With all due respect, I disagree with you on this.
I actually some what agree with Geoff and Lee, If we set the stage to be as is and not take precautions to even the playing field EVs are shit in Britain. If we on the other hand is some what sensible and change the narrative a bit we would reach both the same and another conclusions.
As in the roadtrip mentioned the Ev should have been charged at arrival or through the night, as an EV owner that do long trips this is an absolute must do and have to be planned in to the trip. But and this is a big but, the test as done is a walid side by side comparision.
To be clear, EVs in Britain is shit because of your useless government the last 13 years or so, whom have not prepeared the energy situation and fast charging capacity. Compared to Norway Britain is a laughin stock when it comes to provision for fast charging so that you can make longer car journeys with an EV with the number of EVs you have on your roads these days.
Therefore you have to plan longer trips with EV not only in terms of where you will charge, but also when you make the trip. In practice, this more often than not reduces the experience of longer journeys with an EV to a negative experience compared to an ICE car on busy days.
If one see it on the practical side, most journeys are short and as long your EV is normaly operated inside its homecharge range it wil be fine. Infact much better than a ICE in day to day use, so one have to be conscious of what one expects the car should do for you to be happy about it.
For my own part I've got my old ICE, a diesel I drive most days to keep the km down on the MG4 (because I have a tendency to drive the MG4 a bit to much
) and am happy with using both of them.
I agree with a lot of what you say, but still stand by my position. What you say is very much what I said in the comments. The issue is not that "Electric cars are shit" - in Britain or anywhere else. The issue is that
the public charging network in Britain is shit, and that is not the fault of the cars, it is the fault of the government, fair and square.
What I take issue with is the overall thrust of the message, which is that THE CARS THEMSELVES ARE SHIT and nobody should ever buy one. Also, that because an EV is not as good as an ICE car
in certain specific situations, then an EV is good for nothing and nobody should ever buy one. Also, that because there are certain problems that have not yet been solved, that affect certain uses, EVs can never be good for anything and the whole idea should be abandoned.
If the point of the videos was to criticise the public charging network and so prompt the government into doing something, I'd be more or less behind them. But it's not. The point is to stop the change from ICE cars to EVs, full stop, by smearing EVs. Not to make things better for EVs, but to kill them.
Horses for courses, as they say. If your daily requirement involves long motorway journeys under time pressure, do not buy an EV. Ditto towing caravans. But that pair act as if long motorway journeys and towing caravans are essential for everyone. You get the occasional throwaway line about "well, maybe they're OK for people who can charge at home and don't do a high mileage" (usually expressed as "just drive to the shops once a week", as if that's all you can do with a 200-mile range), but in a tone of voice that implies that's only a small group of really sad people, not actually most of the motoring public.
The EV was never going to beat that diesel. (Although bear in mind that the Volvo Geoff was going to use broke down the day before the challenge and the EV would have won by default if he hadn't bought another car.) Even a Tesla was going to have its work cut out beating that diesel, if Geoff was prepared to do some serious endurance driving and just
not stop. But that's not the way people normally drive these distances. A half-hour break every two or three hours is recommended to avoid driving fatique. The thing about EVs is they force these breaks, rather than allowing drivers in a hurry to skip them.
The issue is the charging network, not the cars. But even there, Lee deliberately chose the worst, the most inconvenient, the most time-wasting chargers, when there were better alternatives pretty much every time. I know the roads and the chargers in the north of England and the south of Scotland, and I could see what he was doing. And I've only had my car 7 months!
After saying he had a plan, and even saying some sensible things about not stopping between charges and charging 10% to 80% and going for Ionity chargers if possible, he actually wandered around at random, not apparently even knowing whether there
were chargers where he was stopping, never mind what type, and often stopping at random places at a high SoC. He spent ages faffing around at the old un-upgraded Gridserves at Southwaite, where he would only have got 50 Kw if he had got on. In fact there is a site with 12 new 350 Kw Ionitys only 12 miles further on, which he ignored. When he gave up at Southwaite, he drove right past them and went on to Gretna - where he chose the small Ionity installation over by the hotel, and ran into more trouble, rather than the 12 new Applegreens in the main car park.
Killington Lake, on the way south, was a complete farce. That is the service station I always liked to stop at with my ICE cars. It's 120 miles on my way south, a couple of hours drive, just right for lunch. So I thought that's where I'd stop with my EV. Oh no, says ABRP. Go to Porsche Centre South Lakes. No, I said, I want lunch in the Roadchef, not to sit in the middle of a wet field beside a car showroom for half an hour. Lay me a course for Killington Lake! OK, said ABRP, but if you do that you will have to stay there for 2 hours 5 minutes.
I looked at the chargers, and ABRP had them rated at only 40 Kw - and you could see that on Lee's phone. (ZapMaps has them at only 25 Kw - almost unheard of for a CCS charger.) That was fair warning. I had 450 miles to go, that was no use. But I still wanted lunch. I looked around some more and found a new 125 Kw Instavolt charger at Greenland's Farm shop, just a couple of miles past the Porsche Centre, and settled on that. The Porsche Centre was my backup charger but I didn't need it, I got the Instavolt. I was only going to visit friends, not racing a diesel car while being filmed for YouTube, and I'd only had my EV for four months, but even I could figure that one out.
They chose Killington Lake for their overnight stop. (Of course, loads of people have done the whole trip in EVs in a single day, starting very early, but they were going to waste so much time that wasn't going to be possible.) Normally one would try to find a hotel with overnight type 2 charging, but failing that, actually Killington Lake was paradoxically not a bad choice. The very slow chargers don't matter if you're staying the night.
So what did Lee do? He parked up without going near the chargers, and the pair of them went off to Kendal for a meal in a restaurant. Leaving the Porsche sitting empty and not charging. Then they came back and went to bed, again without attempting to put the Porsche on charge. In the morning, when they were ready to go, Lee says, better just charge the car. Then they "discovered" the extremely low charge rate, and that it would be lunchtime before the car was charged. After sitting around for some time watching the glacially slow charge rate, Lee suddenly "remembered" the Porsche Centre about 15 miles away, where he is seen charging in one of his earlier videos, and the pair removed themselves over there, having a browse round the car showroom while the Taycan charged. I don't suppose they got going much before lunchtime.
When asked why he hadn't charged earlier at Killington Lake, Lee protested that he couldn't have left the car on a charger overnight, because what if someone had come in during the night desperate for a charge? He ignored the comments saying that he should have charged the car while they went to dinner - the timing would have been about right. Finally he bleated "I was tired and just wanted to go to bed!" So much for being determined to win this important race. In fact there are
three CCS connectors there. He could have sat all night on one of them and still left two for any unfortunate who had turned up during the night desperate for a charge, and was unaware of better, faster alternatives nearby.
I could go on, but this is well beyond tl;dr already. This is just a sample, it was like that all the way through.
If the point had been to show that motorway service stations have not all been upgraded as they should have been, and that finding the most appropriate charger can be hard for drivers unwise to the ways of ZapMaps and ABRP, that might have been fair. But this was supposed to be a race Lee had prepared for, and to show the
best that an experienced and well-prepared EV driver could do. The implication was that it's this bad for everyone all the time, and that nothing can possibly be done about it, and that their trip has just "KILLED the electric car for EVer!!"
It's pernicious nonsense.
