EV Road Trip
I’ve been driving for nearly 25 years, and while I’ve owned an EV as a two-car household for about 7 years, we moved last year to both cars being EVs. We’ve not had the need to use public charging other than as a novelty until now. I felt like sharing some of the experience, and some stats, as there’s so much hate against electric vehicles, but honestly found the trip absolutely fine in an electric vehicle.
My newer EV has a sticker range of 380 miles, but I’ve no idea how they’re getting that number. The plan was a weekend down in Kilkenny which is about 170 miles from home, but we had to drop the children off in the other direction beforehand adding another 100 miles. 280 is within the predicted range of a full battery, as the car estimates 320mi from 100%. So the night before I made sure the car was charging to 100% and we set off.
The total driving for the weekend was about 620mi, which amazingly took 14hrs but I guess some of that is sat on the drive punching in driving directions, though the heavy Friday rush hour traffic around Dublin plus an accident on the M7 probably added to that too.
We charged on the way down just in case, but frankly after 4 hours of driving needed a break anyway. Annoyingly motorway charge prices are a fair bit more than off-route, so we made a small diversion to a 50kW charger in Dundalk. We walked round the corner to the mall, and by the time we’d found the bathrooms, a cash machine for some Euros, and ordered a sit-down coffee, the car was already a fair way through the charge - we certainly weren’t waiting for it.
The next morning I had time to kill, so went into town for a coffee and finished topping up the car on a 100kW charger, which was impressively fast and I could probably have just gone back to the hotel, but seeing as I had time to kill I played wordle and drank my coffee.
On the way home I found an even faster charger, also in Dundalk, and the peak charge was 150kW, though I probably need to look at the charge curves for this car as by the time I’d got a coffee it was already reducing.
A table of the charge stops probably makes more sense than describing each (assuming you’re as interested in stats as I am). The ESB network in Ireland seems pretty thorough, and £0.50 (GBP) per unit is a fair bit cheaper than the motorway services which are often up into £0.85/kWh
| Charger max-rate | Charge time | kWh | range added | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 50kW | 40m | 30 | 110mi | £14.63 |
| 100kW | 43m | 46 | 172mi | £22.54 |
| 150kW | 17m | 24 | 191mi | £12.26 |
Each of these was on a separate day.
The main argument people make against EVs is the charge times, but at no point did any of these stops feel like a big time-waste. Any time we’ve done long journeys with our children we have to stop every few hours and it’s always half an hour to an hour, so there’s plenty of chance for a decent charge on a long journey.
The cost of EV charging is definitely expensive compared to home - even the cheaper 50p rate above is way more than the 13.89p I get at home overnight. Still, £50 for nearly 500 miles of public charging isn’t expensive.
We got home at the end of our 617mi journey with 14% battery, or about 37mi of range (I was watching the last charge so as not to over-spend on public charging). The cost to finish off the battery back to 100% is probably about £12, though would be lower if we had a sunny day (today was not that sort of day).
So is it expensive? Well, £62 for ~620mi is 10p per mile, which for me is insanely expensive compared to the rest of the year where I’m getting easily under 4p per mile. Perhaps you have a petrol car that can do that rate - my previous diesel would maybe manage that journey on a single tank, but that tank would have cost over £140 to fill at current prices. So yes, it’s still half the price of my previous car.
I posted on social media during the journey and immediately got a lot of replies along the lines of “I can fill 500mi in 5 minutes”, some even suggesting they could get the same price as I was paying per mile. I still don’t know why people feel the need to tell me this - do they think I’ve never driven a petrol car before? Do they think this is new to me? I guess the reply-guys just have to mansplain this to me, a man, along with anyone else posting about it.
The one thing none of them understood though was that this was a special journey - sure the car took longer to recharge than filling a tank, but I wake up to a fully charged car every morning. I also pay under 4p per mile for the rest of the year.
So yes, this was expensive, and took a bit longer, but overall it’s still cheaper. For a whole year it’s a lot cheaper…
I’ve yet to meet more than one or two EV drivers who switched back to ICE cars, and I certainly have no plans to buy another petrol or diesel car. Don’t @ me…