Someone take charge Philip Nolan
This Renault is a nice little runner around town but what’s the point if the infrastructure is all wrong?
THERE is a plan, lurking somewhere in the dark recesses of government, to ban the sale of combustion engines by 2030, and that means everyone thereafter will have to buy either electric or hybrid cars. Now as we all know, whatever about hybrids, not all of which are plug-in, electric cars have to be plugged in to charge them, and on longer journeys, that means we need a network of high-speed charging points.
As things stand, the national car fleet is in excess of two million private vehicles, so it stands to reason that there will need to be charge points pretty much at every crossroads, on every main street, in every car park and, especially, at motorway service stations.
When I join the M11 at the Raheenagurren roundabout near Gorey, on my way from home to Dublin, there is one service station on the motorway, and it has one electric charge point. And, on Wednesday, it was out of order.
This wouldn’t normally matter, because I usually keep electric cars fully charged – but this time, aware that the charge point was there, I hadn’t bothered. I had been driving at full tilt, watching the remaining kilometres drop precipitously and I was starting to get nervous. On leaving the services at Coyne’s Cross, I had to stick the car into Eco mode, which allows driving at a maximum speed in the mid-90s kilometres, and trundle my way back to town. And that, in a nutshell, is why an electric car would not be for me. I don’t need the added hassle of worrying that I won’t get to where I need just because a charge point is not working – and even if it had been, a chap in a Hyundai Ioniq pulled up just after me, and he would have had to wait 30 minutes while I charged before he could have done so. Indeed, I have friends in California who own two Teslas, and they missed this year’s total eclipse because they couldn’t get anywhere near a charge point, such was the demand among people driving from Southern to Northern California.
Yes, you can fully charge an electric car on a domestic socket, but for the Renault Zoe I was driving this week, that takes up to 13 and a half hours to hit 100%, so you absolutely would have to have a fast charger fitted at home. This is free from ESB ecars but, as things stand, that is the case only until 22 December this year. After that date, you very likely will have to install one.
So, all that said and done, for the few days before my heartstopping trip to Dublin, I loved the Zoe (the name is based on ZE, or zero emissions). All I did was drive up and down to the local supermarket, once into Gorey itself, and just on general errands, and there’s something very righteous about knowing you’re doing so with absolutely no environmental impact. That’s why I have no issue at all with the aspiration of the Government, but I do wonder what its plan is – not only to roll out a proper national charging network, but also how on Earth it plans to generate the extra electricity needed when, in 2050, maybe a million people a day will need to recharge electric vehicles.
That’s 32 years away, I hear you say. Well, just look at how difficult they have found rolling out a national broadband network, or connecting two tramlines in Dublin, or building a Cork-Limerick motorway? We do nothing in a hurry in this country, and we often do nothing at all.
Anyway, the Renault Zoe is a fine car around urban areas, nimble and lively, and with lovely, smooth linear acceleration. I can’t say for sure how much it cost me to charge this car, but the ESB calculator says that if you drive 200km a week, you’ll pay €2.54 to charge an electric car, compared with €15.74 for diesel or €21.60 for petrol, so you can save a lot of money. Annual motor tax also is just €120.
What that means is that you need to seriously assess your needs and your travel distances before investing. The Zoe starts from €23,490 for the customer, net of the SEAI grant and the VRT rebate, totaling €7,500. Renault claims a real average range of 300km on a single charge in summer, and 200km in winter. I live 114km from the GPO, so I would be hard pushed to manage a round trip in November. That’s the dilemma – and that’s why happening upon a charge point that isn’t working could turn a nice day very dark indeed.