‘It took me two days to drive my electric car 70 miles'

Yahoo

15-03-2025

As he set out on the 70-mile journey from Warrington to Mansfield, Lee Davey did not anticipate that it would end up taking two days, cost him more than £100 and leave him at risk of getting stranded.
But while passing through Buxton, his all-electric Porsche Taycan began to run low on battery and it then started snowing heavily.
Having driven an electric car for the last couple of years, Davey immediately knew that the icy conditions spelt bad news. 'With an electric car if it's snowing, forget it – you're not charging anywhere,' he says.
'Unlike a petrol station, there's no canopies over [EV chargers] and there's nobody serving those stations. So it's impossible when it snows to get to a charging point – and that's a massive issue.'
Despite this, with the snow around his car getting deeper by the minute, he made several frantic attempts to hook up to a charging point at Morrisons and another at BP Pulse. Both were out of service.
With daylight fading and just 3pc battery left, Davey was forced to 'limp' to a hotel where he booked a night's stay for £100 and hooked his car to the hotel's slow charger, which took 20 hours to fully charge his car.
For Davey, the ordeal was the final straw – he has vowed that as soon as the lease runs out on the Porsche in the summer, that he will switch back to a petrol car. It's not the car itself that is the problem, but the charging infrastructure that is forcing him to give up on electric.
'It's just been a nightmare,' he says. 'I dread to think how many hours I've wasted charging my car – it must be hundreds of hours over the last four years.'
Britain's charging struggles have been well documented in recent years. Initially, gripes centred on the relatively straightforward issue infrastructure of quantity – the availability of charging points simply could not keep pace with the uptake of electric cars.
Now, with some 60,000 public charging points in operation, it has evolved into a question of quality. The chargers may exist, but a lack of functionality, accessibility and upkeep are causing big problems for drivers.
Range anxiety continues to haunt them – but it has changed. It is now no longer because of how much the car's battery can hold, but whether they will be able to charge it up.
According to a 2024 survey by Which?, almost three quarters of EV drivers say they have experienced a faulty public charger at least once in the last 12 months, while 37pc have found it difficult to find a working charger at all.
Some areas of the UK have reported up to 30pc of chargers being out of service, according to the Electrical Times, with problems ranging from network failures to broken connectors.
The root of the problem is linked to the speed of installations and the relatively low returns of the chargers once in place.
Fierce competition between providers has led to a dash to dominate the electric car charging market before the petrol and diesel ban is enforced in 2030.
But heavy investment in this land grab – with a view to generating profits in the future – has also created a culture whereby quality and subsequent upkeep have suffered.
Chris, a project manager overseeing the electric car charger rollout for a major provider, who asked to speak anonymously, says that as the Government's deadline approaches, his company has faced growing pressure to keep costs down.
'[The charging provider] isn't making any money off the chargers compared to what they put in,' he says. 'They don't make much at all. They scrapped canopies because they're too expensive.
'[The company I work for] was looking into removing fuel and replacing it with EV [chargers] on some sites but at the moment the demand is not there – they make too much on traditional fuels.
'It costs roughly £150,000 per charge point. But we've been asked to try and halve the cost of getting them installed.'
Chris blames the relative infancy of the technology and the 'mad rush' to get in on the market for the prevalence of unreliable chargers. This is an issue that has only been exacerbated by spates of vandalism and cable theft, as well as the difficulty of sourcing replacement parts from overseas.
But he also says that Britain's electricity network simply isn't ready to host as many chargers as the Government's lofty net zero ambitions demand.
'The UK's electrical infrastructure is too old and too limited to support this quick an expansion,' he says. 'Ultimately there isn't enough power to go around.'
Davey recently experienced the fallout from the grid's overwhelmed network when, during a stop, another driver asked him to unplug from a charger so that the others had sufficient power to charge their cars.
Along with his other experiences, this confirmed to him that the infrastructure could not be relied on, no matter how many hiccups he anticipated.
'You can plan your journey all you like, but you can't plan for the unexpected – like a charger not working, or someone leaving their car on the charger, or the grid not having enough power to charge all the cars,' Davey says.
Andrew Petrie from Dufftown, Scotland, learnt this the hard way when he got stranded at 1am while driving his son back from a cricket game in a fully-electric MG ZS.
He was travelling along the A9, a major road that connects Inverness with Perth, when he realised he would have to stop to top up the battery. Pulling in at the first opportunity in Newtonmore, his heart sank when he found none of the three machines worked.
After receiving assurances over the phone from ChargePlace Scotland, the national charging network, that the chargers in the next town north would work he set off – only to find they too were out of service.
'By this time, I'm 40 miles from home, it's midnight and I have no way of charging the car,' Petrie says.
In the end, his wife was forced to head out at 1am to do an 80-mile round trip to rescue them. Like Davey, he was able to leave his car at a hotel charger and pick it up the next morning – but not before resolving to switch back to petrol for good.
'I will not go near electric cars until the day they ban the last petrol and diesel cars going on the streets.
'It's a complete scandal because the Scottish government is punting all this nonsense, promising to be petrol-free by 2030, blah, blah, blah – I had an electric car which I basically couldn't use because the electric charging points never worked.'
Petrie had experienced close shaves before getting stranded with his son. However, his biggest concern was always about where the chargers were located, rather than their functionality.
On a separate occasion, the maps on his phone led him to a charging station located in the darkest corner of a deserted car park late at night.
'It was like something out of Death Wish – you expected Pierce Brosnan to appear around the corner,' he says. 'I said to my son, 'it's lucky it's me who's with you because there's no way your mum would come in here'.'
Gridserve forecourts are the closest thing electric car drivers have to traditional petrol stations, with staffed charging points under well-lit canopies. But, in the face of bureaucracy, replicating them across the country may be easier said than done.
Chris says a big part of the problem comes down to the complexity of agreements between charging providers and Distribution Network Operators (DNOs) – licenced companies that own and operate the network of cables, transformers and towers in any given area.
'Installing a substation isn't simple because when you install it on a piece of land, the DNOs are responsible for its upkeep as it's on their network.
'You also have to get permission from all sorts of third parties to run the cables through people's land. That's honestly the biggest blocker. It's a real mission to get all the legal agreements in place.'
The Government has set a target of 300,000 public charging points by 2030. However, a government-led report acknowledged a dearth of sufficient chargers outside the South East and London, while also admitting ongoing struggles with accessibility, particularly for drivers with disabilities.
Chris says the future, at least in the short term, most likely lies with the current, more slapdash approach to charging.
'EV charging at home, taxi ranks or supermarket car parks and industrial estates are the best chance going forward,' he says.
All this does little to assuage the frustration of EV owners such as Davey and Petrie who have followed the advice they were given, only to find that the roads seemingly aren't prepared for the electric cars themselves.
'The infrastructure is just terrible in the UK and nobody is taking it seriously,' Davey says. 'You can't have chargers put in the back of a shop or the back of a McDonald's, it doesn't work.
'If they want to go all electric, they need to replace filling stations with electric charging forecourts – not leaving us stranded out in the cold.'
A government spokesman said: 'We're rolling out our chargepoint network at lightning pace, with more than 75,000 public chargers in place across the UK – and a new one added to the network every 29 minutes.
'Our Plan for Change will see the UK become a clean energy superpower. We're working closely with industry to rewire Britain and upgrade our outdated infrastructure to make sure grid capacity is in place to support the switch to electric vehicles.'
Chargeplace Scotland was approached for comment.
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