I often get asked by the EV Curious “But, what if I need to go on a long journey?”. The pandemic has meant that I haven’t really traveled on many long journeys in my EV to give an informed reply. I have just returned from a family “staycation” on the opposite side of England in North Norfolk. This seems like a good opportunity to do a deep dive into the data and give my impressions of the kind of journey people worry about with EVs.

The UK is a small country and much longer than it is wide. So this epic cross-country journey is only 200 miles - what I would class as an easy day on one of my US road trips. However, when they planned the roads in the UK, no one seemed to think you might want to travel East-West only North-South.

Here is a little background on the trip for context. I was in my Jaguar I-PACE and my sister was in her petrol (gas) powered Range Rover Velar. We were traveling with my parents and we planned two breaks on the journey. We split the passengers and luggage between the two cars. In the UK, you tend to pack for four seasons if you have the room so the cars were pretty full but only 2 up. The weather turned out to be consistently at the disappointing end of the British summer spectrum in the mid-teens Celsius (low sixties Fahrenheit). The average speed for the more direct routes is only about 35mph. We drove mostly up at the speed limit or what the traffic or road conditions would allow. With a lot of luggage and my parents in the car, the emphasis was on being smooth rather than shaving seconds off the journey time.

The Outward Journey

I created a journey plan in A Better Route Planner (ABRP) and it came out at 197 miles and 4h 43m drive time. It reckoned I would need a short charge on the journey to arrive with my selected 10% minimum safety margin. However, North Norfolk is not over-blessed with fast chargers, so my plan was to arrive there with as much charge as I could. We were trying to make the journey part of the holiday so we were looking for a nice place for lunch. We were passing dozens of fast changers but none of them could exactly be called scenic. So, in the end, we decided not to worry about chargers for the lunch stop and then compromise on the environment for the second one. The first stop was at a historic town called Sudbury, near Uttoxeter. The second stop I selected was Peterborough Services on the A1. It had a good selection of food options, a mini supermarket and a long line of 350kW of Ionity chargers. These are by far the fastest (and most expensive) chargers in the UK right now. My I-PACE is only capable of 100kW, so much of the benefit is lost, but the main attraction was the number of chargers rather than their speed. The I-PACE is not the most efficient of EVs and ABRP uses a reference consumption of about 2.5 mpkW. I had charged it fully and the GOM (Guessometer) predicted 246 miles of range. The I-PACE actually managed 3.1 and 3.3 mpkW on the two journey legs to the charger. No doubt, the copious amounts of regen helped with 7.8kW added back to the battery. EVs actually like windy country roads and urban dual carriageways with more roundabouts than found in most US States. I got to the chargers with 48% left. After a bit of messing about, the charger finally fired up. I just left it to it and caught up with my folks. By the time we had got a comfort break, a cup of tea and some essential groceries for our holiday house an hour had gone by. The car had charged to 97%. The charger probably peaked at 67kWh but slowed down as it filled, the average was only 47kW. This is disappointingly short of the theoretical speed but also fast enough for purpose. It is disappointing for the £26.26 it cost though. We moved on but became stuck in the Friday rush hour traffic along with the holiday traffic heading for the coast like us. This added about 45 minutes to our journey over ABRP’s prediction. We got to our final destination in Burnham Market with about 60% left in the battery. This was enough peace of mind to do some local journeys and get back to more charger-rich parts of the country again on the return trip.

The journey stats were:

Distance: 199 miles
Driving Time: 5h 32m
Average Speed: 36mph
Start/End SoC: 100%/60%
Estimated Usage: 72kW (86%)
Regen: 11.5kW
Added on Journey: 38kW £26
Average Efficiency: 3.2mpkW

At Destination

Norfolk is quite a large county that is mainly agricultural. It has an extensive coastline. We like to go there for the pretty villages, good restaurants, historic houses and gardens. I usually sneak off at some point to do some wildlife photography at one of the coastal wildlife reserves. The roads are often narrow and twisty with just a few trunk roads joining the major towns. It is pretty much all single lane in the North. There are no real hills, but it is more undulating than some of the surrounding counties. It is good territory for driving EVs but there are only a few fast chargers and none of those were in Burnham Market where we stayed. Partly due to this and partly due to how we had to park, we tended to use my sister’s car. I used mine to drive the short distance to the wildlife reserve and for one family day out where the port of call promised a destination 7kW charger. Both destination chargers worked fine and, despite the weather keeping our stops short, I got home with more charge than I left with.

About halfway through the trip, we reorganised the parking, and I was able to plug in using the granny lead to an outlet in the house. It was only 2kW and I could only do that when we were in the house as the cable was through a window. However, by the time the vacation ended I had managed to get back up to 99%

The journey stats were:

Distance: 83 miles
Driving Time: 2h 52m
Average Speed: 29mph
Start/End SoC: 60%/99%
Estimated Usage: 19kW (22%)
Regen: 6kW
Added on Journey: 52kW £5.12
Efficiency Range: 2.7-3.7mpkW

