Electric road trips in UK: Cleaner than fossil fuels, and plenty of charging options

It wasn’t the numbers, or the price per kilowatt hour that took me by surprise, it was the fact that the prices were in pounds, and not dollars. The first fast charger we had come across in our electric car rental in the UK wanted 65p for a kilowatt hour of electricity to put into the car battery!

You’ve got to be joking, we thought. That’s nearly $A1.40/kWh!

And then I looked over at the petrol pumps on the other side of the service station, More than £1.80 a litre for petrol, £)1.90 for diesel ($A3.40). That made me feel a bit better, because it was pretty much the same ratio of cost of fast charging and the price of fuel in Australia.

In England, you just need to substitute pound signs for the dollar to get the same answer as you get in Australia – charging an electric vehicle is cheaper than filling up a fossil fuel car, even at fast chargers. It’s just that in the UK, with the possibility exception of Cornish pasties, everything is that much more expensive.

The truth is that I shouldn’t have had to pay anything at all. We had picked up a rental EV – a Polestar 2 – at Heathrow and were headed to Bath, and had decided to pull in for a snack, saw the charging stations and thought what the heck, why not plug in.

But the introductory deal being offered by the rental car company at the time – Hertz – was for free charging at certain Shell branded EV chargers. Next time we needed topping up we made sure to do without having to pay. There is a reward, sometimes, to being an early adopter. It’s worth watching out to see if such offers are repeated.

EVs are pretty much everywhere in Europe. The share of full electric vehicles in new car sales across the continent is now above 14 per cent, and there are more than 600,000 full battery electric cars in the UK alone.

You see them on the roads as private vehicles, as taxis – particularly in London – and now they are becoming a growing part of rental car offerings.

Hertz, for instance, has put in an order for 65,000 Polestar 2s for its rental fleet across the world, including in Australia.

Other rental companies are doing the same. When you walk into the Hertz rental centre at Heathrow, the only cars you see are Polestar, and Tesla Model 3s and Model Ys. The fossil fuel offerings have been relegated deeper into the parking lot.

Renting EVs on holidays is a pretty good option for those interested in electric vehicles. Most existing EV owners prefer to avoid hopping back into a petrol or diesel car if they can avoid it, particularly on holidays – unless you really have to cover long distances with limited time, and in an area poorly served by EV chargers. But is that a holiday?

In Europe, for instance, there’s rarely that much distance to cover, and usually plenty of charging locations. In Australia, undertaking a long road trip in anything other than a Tesla requires precision planning, because Tesla is the only network with multiple and well place charging stations.

In Europe, it’s not an issue. They’ve had a good think about EV charging needs before selling too many non Tesla EVs. And in a continent where the percentage of EVs in new car sales is so high, it is not hard to find an electric option at rental companies.

For EV novices, an EV rental it is a great introduction to the technology. You can discover, at no real additional cost, if you actually enjoy the silence, the instant torque and the lack of tailpipe emissions. You get to try before you buy.

And in a country like the UK, there is no reason for range anxiety. The distances are not huge, and there are plenty of charging options – a mix of highway fast and super-fact charging, slower AC charging sprinkled around shopping centres, and of course trickle charging wherever you find an available power socket, particularly where you are staying with relatives (see pic below).

We did a mixture of all three. We drove from Heathrow to Bath to Cornwall, back through Devon, and Somerset, and then on to Kent and back to London – dropping in to see places where we had grown up decades earlier, and relatives we hadn’t seen for ages.

We’ve done a lot of driving in an EV – we’ve done nearly 100,000kms in our own Model 3, and hired them on holidays, once with a Nissan Leaf and another time with a long-range Model 3. And before the UK journey, we had done the same in France with a rented electric Peugeot e-208.

It’s the peace and quiet that appeals most, engine noise and emissions add to stress you don’t want or need when you are trying to wind down on a holiday.

EVs are easy on the highway and fun on hilly, winding and mountain roads, but what I hadn’t appreciated before was how good they were on the narrow country lanes that dominate the UK road map.

In Cornwall, there seems to be nothing else other than narrow country lanes, often lined with stoned walls, once you leave the main roas. We stayed near St Just on the north coast and the local roads there are very narrow and very windy.

In an EV, you can wind down the window and not be troubled by the noise of your own motor, because it doesn’t make a sound.

And because driving down narrow country lanes requires a lot of slowing down, and taking care in blind corners less a tractor suddenly appear, and picking up speed when you can see some open road in front of you, the one pedal driving that is a feature of electric cars with regenerative braking, makes it ideal.

If you do have to stop and wait for some one to go by, then it’s a peaceful way to do it. Horses and their rides are not bothered by the engine noise, because there isn’t any. And it’s an enjoyable talking point, such as at the Tinner’s Arms in Zennor, where we shared EV yarns with a delicious fish pie and fresh muscles.

As for charging, most of it was done with fast and ultra fast chargers. And most of these were found close to the highway and located in or near existing petrol stations.

We only had to queue on one occasion, and that was only because the people in front of us weren’t sure how to use the equipment. But it wasn’t for long.

We “trickle charged” a couple of times, but that was only when we were staying at the homes of friends and relatives. The hotels and AirBNBs we came across were generally not equipped to do this, although it wouldn’t take much to do so.

We didn’t come across any charging stations that were out of order, which was both a surprise and a relief, although we did have to download a whole bunch of different apps to unlock various chargers. And all the information you need is easily identified by the electronic maps and routing provided on the screens in the EVs themselves.

Happily, there was no evidence of “icing” – where a fossil fuel vehicle driver decides he is entitled to park where others need to charge. That may be because the local authorities appear to be serious about handing out fines to those that do.

All in all, like our earlier trip to the south of France, it was great being able to drive an EV on holiday, and not have to pump fossil fuels into the car.

It seemed to us that the EVs were more expensive to rent on a daily or weekly rate. But the difference is not great, and much of it, if not all, can be made up with cheaper charging costs. And, in the UK and Europe, driving an EV means you can go into areas like central London without paying a congestion tax, and into areas where fossil fuel cars are now banned.

See also Try before you buy: Car rental market could be launch pad for EV adoption

(Note: The author’s EV rental costs, but not its charging costs, were met by Hertz).