The Myth of the Impossible Long-Distance EV Journey
or 'why you CAN do that trip to Switzerland in your EV
The good news about this time of year is that there are several events which take place that focus on long-distance EV drives.
The prevailing narrative is that long-distance EV trips are unfeasible due to the relatively short range of the cars and the lack of public charging infrastructure.
The reality is somewhat different.
Let’s take an example with which I am personally familiar: The London to Brighton Rally.
The astute amongst you will, no doubt, pipe up with the cry “It’s only about 60 miles. That’s no challenge!”. You would be right.
But over the last two years, the London to Brighton Rally has been a precursor to a much longer rally which uses the London to Brighton leg as a starting stage. Last year contestants went to Paris and this year they extended the European leg and ended up on the Lake Geneva shoreline (with ‘Smoke on the Water’ playing in the background, no doubt)
For many people who have never driven EVs (and, indeed for some who have driven EVs and had problems on long journeys) this would seem to be a nightmare.
But I can tell you from personal experience that it was a breeze.
Let me set the stage. I was co-driving a 6-year-old Tesla Model S with a 75kWh battery. The average range on a car of this age is around 220 miles. It’s a big lump of a vehicle that isn’t as efficient as some of the more modern Teslas on the road. Doing the trip alongside me, were any number of other electric vehicles, including a 40kWh Nissan Leaf, a Cupra Born, a Kia EV9, a Hyundai Ioniq 38kWh, a Nissan ENV200 van, a Seat Mii, an MG5, and a Volta truck.
The challenge with these vehicles is that they all have different ranges, they all charge at different speeds, and they all have different efficiency ratings.
That, of course, is the fun of a challenge such as this.
So let’s get the admin stuff out of the way first.
We left Brighton at 8 am on Sunday to catch a ferry from Newhaven to Dieppe. Our end-of-day arrival point for day one was the Arc de Triomphe. Day two we started from the Arc de Triomphe and ended up in Geneva. Day three was the return.
Now let’s talk charging.
Of course, being in the Tesla this was simple. When we hit Europe we didn’t charge on the first leg to our overnight hotel in Fontainebleau - although it did have chargers there so we were able to leave on day two fully charged. After that, we stopped at Beaune for 30 minutes and arrived at Geneva with plenty in the battery. We did a quick (literally 5-minute) stop at a Fastned charger heading back into France for our overnight hotel in Bourg-en-Bresse (which also had a charger)
On the return we had lunch in a restaurant just South of Paris and the car charged while we ate. We did one quick stop (20 minutes) at new Tesla V4 chargers south of Dieppe and made it back to Leatherhead in Surrey without a further charging stop. Yes, we did make other stops - mainly for toilet breaks and food - nominally every 90 minutes to 2 hours.
The only stop along the way which would have been considered ‘inconvenient’ was at Beaune. It was 30 minutes and the location of the supercharger was such that there were no facilities. Ideally, we would have stopped and eaten lunch there.
Now let’s look at the same journey in a fossil-fuel car. Just to make it easy I’m going to pick the infamous diesel car that can do 1000 miles on a tank that all the anti-EV folks seem to think everyone has. (Although the 10 Ferraris, Lamborghinis and McLarens that passed us at speed on the A6 Southbound were probably not getting that range from their tanks - especially at the speed they were going). The total distance, on the continent, of that route is 914 miles. So fortunately for them, they wouldn’t have had to stop to dispense some of that hideously smelly and expensive diesel in their tank. (Unless they were a little heavy with the right foot…)
But that journey is also almost 15.5 hours. If we assume they stop in the same hotels as we did, that splits the route down into a four-hour ferry journey & a day of 3 hours of driving, a day of 4 hours driving to Geneva & another hour and a half back to Bourge-en-Bresse, and a day of 6 hours of driving to Dieppe.
Now I don’t know about you but I can probably do around 2 hours, max, without needing a stop. If I had kids in the car I imagine it would have been similar (if not less). This means your leg to Paris from Dieppe would probably have needed a stop, your leg from Paris to Geneva would have needed a stop or two, and the return from Bourg-en-Bresse to Dieppe would have needed 3, maybe 4 stops.
