Electric car long distance journeys - real life experience?

[BewareTheBeardedDragon]

I have to change cars and looking at electric. Having a wobble as a dealer (admittedly one who doesn't sell electric) has been telling me horror stories and suggesting they aren't good for long journeys.

The vast majority of my driving is short distance but I do do a long drive to holiday (2-300 miles) in the summer every year. I thought, with fast chargers at service stations and a bit of forwards planning, this would be doable and not a nightmare.

Are they ok actually, or is it awful? He was talking about journeys that should be 3 hours taking 11, pack of chargers, chargers vandalised or otherwise not working. Was he just trying to put me off so I'd buy a petrol car from him?

£50k on a car!

I drive to Switzerland quite a lot and it's fine. I've driven to Liverpool a few times and once to Cornwall. I had to stop and charge my car obviously. I usually do it while I'm.having lunch or a coffee.

@Sluj I find that hard to believe. My friends electric car has over 100k on it and it's still great.

Hiring an electric car for a week or two, to ‘try before you buy’ is a very good idea.

My stepdad drove me to grandmother's. Drive down was fine, drive back should have been 3.5-4 hours, several charging points kept kicking us off and not charging (still charger him the initial fee). London waits at the motorway service stations and people swapping stories of possible fast chargers. I took us 11 hours to get back

Had an EV for years. Never had a problem.

Ours is fine. We have a range of 200-300 miles depending on temperature. I’ve never had a problem finding a fast charger. I usually go for one at shops or a McDonald’s do I can sit and have a coffee while I wait. The InstaVolt app helps.

I work for a dealer, we sell come. Personally I would say it's fine as a back up car and not for long journeys. Some areas don't have good charging options, in particular old fashioned holiday type areas. At peak times there will be queues for the chargers. A lot of time they're out of order. The main think I would say is in very cold weather expect your range to decrease significantly, by as much as 30-40 percent. Batteries also have less range as they get older. In me personal opinion they aren't the answer just yet, unless you have a back up car.

If it'll do my regular ish London trip (which even on worst case scenario estimate I reckon it could with maybe one charge - and there are about a million chargers in and around London), I might say if it doesn't cope with the annual hol I could rent a petrol car for that week.

I work for a dealer, we sell come 😂

I'm sorry I know that's an autocorrect but please come back and tell us what you meant to write.

However I've booked a weekend away in the Yorkshire dales and there seem to be no suitable fast chargers in the vicinity... so I am borrowing my mums Yaris for that trip!!

Which illustrates the point that it’s only useful to have an electric car if you’ve access to a ‘normal’ car too!

Oh crap, best or worst typo ever 😂😂

We don't sell jizz, we sell 'some' electric cars!

well there's too many dicks apparently so very resourceful to sell come 🤷🏽‍♀️

I keep looking at them but we are also the "quick stop", change drivers sort on long journeys and having to hang around for 45 minutes or more whilst the car charges would drive me crazy.

Even worse if you have to queue potentially adding unnecessary hours on to the trip.

Not for us yet. Battery technology has to improve considerably first and the supply chains for the raw materials cleaned up.

It took me 7.5 hours to drive from South Wales to East Anglia for work the other week. Adding to that seems utter madness to me.

I absolutely adore my electric Fiat for London driving but it is an PITA doing long distance. A 3.5 hour petrol journey takes me around 6, so I get the train. It is exhausting waiting for chargers, then charging, or driving to find one. Charging is now v expensive. I don’t regret buying my car - just wish it had a much bigger range. I think with an EV with a big range, you’ll be fine.

More and more places do have chargers. We have definitely used one at a NT property. However, they may not always be the fastest chargers in such locations.

Are the chargers actually at places you want to stop?

For us, on a longer journey, we want to stop on our direct route, not take a diversion. So yes, they are where we want to stop.

For less obvious locations you need to check online.

They have in some countries but not yet fully in the UK, though apparently it is a planned move. This will help.

I love my EV (DS3 Crossback) but I wish we’d known that the main consideration when buying should be range, range, range. It’s a perfect city car but can’t do much more than 140 km on the motorway. We regularly travel 450 km across Northern Europe - the Netherlands and Belgium are fine, never any problems finding a charger and in NL in particular they always work - but Northern France has been, up until now, an absolute nightmare. That’s finally changing - most of the autoroute stops now have banks of superchargers, and there are more and more just off the autoroute - but for a long while it was pretty dire. There seems to be more of a problem in France with chargers being broken or vandalized as well. Opening up the Tesla chargers should help too.

We’ve just taken the approach that long trips take time and that’s how it is. (The trip used to take us about 5 hours when you factored in pit stops and at least one inevitable traffic jam; it now takes 7.)