Public chargers: easy (ish) to use but slower than advertised
What I wasn’t used to, or even acquainted with at this point, was public charging infrastructure. Zap Map (and apps like it) are near-essential for the EV uninitiated, or if you’re leaving your local area. It’ll tell you where the chargers are, whether they’re free, whether they’re working and how much they’ll cost, which lead us to a 50kW charging point in a nearby pub car park.
Slower 7kW and 22kW units are more numerous, but unless you’ve hours to kill – if you’re wanting a significant-enough boost from a low-ish charge – nothing less than 50kW will do. Especially given that while technically 50kW chargers add range at a rate of 180 miles per hour, you only get maximum charge speed for a limited time in practice. Just for reference, the Q4 is designed to be able to charge at speeds up to 135kW, or 310 miles per hour, making it more than ready for the future proliferation of faster chargers.
Then there’s actually getting there and plugging in. Two parking spots not meaning that two cars can charge at once at some 50kW charging points was something of a jarring discovery in situ. Happily, the Volkswagen ID.4 – a car with which the Q4 shares its underpinning – that was in the hot seat unplugged and hummed away, leaving us free to ‘fill up’.
Getting hooked in and charging was relatively painless, though the not-so-tech-savvy could need more than the five minutes it took me to go from zilch to app downloaded, details entered, fully signed up and ready to charge. Once charging, both car and charger were informing me it’d be about an hour and a half to go from 37 per cent to full. As above, this roughly 180 miles per hour charger in our experience was giving more like 90 miles per hour.
Leaving with 98 per cent charge and an indicated 217 miles of range, we scurried up from Birmingham to our hotel. That, along with a magical jaunt back out through the countryside to our Harry Potter experience and then back to our hotel, saw us eat up 89 miles. The next day, we covered another 48 fast miles up the M6 and M62 for our day in Liverpool before plugging in in the evening before the drive home.
I did attempt a charge earlier in the day near our Liverpudlian lunch spot but was met once again with a single charging terminal with two parking spots, serving the one and only car it had the capacity for. That carvery was served with a tiny side of range anxiety. We did manage to plug in later on at a different charging point at a nearby pub, paying via Zap Map’s Zap Pay facility, which added more juice than the Birmingham charge point and did so 15 minutes quicker. A point to note: EV owners will be spending money and gaining weight, given how many charging points are tied to pubs, restaurants and fast-food joints.