In and amongst these stops you will have needed lunch or A.N. Other meal
The only thing you wouldn’t have needed to do was to put diesel in your vehicle.
Well, guess what, our stop routine was the same! And we didn’t need to stop to put diesel in either.
Before anyone chimes in with “I could have done it quicker than that” - yes. You probably could. You could have perhaps done it with one night instead of two. Or you could have done it without staying overnight in a hotel - of course you could. But so could I. This isn’t about whether I had the best route, or the quickest route, or the most efficient route. This is about whether this journey could be done in an electric car as easily as with a fossil-fuel car.
Regardless of which route and timing you took, there is a finite amount of time anyone should drive without a break. These breaks coincide nicely with comfort breaks (food etc) and charging. As I said earlier the only stop we made which coincided with neither of these was 30 minutes at Beaune. Even then we had the option of stopping in a different location with facilities but chose the Tesla Supercharger instead - mainly because the car was entitled to free supercharging.
But anyone who knows anyone about EVs will tell you “Of course the Tesla would do it without an issue. What about the other cars?” Good question.
I can tell you that the only two vehicles that had issues with charging were the Nissan Leaf and the Volta Truck. But they had completely different charging problems. The Nissan Leaf suffered from ‘Rapidgate’ which is a software-induced slowdown during multiple rapid charges as a result of heat. The outside temperature was in the 30s and - coupled with the fact that the Nissan has no battery heat management - the software slows the charge down to protect the battery. This is a known issue and has been since the release of the 40kWh Leaf back in 2018.
The Volta truck had a different set of charging issues. Most of their problems stemmed from the size of the vehicle. For reference, it’s about the size of a small coach both in height and length. Finding suitable charging locations where it could actually manoeuvre so that the charge port was accessible to a charging cable proved to be an issue at several locations.
As far as charging the Volta was concerned, once they plugged in they had no issues.
Some cars charged slower than others - the Seat Mii (which is the Seat version of VW’s Up!) had no issue starting charges but was limited to something like 30kW. But as the battery was only 32.3 kWh usable it meant they weren’t waiting for too long at each stop. With a real range of around 130 miles, they made several more stops than the Tesla, but arrived in Geneva around 90 minutes after we did.
The Kia EV9 had a real range similar to what we had in the Tesla and - with its 200kW charging it made a similar number of stops to us arriving before us in Geneva.
The Ioniq 38kWh ‘The Wind Knife’ arrived about 30 minutes after us having amassed the best efficiency figures of any vehicle on the run.
Ironically the last vehicle to arrive in Geneva (almost 2 hours after the rest of us) was an MG5 Estate. This wasn’t a charging issue. It was a navigation issue where he missed a turning and ended up having to travel many miles in the wrong direction before being able to get back to the original turning point. (A fate we almost suffered along the A6!)
So even if several people had issues with navigation - and a couple had issues with the charging aspects of their vehicles - the infrastructure was not an issue. Every motorway service station along the route in France had a bank of high-power chargers which were all simple to use. (In fact, they were so simple I had a Frenchman who had never charged his BMW IX2 ask me for instructions and I showed him how to charge purely using hand gestures and through the medium of interpretive dance)
But let’s assume you don’t fancy heading out to that-there Europe. Is it still possible to do a long journey around the UK? Well, if you listen to the naysayers, the answer is no. There’s no way you can get into a car in, say, Devon, and drive up to, say, St Andrews in Scotland in an EV without it taking days and days or without the car having major charging issues.
Well, ironically enough, my co-driver on the trip to Geneva did exactly that in his 6-year-old Model S a couple of weeks ago. The journey was around 8.5 hours, 507 miles, and was accomplished in around the same time as it would have taken him in a petrol car. Again he stopped for comfort and food breaks every couple of hours, charged up while he ate, and arrived, refreshed and relaxed around 9 hours later. This was also one of those ‘What if you had an emergency and had to do a long distance at a moment’s notice’ sort of trips. Time was of the essence and the car (and infrastructure) dealt with it with ease.
