I tried circumnavigating the UK in an electric van — here's why it was impossible

Times

5 days ago

My annual circumnavigation of mainland Britain and Northern Ireland presented the perfect opportunity to try to prove that it was not only possible, but, ideally, a breeze to complete a four-week road trip in an electric van.
Volkswagen thought so too, lending me an all-electric ID Buzz five-seater van, in two-tone candy white and bay leaf green, for the duration. The specs were as impressive as its surfy two-tone looks: an 84kWh battery that charged from 5 to 80 per cent in as little as 30 minutes and claimed a maximum range of up to 293 miles.
The job was to survey the English, Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish coasts — a distance of some 4,800 miles — but since I had the entire month of May to complete the journey I set a maximum of 240 miles a day, leaving a minimum 53-mile safety buffer within which to find a charger for my anticipated daily 30-minute top-up. That may sound overcautious, but over the 16 years I've been doing this journey, I've seen loads of old service stations closed down, but never seen a new one open.
You need apps to find chargers. A single app won't do because you can't be sure that it lists all locations, or that it will communicate with the actual charger you want to use so you can get loyalty discounts and receipts, so I downloaded Charge Assist, Electroverse, InstaVolt, Plugsurfing, Pod Point and Zapmap. They're all free, because they make their money in a variety of ways — that may include commission from charging providers, advertising or data analytics, for example — and soon their icons were crowding my phone.
It was already becoming something of a faff and I wondered how useful they'd be in those parts of the nation where 5G is a popular fairytale, but, overall, I was extremely pleased with myself. I had a green van and a greener plan for a low-cost, zero-carbon road trip (if you ignore the upstream emissions from manufacture and electricity generation). That's not how it turned out.
This year's circumnavigation began in Cleethorpes. I had to start it somewhere, so I started it there. My first charging experience, in the Meridian Point Retail Park, took a little longer than I expected, but I put it down to first-night nerves and used my extended stay to give the resort more of a going over than it really needed.
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Three days later, having followed the coast through Lincolnshire and Norfolk, I discovered what many electric vehicle (EV) owners already know. It was raining when I followed Electroverse's guidance to a Shell Recharge station in Woodbridge, Suffolk. The charger was a massive 300kW monster that made me wonder if I actually had time for a cup of coffee and a bun from the petrol station's food counter.
I did, as it happens. I had time, in theory, for a two-bottle lunch, a chapter of Ulysses and a long kip, because a 300kW charger does not necessarily charge at 300kW. It can charge at up to 300kW, in the same way that broadband providers promise your connection will operate at up to the speed of light. Possible, in theory, but extremely unlikely.
First off, few EVs can draw 300kW. The Audi e-tron, the Porsche Taycan and the Volvo EX90 are among the exceptions, but the VW ID Buzz pulls only 185kW. Second, if the battery is too cold, or too warm, you won't even get 50kW. Ditto if the battery is almost empty. Third, your charge could be slower than advertised because, er, there are other drivers charging, or it's a Monday and there are five crows perched in the lightning tree, or the cows are lying down.
I didn't know this yet. I was simply excited to be plugging in, swiping my card and then watching in wonder as the output display rocketed from 5kW to 41kW. And stayed there. According to the van, it was going to take two hours and 49 minutes to reach 80 per cent. Even Dave T Dog was dismayed, but imagine how quickly the sweet summer holiday dreams of a family would sour as they roasted in a van in the hot corner of the M5's Gordano services.
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And then another mystery arose. Because of the temperature, or some long-forgotten curse or because the moon was in Leo, the range at the recommended 80 per cent charge was now 233 miles, or 187 with the safety margin, meaning I would have to recharge twice in one day to cover the 274 miles and 18 beaches I was planning on inspecting between Woodbridge and Margate.
The next day was worse. Despite beginning the day with a 90-minute top-up in a BP garage, the last 40 miles to Normans Bay felt like a scene from the 1953 film The Wages of Fear.
A large part of the stress is caused by a smartarse onboard computer that, rather than simply reporting the remaining range, constantly recalculates based on how much power you're using at any given time. These fluctuations increase so-called range anxiety — or the fear of not making it to your destination — and while the AA says that running out of charge is rare, the solution is always a tow to the nearest charging point.
