Electric vehicles – the long haul

Sir, – With great excitement my wife and I set out on a seven-day adventure in her new electric car, purchased in Frankfurt, and driving all the way to Lagos in Portugal’s Algarve. A total of 2,500km. We had heard so much about the rollout of electric charging stations across Europe so what could be easier, pull into a service area, connect up, tap your credit card and go. How wrong we were!

Our initial experience on the French Aires app was good but soon we had to rely on our GPS system to identify where we could find chargers. Five times we were led to ghost locations – green fields, back alleys or industrial units where work had begun but no working charger existed.

Then we discovered that charging is not tap-and-go. At every station we had to use a barcode to download an app, invariably only available in the local language.

Having navigated the multi-screen app and provided bank or credit card details we learn that a proprietary charging card will be posted to us, but in one case, only after we submitted a certified bank debit mandate.

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I now have 11 charging apps on my phone none of which will secure a charge. Our days began with a dawn search, invariably visiting four to five stations to find one that would take a credit card. Instead of being an adventure, this turned into a nightmare of stress and so many wasted hours.

To the mandarins in the EU and national governments charged with enabling the green transition, and to the leaders of the commercial enterprises tasked with delivering this service, shame on you all. You have turned the speed and convenience of modern technology on its head and used it to frustrate users and eliminate ease of use.

Unless you drive a Tesla, don’t even consider making a pan-European road trip in an electric vehicle. Instead exhort your regional and European representatives to quickly regulate for open access for plug-and-pay at all charging points. – Yours, etc,

BARRY QUINN,

Monkstown,

Co Dublin.