Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms Electric Cars

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Just means you'll be blocked out by Romulans and Klingons

I can live with that....especially the Klingons.

Naa, that DeLorean was fuelled by just some litter from a waste bin...oh and a banana skin

Just back from a week in Cornwall - staying in a 'holiday home' on the Lizard. Took the hybrid down as we were expecting to be joined by my parents but unfortunately my Dads dementia put paid to their visit.

Filled up with electricity at home and petrol in Rushden (giving a range of about 30 electric and 450 petrol miles). Had an overnight stop at the Premier Inn at Exeter, but no electric chargers in the car park. Down to the Lizard next day, with stops at Bude, Tintagel and Padstow but no chargers in the car parks there.

There were two parking spots allocated to our accommodation, but they were in a communal block so no chargers, and no way of getting a lead from the house to the car.

We didn't actively go searching for chargers, but kept an eye out at the numerous carparks we used as we travelled round Cornwall. We only found one carpark (Falmouth) that had chargers, so pulled into the only available spot. Charger was out of order.

We stopped at the M5 Exeter Services in the way home - huge number of Musk Float chargers, with more being installed - many were empty, but no use to us. All the conventional chargers were in use, but there does seem to be an extensive charger installation programme underway so should be a better next year.

Thankfully, even the remotest Cornish village has easy access to a Petrol station so we could enjoy our holiday doing the stuff we wanted to do, rather than searching for chargers and waiting for charge. Mind you, the petrol price varied by up to 10p a litre!

I am a little confused, you realise that there are app things on a phone that can lead you to (probably) working chargers ?
Also the Tesla chargers can be used by other cars now?

However the issue with regional charging is well illustrated.

Yep, we have a couple of apps, but as I said, we didn't want to spend precious holiday time searching round for chargers.We tend to go to Cornwall once or twice a year and use carparks that are easy to get to, usually have a few free spaces, and are convenient for the things we like to do.

Wasn't aware that other EV's could use Musk stuff, but to be honest I rather stick to petrol than stick a penny of my hard earned cash into his pocket....

I don't think the Tesla charger access deal has been finalised, also it would only help EV's that are type 2 socket IIRC

TBM - What Plug in Hybrid do you have? I have put in an order for a Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV. I feel it is a good option, I feel the two main options to chose from are

• PHEV and use it as main town car and trip car, keep wife's small Skoda Rapid as a second car in case we both need a town car at the same time.
• Small EV like base model MG4 as town car and keep my Skoda Octavia Petrol car for trips

I think the MG4 would use a lot less electricity than the Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV per km so make more sense as a town car but the Outlander would be nice for long trips and car go places in the bush I could not take our current cars which is handy for some of my upcoming retirement plans.

People who are EV fans and go on and on about them show me the APP's with heaps of chargers, but many other people who have them said they tried a trip and got screwed around by non-working chargers, a queue to use the only working charger etc. making it a very long and frustrating trip I feel your experience that finding a working charger without a queue is not easy is probably correct making the PHEV a good choice. The exception is a guy I know with a Nissan Leaf that he bought second hand in Japan and had shipped to Australia, he said it has a funny plug that no-one else has and he knows a few places to charge and has not had an issue, his comment afterwards was when he is there for the more standard plugs there are big queues.

We've got a Golf ehybrid - it is a company car so no outlay from us, bar the £900 for the EV charger install (got a mate to do it so saved a few hundred). It does about 31 miles on a charge and costs around 3p a mile charging at home and 8p per mile charging from work. On petrol alone it's about 55mpg, so 11p. As she does around 20.000 a year the cost of the install will be covered after about 9 months of driving. If we had to factor in the additional cost of a hybrid over a standard petrol I doubt it would make economical sense.

As a 'car' it does everything it should do well (although I find it very boring and souless to drive, but that's more an indication of my attitude to modern transport). Build quality is excellent, and while based at home 70% of driving is on electric.

Out and about is very different - although we don't actively seek out public chargers (why would we, when we drive past numerous petrol stations every journey and we can get a 450miles range in under 5 mins) we are happy to use them when available and working. Since February, the first one we used (BP Pulse) cost 31p per mile for a full charge, so not very cost effective but the second one was free. About 5 others we've tried to use have been out of order. A full EV car would be very impractical for us. The UK EV infrastructure is a very long way off....