babY steps

We're now on our second electric vehicle (see previous post before I started this blog), but have not really put the UK charging network to the test, never straying far enough away from home to worry about having to rely on charging somewhere strange. Today, that changed...

We have an MG ZS EV with a theoretical range of 155 miles, maximum charge tends to be 144 or 142. We picked this one because it is technically in "there and back again" range of Dave's parents, but our most recent visit, being pretty much 2 years since we last saw them, we didn't want to risk it.
However, we were planning to visit my sister (100 miles away) and thought this might be a less stressful opportunity to test the UK charging network. I spent a fair bit of time on ZapMap looking not only at charger locations, but success rates and feedback comments. The route planner in the app is pretty good - easily as good as Google Maps, but more focussed on the particular need of EV charging points - so showing charging points along the route. I filtered for 50 kW CCS so as not to see absolutely everything. First thought was - Milton Keynes is the charging centre of the universe! There are loads of charging points along the H8 (Standing Way - main E/W route across the south of the city). The problem with MK is it's too close to home to make it worthwhile, so I looked further along the route and settled on a supermarket site about 9 miles short of our destination and in one of those places where you can go inside and say "hey, the charging point isn't working" or "can you ask the car blocking the charging point to move please?", rather than a random council car park somewhere. Having settled on the target charging point, I installed the relevant app (GeniePoint) and loaded some credit on to the account, and felt well prepared for our eastward journey.
We left on Saturday morning with a fully charged car (144 miles) and was keeping an eye on distance travelled vs range, and were coming out generally on the positive side with, for example, 30 miles gone, 26 miles used, sort of thing. We had the option up to 77 miles remaining to bug out and go home, but we got to that point and were then committed.
We arrived at our charging destination and found the supermarket, but then had to find the charge points in the rather large car park. Not only did we find the charger, but both parking spots (and most of that section of the car park!) were empty. So we parked up, found the CCS lead and plugged it in, having read the instructions on the tower. I started the app, waited for it to fire up, then excitedly pressed the "start charge" button.
Nothing happened.
After several more attempts, it opened a "chargers near me" page, but listed nothing. I pressed the "show more locations" button and was getting the haptic feedback that the link had been pressed, but with no result. Eventually we got to a list of chargers - the one we were standing within 6 feet of at the top of the list - but again, we couldn't persuade the app that we wanted to select that charger. We finally managed to select the charge location, picked the CCS charger and hit go... then you could click the "start charge" button, and got a 120 second countdown while the charger talked to the car. Kept getting "Unable to connect. There were 2 errors" but no indication as to what the errors were. We tried this multiple times (at least half a dozen) and were on the point of giving up. One last attempt. I unplugged and reseated the lead in the MG, unlocked it, locked it again and while trying to persuade the app to do something, the tower suddenly started sounding like it was preparing for lift off. The light on the side turned blue and we thought, the car might actually be charging. We didn't dare unlock the car to check, because we were under the impression that you couldn't charge if the car was unlocked. We decided to go and buy lunch in the supermarket and give it half an hour to see what happened...
We came back and the charging tower was still making a godawful noise, emitting warm air from the back, and the cable was warm, so we were hopeful something was going on. I unlocked the car and turned it on, to see that the dashboard indicated we were charging - hurrah! I opened the app again, and noticed an extra window that hadn't been there before that was supposed to show cumulative kW/H charged, duration of charge, cost and a big "Stop" button. Tried that... after a haptic bump it changed to "sent", then nothing happened. Tried it again, same result. So how do we leave? You can't disconnect the power lead when it's charging, and we coudn't stop it. At that point, Dave hit the big red emergency stop button on the front of the tower, and it shut down. We could disconnect the car, and while Dave reset the tower (I suspect that some of the people who hadn't been able to charge at that station in the ZapMap comments may have been following someone who'd done the emergency stop and a runner directly afterwards!) I prepared to leave. When we got back in the car we checked the range, and it was up to 135 miles, so we must have picked up 60 miles on that charge. There was no sign on the app that any charges had been applied to my account.
We went merrily on our way, confident that we had enough go-juice to complete our round trip.
When we arrived at our destination we were invited to make a side trip, but declined on the grounds we didn't have enough range (and didn't really want to charge again - far too stressful!). On our way home, the satnav sent us a different (longer) route and it included roads that had been built within the last year (therefore the satnav didn't know about them, or how long they were...) so we were getting apprehensive that our "there and back again" calculations were about to be thrown into chaos. We were still in net plus range (but only by ~11 miles) so avoiding hard acceleration and coasting downhill (which tbh, I'd been doing anyway) became the norm. I also dropped to try to maintain our speed somewhere between 55 and 65. We got to the point where we did turn off the aircon, which didn't make much difference, but turning off the fan gave us an extra 5 or 6 miles. However, the M40 played its part with slow traffic up to getting on, the whole M40 segment and then the main road back down was crawling, so the chance of expending excess energy was nil. We even got cocky enough to turn the aircon/fan back on (it was sunny by then!).
Got home with 16 miles to spare. Oh yes, and I had an email receipt for a charge of £6.60 for 18.87 kW/h applied over a 41 minute charge period.
After working out the route and doing the maths, we are confident that the range on the MG is pretty accurate, so hopefully, we can leave the aircon on next time!