The EV Charging Dance.

 I've just recently purchased (with the help of family) a plug-in Hybrid Prius. Lets not dwell on the lacklustre performance, only to say it's ideally suited to snotting round town picking up fares and will not win any prizes as a grand tourer. 

The other week I went from Leek to Buxton and the car almost ground to a halt on the hills. It is not performance-oriented.

Anyway, lets get to the title. 

Being a plug-in EV, the car obviously can run on Petrol or can be charged up and run for a short time in EV-mode just off the battery.

The battery needs to be charged up (obviously), but having no facilities to charge at home, I'm now becoming an expert on the public EV charging network.

In a nutshell, it sucks. 

The reasons are many, but the one big factor is the lack of consistency. You have a variety of charging sockets as well as a number of different applications to enable a charge at said socket. 

So, first hardware: first you have to know if your car will charge using AC or DC. Then you can move on to the various sockets, charging rates and enabling applications.

Lets just say, you have a number of different connectors for both AC and DC, you then have a number of different suppliers installing charging machines with different interfaces on the machines and different enabling applications. If it sounds complicated, then it is.

If you have a basic smartphone with not a lot of memory, you'll be filling that memory mostly with charging applications.

The uncertainty of compatibility between the charger and the car and the requirement to have internet access ends up in the Owner doing the EV Charging Dance, where the owner goes to the charger, does something, then plugs into the car, then returns to the charger, then logs onto the app to enable charging, then looks at the charger, then goes to the window of the car and peers through the window to see if the dashboard indicates a charge, then back to the charger, then back to the car several times until at some random point both the car and the charger agree that electrons are moving down the cable in sufficient quantity to enable a charge. 

Then the owner can waste a half hour at the nearby Starbucks. Actually the Greggs mega charge site near Salford Quays looks like a bloody good idea, at least you can eat yourself into a food coma while you wait. 

Finally, my favourite charging supplier at the moment is PodPoint. Their 7KW charging posts at Supermarkets just work. The posts start charging immediately and the app gives you 15 minutes to verify the charge. It just works. No EV charging Dance for me. EV owners with bigger batteries tend to shun the smaller charge posts, so I can normally get a slot and charge.