. Oil giant Shell recently branched out into electric car charging, so one of its petrol stations in Surrey, just 56 miles into the journey, looked like an ideal coffee stop. But the app could not start the charger. “No sir, I can’t help you from here,” helpline staff said, but insisted workers at the forecourt were “familiar with the procedures”. They were not. Thirty minutes wasted but a more reliable-looking Tesla site 70 miles north beckoned.
Fortunately, the Guardian had borrowed a Tesla Model S, which has the longest range of any electric car on sale in the UK, at 319 miles at 70mph, and a price that starts at £66,730 to match. But a closer charger might have been needed for more affordable models, such as the BMW i3 (124-mile range).
Chargers are ranked with confusing labels on how quickly they can top up a car’s battery. Fast is better than slow, but rapid is faster than fast, and super is best of all.
The Tesla chargers in a Northampton hotel car park were super ones, so half an hour provided another 121 miles of range.
Next stop was one of the growing number of rapid chargers at motorway service stations. Signposting was poor but operator Ecotricity’s app was easy enough and, unlike some charging sites, this one in Nottinghamshire had toilets.
A short 42-mile drive north ended in the electric equivalent of a satnav guiding you into a lake. The postcode of the charger was a residential road outside Doncaster that led to a dirt road and a dead end.
While there are many charger maps – such as Zap Map, PlugShare, Open Charge Map – the postcodes and pins are not always perfectly accurate. Surprisingly, they are not built into Google Maps’s route-mapping.
There are also a dizzying array of networks – 35, according to Zap Map. The Doncaster charging spot, newly painted in a hotel car park, was part of the Polar network run by Chargemaster, the UK’s biggest network and now owned by BP.
Fragmentation, of networks, maps, payment methods and charging cables, is perhaps the biggest problem facing the electric revolution. Many drivers would like contactless bank cards to be accepted, which only some networks currently offer.
Researcher and student Sam Earle called the fragmentation “chaotic”, while electric car driver Simon Canfer said: “Overall, I suspect it’s too fragmented for the mainstream.” Margarida James said: “It is a joke! Too many different companies, you need cards and apps for them all.”
As other electric cars drivers noted, they need to plan more than those burning fossil fuels. But the next stop was Harrogate on a whim. Fortunately, a map app threw up a B&B with a charger.
“I get quite a few people coming for it,” said Tony Hay, who runs Shannon Court guesthouse and installed two chargers a year ago. It is a slow charger, so an hour’s charge added just 20 miles of range (fine for overnight use by guests, who get the electricity for nothing).
After a brief rapid charge at a spa outside Durham – regular drivers said north-south is a “doddle” compared with east-west because there are so many rapids – the last stop in England is Berwick-upon-Tweed.
The charger in a maternity ward’s car park was hard to find. Worse, the app did not work, the out-of-hours helpline went through to several people who could not help. They offered a mobile number, which promptly went to voicemail. So no charge for the final 58-mile leg to Edinburgh, a potential headache for an electric car driver with shorter range.
Parts of the journey felt like a glimpse of the future, with extremely fast charging points where you can stop for a coffee until an app notification tells you to set off again. But, too often, it feels like being a beta tester, grappling with iffy mapping, broken apps, unhelpful customer support and endless forms.
The trip ended with 72 miles of range at an Edinburgh hotel whose electric car point held out the salvation of an overnight charge. But no, the space was occupied by a huge diesel car and the hotel would not move it.
The Guardian had been “ICEd”, a term to describe the surprisingly common practice of internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle owners blocking an electric car charger. The road to zero still has a few speed bumps to overcome.
