This is a tale of two EV charges. One car, one service station, two consecutive days and two very different charging experiences.
I’m quite fond of my long-term Alfa Romeo Junior that I’m running at the moment. Small, efficient, still a relatively rare sight on the road and with a decent 248-mile range, it’s perfect for what I need.
On a recent occasion though, I found myself with a slight dilemma. On two consecutive days I has appointments around Birmingham and I didn’t fancy a night away from home, so it meant two 200-mile days one after the other.
Not usually a problem, but the overnight in-between would be spent without a home charger, so while I could charge via a three-pin overnight, that wouldn’t give me enough charge for the next day. I’d need a brief top up charge on the return journey each day to see me through.
Again, not a problem, a cursory brief check saw that Warwick Services had Gridserve chargers, so I could drop in there. On the first day, I did so and as I drove in to the services, saw some prominent Applegreen electric charging signs, not a brand I’ve used before.
However, while driving through the car park, I saw an available Gridserve charger and jumped on that, plugged in and before long I was happily charging. Although I only really needed a top-up, I was also mindful of not wanting to stop again and also leaving the next morning with a full charge, so I was also mentally calculating the slow granny-lead charging speed I would be getting later on.
And because of this, I hadn’t really noticed that while I was charging, it wasn’t quite at the speed I was expecting. The reason is that I hadn’t checked the charger speed which turned out was just 45kW, despite the hefty 85p/kWh price. I left it parked there, rather than move, but it was an abject lesson is how not all CCS chargers are created equally. And nor, clearly, are their pricing structures – though I admit it was a motorway service station, so what did I expect.
Fast forward 24 hours and, like Groundhog Day, I was back in the same location again needing to charge. Except this time I wasn’t about to make the same mistake twice because I’d done my research on Zapmap the night before and roundly chastised myself.
This time I sailed past the Gridserve location where I’d been the previous day, found my way to the Applegreen chargers just round the corner and half wished I had swapped over the day before. Here were 16 (!) 180kW chargers, largely unused and, while I didn’t have the Applegreen app, it was easy just to use contactless and within less than a minute of having parked up, I could see the charger was pumping out 95kW, close to the Alfa’s 100kW maximum.
The icing on the cake was it was at 79p/kWh – so faster and cheaper than the Gridserve charger I’d used 24 hours before. But of course there was still that nagging annoyance than I should have been here the day before.
I’ve been driving EVs and using public chargers regularly for longer than I care to remember and would like to think that I’m reasonably experienced at it, but I still messed up through lack of homework. Yes, public charging is getting easier all the time, but this experience shows that you shouldn’t become insouciant about the process even if you have been doing it for years. A little bit of foresight and planning can still save you time and money.