I drove an electric car over 3,000 miles in three months. It tested my sanity

“Biscuits?” I shook my head, refusing Mrs English’s kind offer of comestibles to munch on while recharging the battery-powered Ford outside.

I was starting as I mean to go on. Since I don’t have a home charger, a three-month experiment to discover how a high-mileage driver copes with running an electric car (or not) would surely be accompanied by plenty of snacking opportunities as the volts flowed into the battery.

I was determined that three months of not buying petrol or diesel was not going to be accompanied by sucking at the teat of the international coffee ’n’ cake industry, despite myriad opportunity afforded. A trusty vacuum flask, perhaps an apple? A library book? I feared the experience was going to be expensive and time-consuming enough without gaining even more middle-aged pounds.

It’s the PR-inspired received wisdom of the new electric world that what we most want while we wait to plug in our car is sugary, fatty, ultra-processed fast food, which one leading EV charging provider has the brass neck to call a “premium” experience.

The challenge outlined

I’ve run electric test cars before, of course, often only for a week or two, but mostly for a day where at the end paid flunkies take the car away and charge it.

This was going to be different, no hydrocarbon fuel at all. And I cover a lot of miles, never certain where I’m going to be summoned to next week or next month, often having to change plans at the last moment. Usually, I keep a full fuel tank and a packed bag, which wasn’t going to be quite so simple with an electric car.

The car? A Ford Mustang Mach-e Premium RWD, £63,030’s worth of 289bhp/430Nm, 98kWh large SUV. The claimed range is a useful 372 miles in the WLTP cycle. We’ll see…

But summer is a good time to be running a battery car. Just the briefest blast of demisting during an early start and try not to use too much air-conditioning if it gets hot, to cause less drain on the battery.

My first job was in Hatfield, a 100-mile round trip, for a car review. My app showed a couple of Porsche 350kW chargers at a nearby dealer but they were coned off. Instead, it was a six-mile round trip to a Shell Recharge. Nominally rated at 175kW, so a quick fill for the Ford which will accept a 150kW DC charge, but in this case the charger never got above 60kW; by the time the battery showed 90 per cent the current was trickling in at less than 20kW and I had eaten the apple and started my library book. A 30 per cent charge took 45 minutes, welcome to real life…

In fact I don’t think I’ve ever seen anywhere near the full capacity of any charger flowing into the Ford. That is understandable when the state of charge is above 80 per cent, less so below that figure. Since the speed of charge is dependent on so many variables, the charging industry is able to kick the question down the road.

Undiscovered parts

You roam the undiscovered parts of the country when you travel electric. Small housing estates, tiny back roads and obscure forecourts are all part of the daily search for volts. I’m reminded of various government ministers and charge-company executives trilling about how convenient it all is, without giving a thought to those without private driveways on which to enjoy cheap VAT-free recharging and who might find forking out £40,000-plus for an EV rather more than their wallet will bear. Still, it’s always good to hear how the other half are getting on.

Not that I don’t like electric driving, it’s quiet, smooth (mostly) and effortless. Weight is an issue, yes, and on certain roads the Ford rides like a balloon on a stick, but it yomps around the M25 and up the M1 and occasionally, just occasionally, it’s possible to see how a post-petrol world might work.

Not on a trip to Wales for a Hyundai launch two weeks later, however. I’d planned for a recharge at a service station on the M42 near Birmingham. On arrival, however, the service station in question has 35 Tesla Superchargers with only one Tesla being charged and (wait for it) two Gridserve chargers, one of which wasn’t working, the other with a queue of BT vans all requiring a full charge.

Exorbitant prices

And the prices! A year ago, I was quoting Ionity’s 78p per kW as expensive, but now even a 50kW charge is 85p/kW and I’ve paid up to 91p. Compare that with the 22.36 p/kWh average price of domestic electricity in the UK and weep.

A typical fill for the Ford has always cost in excess of £50 and far from the quoted efficiency of 3.79 miles per kWh. I’ve been getting about 2.8m/kWh on a long run using a bit of air-con, which gives a real-world range of 274 miles. Yet in reality it’s nothing of the sort, because you always start looking for a charge when the battery level drops to about 20 per cent, so reckon on just over 200 miles.

I’ve tried pushing the range, of course, and ended up in Honiton to be greeted by an out-of-service BP Pulse charger. This prompted backtracking to Exeter Services, limping to the bank of Gridserve chargers with less than five per cent in the battery. Mrs English was less than impressed.

In the past three months I’ve learnt to navigate the country using Lidl supermarkets, most of which have a little-used 50kW charger tucked in the corner of the car park. Perhaps this isn’t quite the brave new world extolled by government.

Voice of charging

ChargeUK is the self-styled “voice of UK EV charging”, representing the companies that install and operate charge points. At its autumn reception in Westminster, Lilian Greenwood MP, the under-secretary of state for the future of roads, gave a speech promising to “support the EV industry not simply to grow but to thrive”.

She said the charging industry “is already committed to billions of pounds in charging infrastructure investment by 2030 and that’s a huge step. And this government will back you all the way”.

