Leeds to London in an Electric Car: Still Not Enough EV Chargers in 2024?

hello it's Martin from wisely Automotive with this BMW I3 which I just picked up fresh into stock it's a lovely example but this video will not be about the car it will be rather about the journey it was handed over to me with pretty much a full charge if I go into there you can see I still have about 95% left which the computer thinks is 188 miles it's quite nice and warm outside however I do have quite a long journey to the showroom almost 200 miles so I will ly need to charge at least once and that's what this video is all about it's a journey which we do very frequently it's basically the a1m from Newcastle all the way down towards London with the last bit done usually on the M11 the eveve infrastructure has come a long way in the UK in the last few months and lot of the sites along this major route have been upgraded so I will show you along there has been no planning this was a very last minute video a lot of our staff are on holiday at the moment so that's the reason why I'm picking this one up and I thought I would just take you along and show you how it goes in early 2024 so this is a good opportunity to show you the starting point which is fairy Bridge Services as you can see all the way at the other end of the car park that's what the old grid surf Chargers used to be like and now if I zoom out this is the current setup there's 12 of these brand new high power chargers each one fitted with a CCS plug a contactless card reader so you do not need to make an account or sign up to any apps to start charging and some of them also equipped with the Legacy chademo port for older EVS if you drive a Tesla there's also quite a few Tesla superchargers on the site as well all the actual power equipment is hidden here on the site if you have been here before you may remember that in this cleared out area there used to be a diesel power generator well in fact it wasn't a diesel generator I believe it ran on vegetable oil but it was providing temporary power to the brand new git serve s side here because there was delay with getting the high power grid connection set up no more time to waste I will just get going as you can see the car is saying that I do not have enough charge but I will not do any of the root planning like usual I will just drive and we will figure out everything along the way and just for the record yes if I go this way I will show you there were no cues whatsoever on the grid Surf Side and also on the Tesla side so that's all good also given it's quite warm I will run the air conditioning in automatic mode but I will just pop the car into e copr mode speaking of which I will also go into the trip computer and reset all of those values and the board computer here as well just so we can measure how efficient we are and how much the entire trip costs in the usual wisely Automotive fashion and that's it getting onto the A1 heading southbound and now I will just sit here and enjoy the journey this didn't last long I'm just passing Don cter and you will see hopefully on this camera that if I zoom out there is plenty of Rapid charges available in the the kind of donter City area but I don't feel like getting off the a1m so we will just keep pressing on and show you the next available charger right of the motorway or dual carriageway whatever this is classified as which would be blly Services BL or BL not quite sure but I'm a foreigner so I can get away with it so yeah I will just pop off the a him now to show you what the situation is like here obviously I don't need to charge I still have 159 mil exactly 80% in the battery and here we go I can see the Chargers lovely model 3 Highland I would definitely like to get hands on one of those so this is a similar setup to the other services where there are a couple of the Legacy medium power grid serve Chargers but if you go into this separate section in here then you have got the actual new git serve high power charger I will put on the screen how many because there are quite a few and you see all of them working no quue all of them with contactless payment just like the previous style we have seen and there's also I believe these are Tesla only V3 superchargers so see quite a few of those in here as well lovely this is how it should work so let's continue onwards yeah that's the ones in the left which you may have seen through the window they are those old ones which honestly I wouldn't bother with you using unless you are absolutely desperate there's a massive Q on the other ones but even then because they charge so much quicker the newer ones the Q usually moves quicker as well whereas the old ones they charge quite slowly to begin with usually about 60 Kow and that's if you're not sharing power with anyone next to you if you are sharing power then it would be something like 20 30 Kow really not suitable for modern day cars but yeah back on the a1m and I will just continue my journey at hopefully 70 mph has been quite slow going so far but the traffic is definitely freeing up I'm just passing elk asly and if you look very closely on my right there's a Starbucks and I believe there are yes four insta Vol Chargers in the car park these are only accessible if you are traveling Northbound but instav world is a very good Network definitely on the more expensive side of the spectrum but very reliable and they also all support contactless payment and actually I think with that particular side all of them are equipped with both chademo and CCS plugs but don't you worry because just a few miles south there is maram more and there's plenty of charging opportunities here so firstly you have got a similar Starbucks setup with chargers which are only accessible on the Southbound Route you may have spotted those through the window but if Starbucks is not your thing there's plenty of other options here as well I believe there's potentially a holiday in with a single BP pulls unit wouldn't bother with that instead if I go across this roundabout you've got these services oh and this is new so obviously the Chargers are not fitted yet but as you can see there is a huge canopy for Shell recharge units they will be up 250 KW according to the