Month: April 2022

I bought a plug-in hybrid car a year ago with the idea that I would get used to charging it and using public charging points before going to a full EV. I think I am ready after a year and I will move to a full EV when I replace the car, but I do wonder why it has to be so complicated. I mostly use public EVs at our second home in Northumberland as I have a home charging point in our main home. There are several places with charging points and each one has a different way of paying. Each has its own phone app and there are 3 different ways of paying. For one you have to set up a Direct Debit. For another you have to register a credit card. The third way is that you have to pre-pay into a wallet on the app, so they always have some of your money! We have invented a neat way of paying for other things, the contactless payment card. Why on earth do we have to fiddle about with apps when we could just swipe our card.

The apps make it unecessarily complicated. Last year the most convenient public charging point was unusable for days, they had “technical problems with the app” for about a week. Now, they have been taken over by a different company so I have to go to a completely new app. It is absolutely ridiculous.

If we want EVs to take off, we need to make it as easy to charge an EV as it is to buy petrol.

Last week I drove along a road that was just wide enough for two cars to pass. Each side had a cycle path marked on the road, taking about 40% of the road on each side. It was not possible to drive a car without the nearside wheels being positioned in the centre of the cycle path. I wondered why they had bothered to mark the cycle path as I could see no difference for the motorist or the cyclist whether the cycle path was there or not. Indeed I have seen many examples of daft cycle paths recently as local councils rush to create more. I presume that they have a target for this and money to spend, so that is what they do: paint some lines on the road and claim a new cycle path. Tick. Targets met. Who cares about whether it makes any difference whatsoever to the cyclist or motorist. It would be a lot better for cyclist if the money was spent filling in the many potholes which are such a danger rather than wasting it on useless white-line painting.