The Greenfleet EV Rally
But, just in case you’re not convinced let me introduce you to the Greenfleet EV Rally1. This is a yearly event that attempts to travel a long distance across the UK and Ireland over 5 days. Last year the route took them from the start point to all five capitals in the British Isles (London, Edinburgh, Cardiff, Belfast and Dublin). This year the route is a similar, range-busting 1,400 miles across England and Wales, encompassing points as far North as Carlisle, East as Norwich, South as Exeter, and West as the Rhug estate in Wales. The ‘Beast’ day will be day 4 which starts in Cambridge and goes - via Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, and Berkshire, right down to Exeter in Devon.
All sorts of vehicles are doing this journey - including commercial vans, lorries, cars and even an electric motorcycle. Plus there are a lot more of them than did the trip to Geneva. It will be interesting to see the results of this. But one thing’s for certain - if last year is anything to go by the vehicles will all finish - in varying times, of course, and the charging infrastructure will be the least of their worries.
Will they encounter chargers that don’t work? Probably (After all Zapmap does a yearly customer survey of the best charging networks in the country2 and reliability is one reason many operators are not at the top of that list). But next time you go to a petrol station have a quick look around at the pumps there. See how many of them are coned off, taped up, or have a yellow ‘Do Not Use’ sign on them.
Will some of them take longer to travel the distance on any given day than could be done in a fossil-fuel car? Yes, probably. Sam Clarke from CPO Gridserve is doing the journey on a short-range, slow-charging, electric motorbike. I would be very surprised if he could do it quicker than a similar fossil-fuelled motorbike which has a much longer range. But Sam isn’t doing the rally to be first. He’s doing it to see what challenges running such a vehicle encounter over a long distance. In reality, this isn’t the vehicle in which to do such a journey. It’s also worth noting that Sam did the EV Rally last year in a commercial van and - alongside his co-drivers Kevin Booker and Fergal McGrath - won a Guinness World record for the greatest distance travelled by an electric van on a single charge: 500.8 km (311.18 miles). Back when I drove a 2.0ltr Honda Civic 311 miles would be considered a great range on a tank of fuel. (I had a heavier right foot then than now!)
The education issue
So how can I reconcile what you’ve just read to the reports from many new EV drivers about horrendous long-distance journeys where they’ve taken three or four times as long to do the distance in their EV than they previously did in their ICE cars?
One word: education.
Almost without exception, whenever you dig into the details behind these horror journeys you find a couple of key facts that point to this. A key one is not understanding the difference between AC charging and DC charging and plugging into a slow AC charger expecting a rapid charge (Hell, even Maddie Moat from The Fully Charged Show did this on her first long-distance rapid charge).
Then there’s not using Zapmap to check the status of chargers before arriving resulting in pulling up to a charger that may be out of order. Then there’s choosing an unreliable chart point operator such as Geniepoint. Next, there’s following the screen instructions and downloading a separate app for every charge company you use (Which involves creating an account and adding a payment method to each app) instead of using contactless or a roaming service such as ZapPay, Octopus Electroverse, or Bonnett. Finally, there’s the insistence on charging right up to 100% resulting in extended charge times.
Any one of these rookie errors can leave a bad taste in the mouth. Many ‘intrepid reporters’ or first-time EV owners hit two or more of these errors compounding the issue.
But every single one of these errors can be avoided with just a little education. The fact is public charging can be daunting the first time you do it. But a couple of simple steps beforehand can avoid a lot of the tension and make it much, much simpler.
Download Zapmap and create a filter that shows you DC chargers from the top 5 or 6 CPOs in the Zapmap customer survey. For extra security also select locations that have 4 or more chargers on site. Plan a route that allows you to stop at these chargers while you still have around 20% of your battery charge available. Plug in and use contactless (or a roaming service) to pay. Stop charging when you get to 80% battery state of charge.
Go find some food, or a coffee, or a toilet.
Follow these simple steps and you’ll find your charging ‘troubles’ reduced by an order of magnitude.
https://ev-rally.co.uk
https://www.ospreycharging.co.uk/post/top-uk-ev-charging-network