Interestingly, while she also committed to the proposed reversal of the date to ban new combustion car sales back from 2035 to 2030, she also added somewhat weaselly: “In 2030 there will be no new cars relying solely on internal combustion engines.” A reprieve for hybrids, then.

It’s all rather jolly when charging companies meet government, they all seem so confident and well-fed. Sometimes I wonder if they’re just whistling in the dark like scared teenagers walking back from school in the dark, at others just over-confident wazzocks giving each other jobs.

It’s actually quite difficult to find out how profitable the provision of volts to electric cars is. At Companies House you’ll find 22 companies with Gridserve in the title, all with headquarters in the same building in Iver, Bucks. The articles of association are sufficiently vague to make nailing down the actual profit from charging operations almost impossible. We also learn that the costs are highly variable, solar and wind power costs will depend on the contract signed and the time of day at which that electricity is flowing into the grid; the industry calls it “sleeved” supply.

As you’d expect, the charging industry is all about investment right now, with a long list of international power companies stumping up the cash.

Go to BP’s annual report for 2023, for example, and you learn that it ended the year with 29,000 recharging points and made $15.2 billion in profit. Five pages on, you learn that BP also sells fossil fuels…

The minister said: “We must double down on charging. We must think about the needs of people without off-street parking, we must think about fast-tracking the release of funding to local communities to roll out a reliable network of public charge points.” I’m not sure that’s what is happening, though, or whether it should. I’ve not seen any efforts by local authorities to provide public charging and when I’ve asked about running a cable across a pavement to the Ford, I’ve received a distinctly chilly reply from my local council planning office. It’s also hard not to boggle at the ethical and dialectical gymnastics involved in simultaneously urging the splurging of council tax on providing EV charge posts for the 1.1 million electric cars on our roads, while also ending the universal winter fuel allowance to old folk.

The minister also echoed ChargeUK calls to go “further and faster” in the rollout of charging points and recognised the need to provide “a reliable, accessible and affordable EV charging network”.

So far, they’re not doing particularly well, even by their own measure. One recent study from charging specialist Konect and fuelling specialist Gilbarco Veeder-Root showed that the US, Europe and the UK are more than six times behind the number of plugs needed to meet growing EV demand by 2030.

Reliability? What reliability?

As for the reliability, in three months and more than 3,000 miles of electric driving, charging on the go, I’ve found more than 20 out-of-service chargers, I’ve had my vehicle locked inside fields while charging and also been locked irretrievably to a charger twice when the plug refused to let go, which requires an engineer to release you and hours out of your life – EV motoring means constantly apologising for being late.

And as well as being expensive, it’s also hard to claim costs back as no charging post provides a receipt so getting one is long-winded and confusing. And while the touch-and-charge card system is slowly being introduced, you still need to create accounts with several suppliers to access lower unit prices and get reasonable coverage.

When I called ChargeUK, its affable PR said there are no available figures for reliability, so how would the minister know if charging is getting more dependable?

And while the figures for available charging points seem to spiral upwards by the day, nailing down the actual numbers is tricky. Vicky Read, the new chief executive of ChargeUK, recently claimed there are 930,000 charge points in the UK today – home, work and public, which is close to one charger for every EV.

Yet according to Zap Map, at the end of August this year there were 68,273 electric vehicle charging points across the UK, across 35,230 locations. Admittedly it claims a year-on-year increase of 41 per cent in public devices, with 19,823 installed; so well done…

While this is a nascent industry struggling to find its place in the world and unsure how to sell branded volts, it’s interesting how France and Germany have been faster to get control over their charging industry including the state of readiness and pricing (high-current autoroute charging in France costs almost half the UK rate).

Still, there’s no substitute for shouting. One obstreperous charge-company PR phoned a motoring journalist friend a year ago to yell at him for not toeing the company line.

“Tell me, what network are you phoning me on,” asked my friend.

“Erm, I don’t know,” came the reply. “What’s the point of the question?”

The point had been made…

Never again?

My first visit to a petrol station since starting my Mustang trial will be next week when I’ll fill my Triumph motorcycle before a ride. There have been some high points in the past three months. The Ford has been reliable and nice to drive, although this hasn’t been the easiest or happiest of experiments.

Nor is it just us in the UK. A cautionary survey from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago found 47 per cent of US respondents think they’d be unlikely they’d go electric, while a recent McKinsey & Co survey found 46 per cent of current EV owners in the US would go back to a combustion engine at their next switch. Most respondents in both surveys cited charging as their main beef.

The Telegraph verdict

The late Tony Benn had five questions to address to democratic power:

What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you use it? To whom are you accountable? How do we get rid of you?

I’d suggest a similar set of questions to anyone shilling for EV cars, or the EV charging industry. They are: do you own your electric car and did you spend your own PAYE income on it without grant or tax incentives? Will you personally pay for any fall in resale values? Do you own or have access to a combustion-engined vehicle? Do you have access to off-street parking and a home wallbox? Do you or anyone close to you have a vested interest in talking up the EV industry?

If the answer to all of the above is no, then continue to listen. If not, grab the salt cellar and give your vacuum flask a rest.