Overview

Last month after a number of years of being stuck at home due to the covid pandemic, we finally got away on holiday, our destination - The Highlands of Scotland, and we would be getting there in a fully electric car. One of my colleagues said upon hearing this, that we’d have trouble finding a charging point that far north, which is the typical reaction from a lot of people, they don’t think they can drive very far in electric vehicles, and if they could, they would be stuck without the ability to charge.

Charging Infrastructure

The experience to those who drive electric vehicles is of course, very different, Pod Point have been doing an exceptional job working with Tescos to get charging points installed at Supermarkets across the nation, so pretty much anywhere there is a big Tescos there is usually a charging point. There are also the charging stations at most motorway services pioneered by Ecotricity, now maintained by Gridserve.

One major change in recent years is the dedicated charging stations being installed across the country, Ionity and Fastned leading the way with these (I do love the Fastned ones, great design as well as the best user onboarding experience of any EV charging provider), in addition to these, Tesla have also opened up a section of their charging infrastructure for non Tesla EV’s.

Destination chargers are now becoming commonplace at a lot of hotels as well, so you can charge overnight whilst you sleep en route to your final destination.

On top of all of that, there have also been smaller scale additions all across the country so you really are not far from your next charging point at all.

With this all in mind, we weren’t expecting any problems in travelling the 600 miles

Preparation

So, whilst I knew where we were going, I didn’t really do any preperation, I knew where I was intending to stop, but didn’t investigate the charging points there, so I would advise that you do this, it saves a little bit of time when you do get there, I’ll detail a little on the setup processes of each below

GridServe - No setup required, contactless payment, just connect up your vehicle and tap your card to start the process.

Ionity - https://ionity.eu/ - Download the app for your device, select the charger you have connected to, set up payment details once, start charging.

Fastned - https://fastnedcharging.com/en/app - By far the best onboarding experience for new users, no faff, again, download the app, set up payment and once you are at their station, plug in, start/stop charging, all within the app.

PodPoint - https://pod-point.com/ - Another favourite of mine, they installed my home charging point and also the charging points at the hotel opposite work, and more recently at Tescos stores across the country, they also have charging points at various other destinations too, I think I’ve used their points at Sainsburys before too - the process with them, set up an account, set up payment (you add an amount in advance, so you can budget more easily, so payment is by a top-up process), the funny thing with these, I’ve used so many but rarely had to pay, there are plenty of free charging stations around. Once you’re connected, the app uses your location to identify where you are, then you just pick the charging stations name and the socket you’ve plugged into and then start charging.

Tesla - A fairly starightforward setup process, download the app, set up an account and payment method, then choose the ‘Charge your Non-Tesla’ option and you will get a map with available locations, the only problem we encountered with Tesla was that the cable is the perfect length for a Tesla, but a little too short for some other vehicles, thankfully the Tesla charging next to me had plenty of space, so allowed me to encroach on their parking bay for a 20 min boost.

ChargePlace Scotland - Only necessary if you are going to Scotland, but if you are, then I’d recommend signing up with them a few weeks before departure and requesting the RFID card, so you can use charging points where you don’t have good mobile signal too, the sign up process for these was the longest and quite a faff in comparison to most, they also do a direct debit charging method, which supposedly bills you every month, but so far we haven’t seen any invoice or charges from them. With regards to the process - again, a little bit of a faff, you have to get the charging point ready for the charge, then connect your vehicle, and then the charge will start, the main problem we encountered was identifying the charging point that we were supposed to use, newer ones have an identification number on, older ones either have them scrawled on the device, or no identification listed, so it was a bit trial an error, it was one ChargePlace Scotland device that we couldn’t use in Golspie due to mobile signal in the morning, but trying again later in the day, we got a successful charge there, I believe that wouldn’t have been an issue if we had the RFID card mentioned above.

Experience

So no major issues essentially, on the way we stopped at a regluar motorway services, used a Gridserve Charging Point, paid by contactless, next stop was an Ionity station in the Midlands, one of the points was offering a free charge as it was offering a lower rate of charge, we then stopped at another motorway services in Scotland and used another Gridserve device without issue. The next day we stopped at another Ionity station in Scotland, again, no issue with the charge, we carried on to a Tescos near our destination in the highlands and used their PodPoint chargers for free, then at our destination we utilised their destination charger to top the vehicle up, the only sticky moment was negotiating with the goat guarding the charger, but the owners came out and helped the goat back to its enclosure. For the 2 weeks we were there, we used rapid and 7kw chargers from ChargePlace Scotland and PodPoint to keep the vehicle topped up whilst we visited various beauty spots and beaches in the area, the only stumbling point being the oddity in Golspie, but we were able to charge there later on.

My plan, for if one of the intended charging points wasn’t available, was to fire up the zap-map app and see where the next appropriate charging point would be, but thankfully, this wasn’t necessary, I should add that our vehicle is a Hyundai Kona 64Kwh, so has a range of 270miles when charged to 100%, but we found there was rarely a need to charge above 80% due to the availability of chargers and my need to have a rest every 100 miles of travel.

On the journey back we tested out 2 Fastned stations, 1 Tesla station and skipped the GridServe and ChargePlace ones as we didn’t need to use them.

If your vehicle has a lower range then you will need to stop more than we did, and allow more charging time, so as with everything, your experience may differ if using different tools, but if done right, there is nothing stopping you from travelling the length of the country in a zero emissions electric vehicle.