The slow movement
Like waiting? You’re in luck. By James Taylor
I shirked my responsibilities last month and dodged the bullet of an early-morning, long-distance motorway voyage in the short-range Mini by borrowing a colleague’s petrol car. I repented this month by using the Mini to make a 250-mile round trip from Lincolnshire to Buckinghamshire to get to the launch of the updated Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio.
I made it there and back without getting stranded but it did mean charging up three times: once on the way down, once at the launch venue and once on the way home.
The Mini’s battery was on 99 per cent when I left home, and reckoned on a 125-mile range in miserly Green+ mode (no air-con, feather-footed accelerator pedal response) for the 115-mile journey when I set off. But at the bottom of my road it flashed a warning that it would have insucient charge to reach the destination. No problem; I was smugly expecting this, and had given myself an extra hour in hand. Plan A, to top up at a motorway services en route, was thwarted when I couldn’t get the supplier’s app to strike up a fluent conversation between the charge point and the Mini. But Plan B, a tip from a colleague, saved the day. In Kings Langley, a few minutes from the motorway, there’s a rapid CCS charger that lobbed dozens of miles of range into the Mini in a few minutes.
On the way back, I trusted the Mini’s own sat-nav to help, and it found me a rapid charger near Kettering. I made it home having spent a couple of hours longer in transit than I would have done in a piston-powered car.
Next day, with the Mini’s battery depleted, I ventured out in search of another public rapid charger closer to home. It was operated by a supplier I hadn’t used before, and needless to say signing up for an account and getting it authorised was long-winded and unsuccessful, though the charger did manage to charge my credit card… Time to head home and begin the rigmarole of charging through my kitchen window again instead.