An Electric Car Road Trip in the Scottish Highlands

This year, with covid travel restrictions changing daily, my usual family holiday in the sun looked trickier than ever so we opted for a much in-vogue ‘staycation’. Destination of choice: the Scottish Highlands. The only potentially complicating factor was that I am currently driving an electric car – a rather lovely Jaguar all-electric I-PACE. As the majesty of the Scottish landscape is matched by its scale, long drives were going to be inevitable. Would an electric car (or EV – electric vehicle) be up to the task?

1. The Itinerary

Owning an electric car requires a certain amount of day-to-day planning, a problem if you are the spontaneous sort. If you are caught short of battery charge before a journey, this cannot be fixed by a quick visit to a petrol station. This is even more true when setting off on a long road trip. In this case, our itinerary was to take us from home in Reading (30 miles west of London) to Fort Augustus on the shores of Loch Ness and then on to Oban, on the west coast of Scotland.

Excluding day trips and expeditions from our two bases, this represented a round-trip of over 1,200 miles. Given that the real-world range of the I-PACE is about 250 miles, clearly a lot of charging would be involved. To this aim, I found the Zap-Map app invaluable for route planning. It provided by far the most reliable list of public charge point locations and their most recent usage and availability status, and was to prove a trusty companion.

2. Motorways – Too few, too slow

As I didn’t quite fancy taking in a twelve-hour drive in one stint, we planned an overnight stop-over in Glasgow, and booked a night at the Crowne Plaza which boasted two 22kW chargers in its car park. Zap-Map recommended a stop on the M6 north of Manchester and a quick top-up at the rapid chargers just across the border at Gretna Green, and so we set off.

On our way north, we easily found a 50kW charging station on the M6, south of Manchester, which topped up the car nicely while scoffing down a fast-food lunch. We then stopped at Gretna services, just across the Scottish border, where we got to enjoy the only truly rapid 100kW charging experience of our journey.

Although I was able to find a free charger in all my stops, I couldn’t help but feel that I was quite lucky. At one motorway services, I got to the last available bay just before an Audi e-Tron, which then had to wait for an hour until I vacated the bay. Despite my luck, charging provision at motorway service stations seemed rather thin on the ground.

3. Scotland – Quite a Pleasant Surprise

An overnight stop and charge in Glasgow saw us finally get to our destination at Fort Augustus the following day, courtesy of a glorious drive by Loch Lomond and Glen Coe. I had a slight sense of dread about what lay ahead for us, at least from a charging experience. I needn’t have worried. Most towns and stop-over points in the Highlands hosted public charging points, either in public car parks, cafe’s or hotels, courtesy of ChargePlace Stotland. This is a Scottish Government owned-initiative that is seeing an EV charging network rolled out throughout the country, funded through a series of grants from local authorities. There is a clear intent to ensure that all main east-west and north-south routes as well as tourist spots are catered for.

So for example, Oban, a small seaside resort which is a popular stop-off for the Western Isles, hosts a (rather rusty) 50kW charger at the ferry terminal, and a couple more charging units in the town-centre car park. While we enjoyed a rather wonderful afternoon tea at the Real Food Cafe at the entrance to the magnificent Glen Coe, the car was taking in electric charge from a rapid charger on site. Likewise, Inverary, on the coast of Loch Fyne is also equipped with a rapid charging point in its main car park.

This meant that even though neither of the self-catering places we stayed at were equipped with EV charging points, I was never unduly concerned about running out of charge. I could simply use the public charging points nearby or simply top-up at any of our day-trip destinations and get on and enjoy our holiday.

4. Edinburgh – An EV Charging Black Hole

Our electric car bliss came to an abrupt end on the return journey. I was now feeling so confident about the ease with which we could find charging points, that I had given up planning for our return trip, which included a day of sight-seeing in Edinburgh. Having dropped off our suitcases at our city-centre hotel, I then launched Zap-Map, and looked for the nearest charging points. What followed was a two hours’ wild goose chase, hunting down charging points that were either non-existent, restricted for University or Scottish Government employees, or otherwise inaccessible. The Scottish capital was hardly a showcase for EV charging access – no roadside chargers, most accessible for exclusive use by various public bodies, none whatsoever in car parks, other than in Fountain Place, a leisure and retail centre.

In Summary – Too Good to be True?

I was pleasantly surprised by the ease with which my I-PACE dealt with our Scottish Highlands road trip. Apart from the last day, I was never unduly worried that I would not be able to charge my car. As we were on holiday, it was usually straightforward to plan our charging stops around our itinerary, such as charging in a public car park while enjoying a meal out. The extent of our inconvenience stemmed from the buggy nature of many of the public charging points and the apps. I came across inoperable or otherwise not fully functioning charge points way too often, and this is something that the industry really needs to address. Otherwise, we were able to enjoy hassle-free, low-emissions road trip.

But were we lucky? Was this the sort of experience that Britain’s growing population of electric car owners can expect? Wherever I went, there didn’t seem to be too much competition for charging bays, and the relatively thinly spread infrastructure seemed to be generally adequate. This left a niggling doubt. Would things get worse or better as the country hurtles towards mass low-emissions motoring?

As very few chargers are faster that 50kW (around 4% according to Zap-Map), most cars will require an hour or more to top up. Given that most motorway services have between two and six charging bays, and, as an example, there are on average 56,000 car journeys on the M6, it felt to me that any significant increase in electric car usage would severely strain the charging infrastructure.

So I decided to look at the numbers. According to the SMMT, the UK’s automotive industry body, the number of electric cars on UK roads is expected to increase 10 fold from 192,000 in 2020 to just under 2m in 2025. What would this mean for public charging? Already looking at the number of electric cars per public charge point, this has decreased from around 5 in 2016 to 14 cars per charge point. This is a case of a rapidly growing number of cars chasing a limited number of charge points.

At the current rollout rate, by 2025 there will be 30 cars chasing each public charging point. Indeed, the UK’s Climate Change Committee estimates that 30,000 new public chargers a year would be required in order to meet the UK’s carbon emissions commitments. Given that there are just over 25,000 public charge points in the UK, this feels like a tall order, so I can’t help but feel that as more people buy electric cars, the public charging experience is about to get a lot worse. Perhaps in future years, 2021 may be seen as the best experience an electric car driver could get for a while.

Likes

1. The smug feeling that your holiday has a relatively small carbon footprint
2. The joys of truly fast charging – in excess of 100kW – few and far between, but these make EV ownership a doddle
3. Surprise at finding ChargePlace Scotland charging points in the most unpredictable places
4. Delighted by the accuracy of the I-PACE range prediction

Dislikes

1. On-the-fly route planning would be difficult without a passenger to check Zap-Map
2. EV Chargers where there are not enough parking bays to match the number of connectors available
3. The general poor quality of publich charging apps, including those by BP Pulse, Ionity and ChargePlace Scotland
4. The depressing regularity with which I came across faulty charge points
5. Antisocial drivers who hog charging bays with their diesel/petrol cars due to their convenient location

References

1. Department for Transport, Road Traffic Statistics https://roadtraffic.dft.gov.uk/downloads
2. EV Charging Stats 2021 – https://www.zap-map.com/statistics/
3. Climate Change Committee, Sixth Carbon Budget https://www.theccc.org.uk/publication/sixth-carbon-budget/

Notes

• From junctions 21 to 22 – average daily traffic in 2019