Lithium-ion irnod nies
Living with an electric car in London requires a mix of lightning reflexes and zen-like calm.
Filling up your car with petrol or diesel is a gloriously mundane experience. You can find fuel almost anywhere, the price you’ll pay is clear, and it’s over in minutes. Not so with an EV, and especially not in urban areas – which is painfully ironic because electric is best suited to city life.
But I’ve known living in London with an electric vehicle was going to be an issue since 2017. Way back then our local council, Richmond, had the foresight to canvass residents about future EV ownership and ask where we’d be keen to have charging points installed. Our road was identified for three public points, but just as residents were being canvassed again about going ahead with those three charging points, a celebrity chef opened an eaterie nearby. This would mean an evening influx of diners (and their cars), and local opinion suddenly changed: the mood now was that we weren’t prepared to lose three increasingly precious parking spaces so they could be turned into often-empty EV charging bays.
We did, however, get three lamppost chargers, thanks to the switch to LED street lighting, which frees up enough power to provide 5kW charging. Meantime, other streets didn’t protest quite so much, meaning less than a mile away are three dedicated 7kW Source London sockets.
The other option is fast charging, and the likes of BP are installing 150kW points on forecourts in the capital. Our nearest is over the river in Hammersmith, but the bridge that should get us there is closed for repairs for the next three years.
Charge at home, you say? Like much of London we don’t have off-street parking, which is a sticking point if you want a wallbox installed. There are ways round this – in Oxford, for instance, they’ve been testing different solutions, including digging cable gulleys in the pavement.
For now the focus in my area is on lamppost conversions. Over 200 have been completed so far, another 145 soon, with the request list stretching to over 700.
So I created a spreadsheet – please DO NOT tell my wife – to calculate the different charging costs for the Ubitricity lampposts (£0.24 per kWh, or £0.162 if you buy their bespoke cable at £299) and the Source London chargers (with their three different pricing options). The higher Ubitricity rate was better for little top-ups, while big fills came out cheapest via a Source London full subscription.
But with only three lamppost chargers on the street and no markings to reserve the adjacent space for EVs, I’ve never actually seen a space beside one in the three months we’ve had the e-Tron. So until every lamppost has a charging point, the space beside those that have been converted is gold dust to EV drivers – but just another spot to be nabbed by everyone else. Source London it is, then.
Our nearest fast charger is the other side of a bridge that’s been closed for three years