sign if you look out of the left window you've got two insta volts at McDonald's as well so as you can see plenty of choice and ride across the road there are some additional I believe shell recharge units you hopefully saw with your very own eyes no cues out of the car park plenty of availability overall and all of these also do support contactless payment one roundabout of the a1m there is this shell garage which supposedly has rapid Chargers I've never been here before and to be fair I don't even know exactly where I am so I will have to put this on the map so you can imagine what's happening and here is this charger a single lonely rapid unit which appears to be broken I told you we will be honest in this video and this is part part of the reality to be fair I'm not too shocked because with shell BP and all of these fossil fuel companies I think they would still rather sell you petrol and Diesel than electricity and you know having a charger on their for cord is just a dig box to say that they're actually trying to help the environment that's no problem however and from experience I would recommend avoiding sides which only have one charger because obviously if that one is occupied you are queuing and there's plenty of other options like for example nework services in in fact youve got two options the first one being the Tony owl pub with these two ospray units I believe they're only 50 KW but two of them both of them with ccs and tro it appears like they are operational yeah the screens are on the green lights are on they do support contactless payment as well and obviously it means that if you want to eat some proper food instead of fast food you've got the option of the nice Pub but if you're all about the charging speed instead you can just cross over the a 1M and that brings you to the actual welcome Brak Services which means you've got apple green Chargers so as you see basically Moto is partnering with grid service the charging provider with welcome break they brought the charging efforts in housee because they realized there's some money to be made and their brand is apple green all of them operational supporting contactless payment as well and as you can see 180 kilow each one being double-headed but they only support CCS so for for Cho users with older EES you will need to use the pub are you a moto funboy for Life instead well then we've got Grandam Services coming right up you probably know the drill by now 15 high power 350 KW grit serve rapid Chargers further down the services car park those are Tesla superchargers these are the version two so slightly slower than the previous ones we have seen but still we'll charge at about 120 150 Kow and there's 16 of them those are Tesla only plus the two Legacy grit serve ones which are slower but still maintained and operational and you can see it's all nicely labeled on the floor so you know what kind of charge to expect plus lastly a single lonely AC point so I suppose if you're traveling with a Zoe which doesn't support rapid charging you are covered as well but no cheating I'm parked over here not plugged in because I still have over 50% in the battery onward I'm not stopping here because I want to make some progress but are a hardcore McDonald's Fanboy instead well cerw worth there is a charger on the southbound side here at McDonald's you may be able to see through the window maybe not but they are indeed there I believe they are insta Vols beautiful to be fair the a1m is one of my favorite routs on the way down south I know it's not as fast as the M1 or any of the other motorways because especially in scenarios like this when the traffic is dense and you have got lores overtaking each other the second lane can clog up a little bit but the scenery is just so much nicer you've got the winding road instead of going just straight forever so yeah this is nice and the weather is fantastic let's see how are we doing in terms of efficiency 3.8 m per Kil so far not bad considering I was basically on cruise control locked in at 70 mph for most of the journey I'm pulling into beater brush Services H I haven't been here in a while so let's see EV charging left here these services are much busier than all the previous ones so I'm interested to see whether that's the case for the charging as well here we've got ionity chargers one of them is out of service and this one is occupied as well so let's see decisions to be made this is when it's worth knowing your options because at this end of the car park we have got the slightly older but perfectly suitable chargers for the I3 the git surf ones which if you were driving a take on this would really be not optimal but for an I3 this should do CCS start contactless payment and the power is now rumping up as you can see I still had 24% so I could have pushed it to the next toop but this way I know I can be comfortable I can be having the AC on as much as I want to I can be driving in 70 and not compromise on anything at all and I don't have to stress about whether the next Chargers are going to be free and fully working so now I actually need to use the bathroom so that's the reason why I really wanted to plug in here and I may grab some snacks it is delivering the full power like you would expect on the I3 doesn't quite reach 50 KW at low state of charge because it's limited by how much current the station can provide so this is all as expected needless to say the car can be locked while it's charging so you don't have to babysit it and by the time I got my McDonald's food it was already over half full it's very easy to monitor the progress on your phone so you don't have to keep popping out of the services to see that everything is going all right and how much charge you have left and if anything I have too much now basically 90% so stop £ 2147 we will add up the numbers when I get to the office and yeah it's definitely time to continue the range is showing 161 miles and if I look at the navig ation system all the way to the office it's only 92 Mi so I should have plenty of margin left and it usually tends to improve towards the end because obviously the last bit is through London which is lower speed the last option I want to show you is ionity at Cambridge