The Homeward Journey

We were concerned about Friday rush hour traffic and the holiday traffic to get to the North Wales coast where my parents and sister live so we had an early start. The route we chose was similar to the outward one but with a few modifications. We planned to stop at Peterborough Services again. This time it was more about being on a better and the right timing than needing to charge. We would then take a longer but faster route, but still stop close to Uttoxeter - this time at a services. It was only going to be a takeout coffee and a comfort break this time. The route worked pretty well apart from hitting a road closure near Nottingham. We managed to get by most of the potential choke points before the traffic got too heavy. However, I had real issues with the Ionity Charger I tried. It didn’t want to talk to me. Before Ionity was there, Peterborough had a couple of Ecotricity Electric Highway chargers. These would have been first-generation 50kW chargers with a single CCS. I noticed on Plugshare that GridServe’s Electric Highway upgrade rollout had already got to Peterborough. It now had a couple of 120kW chargers with 2 CCS points. I moved over to these and it was a simple plugin and tap my Apple Watch on the contactless pad to start - marvellous. It’s only £0.30pkW compared to £0.70pkW for Ionity too. I still haven’t seen a charge come through, one of the posters on Plugshare said it was on free vend a few days earlier. Gridserve seems to be moving at pace with upgrades since their recent takeover of Electric Highway.

The journey stats were:

Distance: 219 miles
Driving Time: 5h 32m
Average Speed: 39mph
Start/End SoC: 99%/38%
Estimated Usage: 72kW (86%)
Regen: 12.6kW
Added on Journey: 20kW £6.5
Average Efficiency: 3.2mpkW

Learnings

The I-PACE is good at this kind of journey. It’s comfy, quiet and effortless. The cross-country roads and lower speeds mean that it’s close to its best efficiency. I admit to being nervous beforehand. I didn’t want bringing an EV to dominate the trip. I was also worried about the lack of fast chargers in North Norfolk. Traveling in convoy with an ICE vehicle would tend to highlight any issues. My sister’s Velar has a range of about 400 miles on a tank. I don’t have the same detailed data for my sister’s trip, but on the long journeys she was getting about 35mpg (29mpg US) but this dropped into the mid to high twenties on the local journeys. She had one fill up from quarter full which cost about £60. In the end, it all worked out fine. We never had to stop more often or for longer than we would have normally.

I did a LOT of planning beforehand. Much of this was just trying to find stops with enough chargers to remove the chance of them being busy whilst still being somewhere my family wouldn’t mind being. Peterborough Services worked out well. I didn’t see the charging speeds I had hoped on either charging system, but we were never waiting on my car. If I had not charged at all, I could have completed the whole journey with about 15% left. What was worth a bit of research was looking for destination chargers at places you wanted to visit. I made the best of these destination chargers when we used my car. There were also more available at locations on days when we didn’t use my car. I am more confident now that, if we had just used only my car, I could have kept the range in my comfort zone without inconveniencing the passengers. Charging from a standard domestic plug with a granny lead is slow, but the car is often doing nothing for long periods so it all adds up. I had built up enough charge by the end of the holiday to make it all the way home without charging if necessary. Make sure you have the leads with you to use destination chargers and domestic plugs and possibly a heavy-duty extension lead. All this planning might be a real turn-off for some and I think that is fair. However, it is currently dwarfed by the challenges of trying to book tables for a week’s worth of lunches and dinners in UK resorts now everyone is having to staycation.

Infrastructure is still an issue but I feel the major issue now is not quantity but the ease of use. My sister likes the idea of an EV or PHEV, but when she sees me struggle to get chargers to work (bear in mind I am the family tech support guy) it puts her off. The updated Electric Highway contactless experience is better though the “just plug it in” approach of Tesla is still the ultimate goal. In reality, like me, my sister would only have to use one a couple of times a year if she had a home charger. It is still the fear of using fast chargers that puts her off.

While on vacation, a couple quizzed me as I was plugging in at a destination charger at a National Trust country home. As ever, “What’s the range?” was their first question. They felt they needed 400 miles because they made a trip to the Devon coast a couple of times a year. The rest of the time they live on the Isle of Wight which almost guarantees most of their journeys will be short. It is still a challenge to change to a different mindset to longer journeys. Their long holiday journey is another 200 mile East-West slog on A-roads where you would want to stop at least once for a break.

Ionity

Ionity was set up by a number of car manufacturers, particularly VW Group. Whilst 350kW is impressive, it is as costly as fossil fuels unless you are having it subsidised because your car is coming from one of the contributing partners. It also functions best for those cars with 800v charging systems like the Porsche Taycan and Audi E-Tron. If your car is not one of the chosen, I think there are better options that still charge fast enough for most journey scenarios for less money. Perhaps the stall I chose on the homeward route was faulty but I found the UI unintuitive and laggy and seemed to stop responding altogether.

ABRP and Plugshare

These were the two main tools I used in my planning along with a bit of Zap-Map. I use ABRP for building the routes and Plugshare for checking out the chargers and their environment. If Plugshare is short on pictures, I go to Google Maps. I upgraded to Premium with ABRP so I could try it out on Apple CarPlay and get the dynamic traffic and charger information. I feel it still needs some work on CarPlay. It needs more ability to adjust the settings from CarPlay UI and the Nav directions struggled in some of the more fiddly cross-town sections. The Jaguar navigation still scores as I can see the map in my dial setup leaving the central screen for other things. Using Apple Maps also has an advantage as my Apple Watch chirps when I get to turnings. This is useful as I tend to turn the voice guidance off.