Coming through Winchelsea in East Sussex the display said I had 31 miles' worth of power with which to make the 25 miles to my campsite, but as I climbed the steep hill at Tanyard Lane, the range dropped to 21 miles, then recalculated when I reached the flat to 27 miles.
Given a signal I could have used my apps to find a late-night charger for a top-up, but my survival instinct was not that strong, and by the time I reached the Camping and Caravanning Club site, just seven miles remained. Luckily I'd paid for a pitch with an electric hook-up. Unluckily the van's plug did not fit the site's socket. Probably because I'd failed to salute a magpie earlier in the day.
The next morning I crept the six miles into Eastbourne on the electrical equivalent of fumes, following the Electroverse app's directions to a high-speed charger in a Volvo dealership. How I laughed when they told me it was out of order, and how I chuckled again when I discovered that the trickle charger at the VW dealership — a tense half-mile away — would take six hours to bring me up to 80 per cent.
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I gave it an hour to get enough power to drive to Waitrose, where a 120kW charger told me it would take just three hours to fill my battery.
Unless you're a student of urban decline or a fan of post-apocalyptic horror, you'll find three hours is too long to be in Eastbourne. I sat in a café one street back from the ruins of the seafront, watching as zombies lurched past. It gave me time to think.
According to Zapmap, there were 40,479 charging locations in the UK at the end of June. That's five times more than the number of petrol stations, which have fallen from 40,000 in 1967 to about 8,000 today.
Of the 82,369 chargers at those locations, 16,698 (20 per cent) are in the rapid or ultra-rapid band, ie those with capacity of 50kW or higher. But speed is relative. It takes about five minutes to fill and pay for a tank of petrol, meaning each pump has a throughput of 12 vehicles an hour.
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Where you are on the road matters too — southeast England has 2,410 of the faster chargers; the northeast 594; and Northern Ireland just 190.
If my van really could get from 5 to 80 per cent in 30 minutes, the charger throughput would be two EVs per hour, but since the average so far was closer to three hours per charge the true throughput would be closer to eight vehicles per 24-hour period.
Fortunately EVs comprise just 4.5 per cent — or 1.5 million — of the 34 million cars on UK roads. Because most of them are charged overnight, at home, and used for average journey lengths of about ten miles, they rarely run out of charge, and their owners are unlikely to notice the massive inadequacies of the roadside charging network. After all, no one does Route 66 in a golf cart.
Despite easing the pressure on car manufacturers to meet EV targets, the government still expects 28 per cent of sales in the UK in 2025 to be zero-emission vehicles. By 2030, the mandated target will be 80 per cent, rising to 100 per cent in 2035. By then, according to a 2022 report by the government's Electric Vehicle Energy Taskforce, '500,000 public chargepoints [will] need to be deployed … to provide drivers with the confidence to buy electric vehicles and the means to charge them'.
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But availability is one thing. The time it takes to charge is another. The 340-mile journey from Manchester to St Ives via the M5 and the A30 takes six hours in a petrol-powered car. In an EV it could take up to ten hours when you factor in two charging sessions, and how will that affect Cornwall's tourism appeal?
'We know public charging is still a concern for people who cannot charge at home or for the occasional particularly long journey on high days and holidays,' Volkswagen said. 'We continue to work to develop partnerships to improve access to charging for our customers and urge government to support the development of a national, interoperable and affordable public charging network.'
Despite the challenges you, like me, may still be tempted to hire an electric van for your UK road trip. The rental agency goboony.co.uk clearly thinks you should, claiming it's budget-friendly, eco-friendly, city-friendly, quieter and encourages slow travel.
The last claim is definitely true and by the time I reached Weymouth, two days later than scheduled, I knew my plan had failed. It wasn't the van's fault. The ID Buzz is the prettiest vehicle VW has designed since the T2 split-screen: a design classic begging to be customised, but I'm not sure the UK is ready for an all-electric touring van. I'd covered less than 15 per cent of the 4,800 miles and if I couldn't handle the range anxiety of the UK's soft south, how was I going to cope with the wilds of Wales and Scotland?
So I admitted defeat, called VW and asked if it had anything that ran on diesel. It brought me a California camper van. It took five minutes to fill, had a range of 550 miles, an electric pop-up roof and a fridge that looked great when I loaded it with beer.
That's all you need to know. But I will try again.
Chris Haslam toured the UK in a Volkswagen California campervan (volkswagen-vans.co.uk/california)
Have you travelled in an electric camper van, or are you considering it? Let us know in the comments