Peugeot 508 SW PSE

A charge proves hard to find

RECENTLY I NEEDED A FIVE-SEATER FOR a few days, so John Barker kindly agreed to swap ‘his’ Peugeot for ‘my’ Alpine for a while. After rendezvousing for the exchange, I clocked up another 100 miles or so heading out to an evo photoshoot and then back home, so the hybrid 508’s battery was fully depleted.

As my house has no driveway there was no possibility of topping up the battery there without draping a cable across the pavement, which probably wouldn’t have made me too popular with passing pedestrians. So when popping into town the next afternoon I thought I’d see if I could grab a bit of charge ‘in the wild’.

First stop: Morrison’s. A relatively new store that opened in 2018, it has dedicated a whopping four spaces to EV charging. Unfortunately the charger they share wasn’t working, and according to zap-map.com hasn’t been for months.

Over the road to Aldi then: an even newer store, built in 2020, with two charging points that, unlike Morrison’s, were free to use. I plugged the Peugeot in, checked its dash, and saw an estimate of 9h55m for a full charge at a rate of ‘0 miles per hour’. Yup, another out-of-order charger – for over a year say some online reviews – which then refused to release our Peugeot’s cable until it was subjected to some particularly vigorous swearing.

None of the above problems were the Peugeot’s fault, of course, but they confirmed to me some of the current shortcomings of the electric dream. Pity too, because had that second charger been working, a 30-minute shopping experience (surely the longest you can spend in Aldi) combined with the 508’s maximum charging rate of 7.4kw should have gained me around 7 miles of range – or put another way, a completely free ride home.

Date acquired March 2022 Total mileage 7275 Mileage this month 601 Costs this month £0 mpg this month 41.1