My plan is in tatters even before we set off from Dublin on a nervy cross-country drive in an electric vehicle that may or may not get us to a family wedding in Delphi, Co Mayo, on time.
“Why don’t you charge the car overnight?” my wife suggests, sensibly.
Favouring Netflix over a late-evening drive to the only public charging point close to home, I have come up with a better plan. As we are not heading west until the next afternoon, we will have six hours of daytime to get the battery to 100 per cent before hitting the road.
“We’ll be grand,” I assure her.
I understood her suspicious eyes. This time last year, heading to another family wedding, also in the west, I said much the same thing, and five of us ended up changing into our wedding finery in the car at an Ennis petrol station as we waited for an overly leisurely woman to finish charging her car so we could get enough juice into ours to cover the last 30km of the journey.
“No, honestly, tomorrow will be grand,” I repeat. “There’ll be no stress.”
I live in a Dublin 7 terrace with on-street parking and can only dream of the luxury of a dedicated parking space to charge my car at discounted night-time rates, so instead I pay almost three times more than my driveway-owning peers for the public charging point a kilometre away.
The cost of just over 400km is about €40 – cheaper than petrol or diesel but by no means cheap. Not only do I pay more for my car’s energy because we have no driveway, I also pay more than €10 for parking for each three-hour block spent at any charging point.
It’s absurd and a slap in the face for anyone who chooses to buy the cars we are told are the future. But I have become wearily accustomed to the unfairness in the two years I have owned my EV.
And that’s not even the worst of it. Other drivers are the worst of it.
[ Ireland is second most expensive for EV charging in Europe, says reportOpens in new window ]
I am chipper as I make my way to the charging point the following morning. Then disaster strikes. A non-EV driving clown has blocked the charging spaces on the street – an all-too-common occurrence.
I fume silently while searching for other options. I live in one of the most densely populated parts of Ireland, where almost every EV driver has only on-street parking but there are just a handful of public chargers within a 2km radius of me.
They all offer slow charges and it takes at least six hours to go from zero to the slightly over 400km my full battery gives me. And right now they’re all occupied apart from the ones I can’t use because of the clown’s car.
Eventually he returns and drives off oblivious to my glowering. I still have time, though.
With the car charging, I walk home doing sixth-class sums: “If there’s 100km of juice in a car charging at a rate of 60km an hour, how long must it be plugged in to get a driver 273km to Co Mayo? Please allow for the fact that if you turn on the air-conditioning, the heat or the window demister or are travelling in a stop start fashion along a bumper-to-bumper motorway at rush hour, the promised range may be a way off.”
Five hours. That’s the answer.
So 4½ hours later we set off to cover 273km with just under 400km in the car.
A detour is needed to pick children up from an out-of-the-way school and by the time we are on the road there’s around 375km of battery left and 275km to travel.
We make a pit stop in Enfield because a small child in the back “really, really needs to pee”. There’s a charging point at the service station – not something commonly found on Irish forecourts – so even though we have only travelled 50km and the car has just under 320km left in it with 223km still to travel, I figure we might as well plug it in as we have restorative coffees/ice creams.
There are two charging sockets but one doesn’t work with our model of EV and the other is annoyingly, if fittingly, occupied by a Green Party politician. I know her allegiances because her car has her face plastered all over it.
The Popes loiter for a bit to see if the Green might set off on the campaign trail but she has settled in, so we leave.
As my wife drives, I keep an eye out for charging points – on motorway signs and the app. There aren’t many.
A crash in Longford sees traffic backed up and, with the engine idling and the heat on – it’s May but not warm – the battery drains and, with 150km to go, the range is down to about 190km.
We should still make it but it’s not as comfortable as I had hoped.
[ High-powered electric vehicle chargers planned every 60km on motorways, says RyanOpens in new window ]
As the sun goes down on Clew Bay, we arrive in Westport and are delighted to see on the ESB app two sets of charging points nearby. The first set is occupied by a non-EV car (rage) so we head to one in a hotel car park. It’s free.
“Oh my God, it’s a fast charger,” my wife exclaims like she’s just seen a unicorn cantering through the town. The difference between the slow chargers of Stoneybatter and the fastest ones in the west are enormous. We plug in and go for dinner and, by the time we are finished, the battery’s full again. It’s something we could only dream of closer to home.
The full battery gets us to our Airbnb and on to to Belmullet – a full two-hour drive away – shortly after dawn, where another child is being picked up from Irish college ahead of the wedding.
That journey takes the range back to under 200km but 30 minutes in the fast-charging unicorn in Westport and it’s nearly full again.
We drive to the wedding in Delphi where – miraculously – there’s another charger so, while dancing the night away drains the Popes’ batteries, the car is at full strength.
Another meal in Westport with the car attached to the fast charger means we can head from west to east fully juiced. There are no pit or pee stops or accidents or rush-hour traffic, so we fly home and pull up outside my house with 80km left in the battery.
In total we have covered 886km and, had I been driving a petrol car it would have cost about €100, but I paid just under €75.
The savings would – and should – have been bigger if public charging points, particularly fast chargers, weren’t so wildly overpriced or if I had the capacity to charge at home.
But, price aside, the emissions are less and the drive is nowhere near as stressful as it might have been. Range anxiety is diminishing but infrastructural anxiety is not. That’s the real problem and it must be tackled if the Government is even remotely serious about the EV targets it has set.
That seems like a big if.
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