Services as you can see the actual services are quite busy but there are still plenty of charging spots available with ioni they are slightly different Chargers to the other styles I have shown you they only feature the CCS plug so again older vehicles will need to use some of the older Legacy stations and when they were first introduced they were designed to be only operated through a mobile app or something like a membership RFID Card or alternatively you can do it through the web portal but ion has started retrofitting these with card readers it's a bit of a different setup because there's only one card reader for all of the Stalls but at least it does the job so if you don't have the app you just need to go into here and you s select which station you are charging on and that's how you activate the plug but if there is one provider's app to have on your phone it would be ionity it's very welld designed it shows you lots of details including stateof charge charging power Etc so even if you have car which doesn't offer all of the online connectivity like the I3 does you can still see how your charge is doing and it just makes the whole process easier especially if you are a company driver and need to invoice all of your expenses and these are the old grit serves not quite sure by the e is charging there will definitely be faster on ionity but hey ho actually I lied there is one more option just before London about 25 to 30 miles away which is birchanger green Services is a site many of our customers use when they are visiting us and want a quick top up before getting to our showroom it used to be a disaster back in the day because just a 7-minute drive about that way that stands to the airport so these two lonely grits Sur Chargers which again split power and don't charge particularly fast used to get overwhelmed by taxi drivers topping up between pickups but it's no longer an issue at all because just look at the situation there are 20 brand new Tesla V3 superchargers they are Tesla only but that's probably because there are the ones provided by the services which are apple green units for all other EVS eight of them in total each one supporting contactless payment for now you can also use their up and get a slight discount on the electricity and they do charge it up to 180 KW and look at this rare thing here wondering how many we will see of those on the road so with the actual last stop out of the way it's time to hop back onto the M11 and finish off the journey I will catch up with you in 34 Miles when I get to the office [Music] I've arrived back in the office so let's go inside and let's take a look at the numbers just over 22% still in the battery showing 52 miles as I mentioned because of the last stretch into London being quite slow and efficient so I definitely overcharged at Peter BR Services total distance covered 203 mies over which I 46.3 mph and 3.8 m per Kow hour as always I will put the energy conversions down below as well I also crunched the cost numbers so let's be very pessimistic and let's say that I left with 100% charge even though I left with about 95% let's say that there's about a 10% charging loss when you charge at home and the price is the price energy cap which we have here in the UK which has dropped compared to previously but it's still quite high at 24.5 P per Kow then I calculated it with the top up I only needed to charge to 66% to get here on fumes so as I said I definitely overcharged I only needed to stay for about 20 maybe 25 minutes maximum and that would have worked out for the total trip to cost just under £25 not bad in my eyes and if you wanted to get to the same cost in a petrol vehicle it would have needed to achieve about 55 m per gallon but it's not the costs which we wanted to focus on this video it's rather the convenient side of things because we often see people coming to us that they are concerned to jump into the world of electric Vehicles even though the car is actually perfectly suited for them but they read online or in the papers that Chargers are often broken there are long cues too expensive difficult to use Etc so I genuinely hope this video has shown how far we have come in the world of EVs and specifically the EV charging infrastructure here in the UK because truth to be told even though we still love the I3 it is very much designed as a city car first which can handle the occasional longer Journey because by modern EV standards it doesn't have the best range and it definitely doesn't charge the quickest especially if you compare it to the bigger EVS like for example these BMW i3s or any postar Tesla and so on but definitely don't assume that you have to go for an expensive Eevee to make longdistance travel easy for the same price as the I3 as long as you don't care about the badge and the character side of things there are two fantastic options which we retail very often and they are very popular in terms of how much range and efficiency you get for the money and those those are the renold zoy and the Hyundai Kona which would have actually probably completed this journey without having to stop at all but what I wanted to show is that even if you do have to stop it's really not that much of a hustle and there is so much Choice nowadays that if you just like to jump into a car and drive and stop at the services you like chances are they will have the Chargers you need to get topped up and I think that's about it obviously if you're new to EVS I would still recommend doing some research before jumping on a long trip just so you know what you're doing I will leave a video showing how we have compared a Tesla Moto 3 on a long trip compared to a petrol equivalent car and the results May shock you if you want to see more EV content definitely make sure to subscribe if you're in the market for one get in touch thank you for watching and we will see you in the next one

Channel: Wisely Automotive

Views: 11,432

Keywords: BMW i3, electric car, EV, infrastructure, charging, station, hub, travel, review, vlog, Leeds, London, A1(M), M11, IONITY, Gridserve, Tesla, Supercharger, Osprey, Instavolt, cost

Id: MmYxq090yKk

Length: 18min 53sec (1133 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 19 2024