FUTURE PROOF

EVs are exceptional in town, says Horrell. But for long journeys? Um, not so much

This is the year EVs go mainstream. Pressure comes from every direction. The car companies will be clobbered if they don’t meet a much stiffer average CO2 target, and big numbers of EVs are the only way. On the other side of the supply-demand equation, company-car user-choosers will be able to save absolutely vast amounts of tax if they go EV from April. So electric cars will no longer just be for deep-green earlyadopters, or for the retired with time on their hands. The road warriors will be getting into them too.

So let’s imagine a world where the Regional General Manager (South) is now in an electric car. First thing, RGM(S)’s self-esteem will be toast if they can’t sit in the outside lane. Which means 80mph and the rest. Now that’s going to be problematic. See, electric cars can just hit their claimed range in moderate give-and-take driving, because of regen braking. But at steady high speeds it’s much worse. There’s a lot of aero drag, regen isn’t available because RGM(S) aims never to slow down, and also motors are simply less efficient at high rpm.

Experience tells me most of the current fleet of so-called 280-mile EVs will be flashing low-battery warnings after 160 miles of brisk motorway work in winter. That’s minus a headwind.

Now picture what happens when RGM(S) is scheduled to deliver a PowerPoint at the national sales conference in Leeds. From the Southern regional HQ in Swindon it’s only 200 miles. To our executive road warrior that has always been a cinch on a no-stop strategy. No longer. Because time is money, our hero plans for just a 30-minute top-up stop. That’s fine assuming the charger isn’t occupied or broken. The notional half-hour pause might well stretch much longer.

Still, it all goes smoothly, RGM(S) gets there, delivers the presentation and spends the rest of the afternoon buffing up his or her LinkedIn profile. But remember, this is the year of the EV. So if there really are far more long-distance battery cars on the roads – or indeed if the sales conference happens to be in Glasgow, demanding two or three charging stops – there’s going to have to be, rather suddenly, a commensurate increase in the number and reliability of rapid chargers.

And if that doesn’t happen, RGM(S)’s boss’s boss is going to be properly brassed off. The big corporations, and many public-sector institutions, have green targets, but will those targets buckle if they keep finding their senior staff stranded in motorway service stations?

I’m hopeful the charge-infrastructure providers will actually step up. Someone in that business told me the number of rapid chargers will grow by another third this year, much of the extra being on motorways. Good. Because if it isn’t enough, RGM(S) will probably hire a different car for long business trips. One with pistons under the bonnet and hydrocarbon in the tank. Was that really the intended consequence of incentivising EVs?

“280-MILE EVs WILL BE FLASHING LOW-BATTERY WARNINGS AFTER 160 MILES OF MOTORWAY WORK”