Should motorway charging points all be rapid chargers?

[KasEV]

Hi Folks,
My wife's 700 mile round trip is underway and her feed back so far is rather disheartening. Most rapid chargers are not working along her route into Cornwall and there are long queues to use the few working rapid chargers. She also had a rather unpleasant conversation with a service provider at one of the charging points who did not realise that fast chargers are actually relatively slow and rapid chargers are faster but not quick. The reason being the service provider was asking them to move on after 30min on a fast charger and he could not understand when he was told that his fast charger was actually slow and it would that upto 4 or more to top up to eighty percent.
I think there should be a campaign for all chargers at service stations on the motorway to be rapid chargers. And for all such service stations to have at least 8 rapid charging spaces and 2 fast chargers. What do you think?

 

[Kithmo]

Although it doesn't affect me, I totally agree, they should all be rapids, fast chargers are a waste of time on long journeys, unless they're at your destination. It's going to get worse as more people move over to EVs, the government should be doing more to build up the infrastructure, especially as they're going to eventually ban the sale of new ICE cars soon. Credit to your wife for attempting the journey, I hope she gets sorted without having to resort to staying overnight somewhere.

 

[Nibloprice]

Thats sounds very annoying. We went down to cornwall a few weekends ago, and didnt have to wait at either place we stopped at. Although one was 9pm so that probably makes a difference. There was one Rapid charger at Gordano north (next to a fast charger). Next to a bank of 8 Tesla chargers...

 

[Mgkev]

From my research via various media , Motorway services “ Ecotricity” chargers are rubbish and can’t be relied upon. M27 has 1 charger each way and is often out of service according to Zap-Map. Best to come off the motorway and use a local item.
What ags me is that Tesla has banks of chargers like a fuel station and all other EV drivers get one or two.

 

[Stuart Wright]

Hi Folks,
My wife's 700 mile round trip is underway and her feed back so far is rather disheartening. Most rapid chargers are not working along her route into Cornwall and there are long queues to use the few working rapid chargers. She also had a rather unpleasant conversation with a service provider at one of the charging points who did not realise that fast chargers are actually relatively slow and rapid chargers are faster but not quick. The reason being the service provider was asking them to move on after 30min on a fast charger and he could not understand when he was told that his fast charger was actually slow and it would that upto 4 or more to top up to eighty percent.
I think there should be a campaign for all chargers at service stations on the motorway to be rapid chargers. And for all such service stations to have at least 8 rapid charging spaces and 2 fast chargers. What do you think?

What is the route? I'm confident that you could use Zap-Map to plan a route with rapid chargers along the way.

There is no point in there being any Fast charge points along a motorway unless there is something to do there for a few hours. And if you're at a stop on a journey where you just want to charge the car and go, you should never bother using them.
The Ecotricity chargers at motorway service stations are reliably unreliable and today I drove from Birmingham to Heathrow and back and never even looked at the service stations as options.
BP Chargemaster are locating new chargers at convenient points along the motorway network, so instead, I planned the route with their Polar chargers as a preference. The rapid at The Holiday Inn, High Wycombe wasn't working, so instead I used the backup, just a mile away at The Blacksmith Arms Harvester to put 40 miles in going down and 100 miles in coming back. I was fairly confident that nobody was going to be using those chargers at 5:30am and 8:30am, but I built an extra 30 minutes into the journey time just in case. It wasn't needed.