In this episode of EV Musings, Gary discusses the feasibility of long-distance electric vehicle journeys, debunking common myths about range anxiety and charging infrastructure. Using personal experiences from a London to Geneva rally, Gary highlights the ease of long-distance EV travel, comparing it to fossil fuel vehicles. He also shares tips for first-time EV drivers and emphasizes the importance of education in avoiding common pitfalls.

The episode concludes with insights from Julie Ramsey, who completed a historic North Pole to South Pole EV journey, proving that range is no longer a barrier.

What are the hints, tips & tricks to driving long distances with an EV?

This season of the podcast is sponsored by Zapmap, the free to download app that helps EV drivers search, plan, and pay for their charging.

Links in the show notes:

• Pole to Pole EV - homepage
• EV Batteries Can Outlast A Vehicle’s Lifetime With Minimal Degradation, Study Finds - Cool Thing
• What to Do the First Time You Charge Your New Electric Vehicle - The EV Musings Podcast
• Maddie Goes Electric

Episode produced by Arran Sheppard at Urban Podcasts: https://www.urbanpodcasts.co.uk

(C) 2019-2024 Gary Comerford

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Gary C: Hi, I'm Gary, and this is EV Musings, a podcast about renewables, electric vehicles, and things that are interesting to electric vehicle owners. On the show today, we'll be looking at the long-distance EV drive. Before we start, I wanted to let you know that the round table guests are identified and sorted.

We'll be recording that episode shortly, and it will form the last show of the season as usual, and we've got some great little topics to discuss as well. Our main topic of discussion today, though, is long-distance driving in your electric car. Can it really be done?

You ask anyone who hasn't been in an electric vehicle, or anyone who has been in an EV but listens to the anti-EV crowd, and the prevailing narrative is that long-distance EV trips are unfeasible due to the relatively short range of the cars and the lack of public charging infrastructure. Any time a journalist takes an EV for a weekend, they invariably try and do an extremely long-distance journey with little to no preparation or education, and they always end up stranded on the side of the road with no charge. Well, at least the ones that make the headlines do, because the story where the journey is successful and event-free doesn't make good news fodder and clickbait.

In actual fact, the reality of long-distance EV driving is somewhat different to what the media would have you think. Let's take an example with which I am personally familiar, the London to Brighton rally. Now the astute amongst you will no doubt pipe up with the cry, that's only 60 miles, there's no challenge there, and you would of course be right.

But, over the last two years the London to Brighton EV rally has been a precursor to a much longer rally which uses the London to Brighton leg as a starting stage. Last year contestants extended the trip, or should I say actually participants, because it wasn't a competition, last year participants extended the trip and went to Paris and this year they extended the European leg and ended up on the Lake Geneva shoreline, with smoke on the water playing in the background no doubt. Now for many people who have never driven EVs, and indeed for some who have driven EVs and had problems on long journeys, this would seem to be a bit of a nightmare.

But I can tell you from personal experience that it was something of a breeze really. Let me set the stage. I was co-driving a six year old Tesla Model S with the 75 kWh battery with 80,000 miles on the clock.

The average range on a car of this age is 220-230 miles, something like that. It's a big lump of a machine that isn't as efficient as some of the more modern Teslas on the road. Also travelling to Paris were 18 other vehicles including a 40 kWh Nissan Leaf, a Cooper Bourne, a Kia EV9, a Hyundai IONIQ 38 kWh, a Nissan EMV 200 van, a SEAT Mii, an MG5, an experimental Skywell vehicle and a Volta truck.

In Paris four of these vehicles finished and the remaining 15 went all the way to Geneva. The challenge with these vehicles is that they all have different ranges, they all charge at different speeds and they all have different efficiency ratings and that of course is the fun of a challenge such as this. So let's get the root stuff out of the way so you know what we were up against.

We left Brighton at 8am on Sunday morning to catch a ferry from New Haven to Dieppe. Our end of day arrival point for day one was the Arc de Triomphe in the middle of Paris. Day two we started from the Arc de Triomphe and ended up in Geneva and day three was the complete return journey.

I spent the first night in Fontainebleau outside Paris and the second night in Bourg-en-Bresse near the Geneva border having finished in Geneva and headed back into France and it was a little under a thousand miles in total. So how did we do? Well I'll tell you all that in a moment but first let's look at the same journey in a fossil fuel car and just to make it easy I'm going to pick the infamous diesel car that can do a thousand miles on a tank that all the anti-EV folks seem to think that everybody drives around in.

Although the ten Ferraris, Lamborghinis and McLarens that passed us at speed on the French A6 southbound were probably not getting that range from their tanks especially at the speed they were going. The total distance on the continent of that route is 914 miles as I said so fortunately for them the diesel drivers they wouldn't have had to stop to dispense some of that hideously smelly and expensive diesel in their tank unless they were a little heavy with the right foot. But that journey is also almost 15 and a half hours.

If we assume they stop in the same hotels as we did that splits the route down into a four hour ferry journey and a day of three hours of driving a day of four hours of driving to Geneva and another hour and a half back to Bourg-en-Bresse and a day of six hours of driving to Dieppe with a four hour ferry and a couple of hours back around to our starting point in Leatherhead. Now I don't know about you but I can probably do around two hours maximum without needing a stop. If I had kids in the car I imagine it would have been similar if not less.

Which means that your trip to Paris from Dieppe would probably have needed a stop, your leg from Paris to Geneva would have needed a stop or two and the return from Bourg-en-Bresse to Dieppe will have needed three maybe four stops. Now in and amongst these stops you will have done lunch or a end of the meal and the only thing that you wouldn't have needed to do was to put diesel in your vehicle. Well guess what?

Our stop routine was exactly the same and we didn't need to stop to put diesel in either. Now before anyone chimes in with I could have done it quicker than that. Yes you, yes you probably could.

You could have perhaps done it with one night instead of two or you could you could have done it without staying overnight in a hotel. Of course you could but so could I. This isn't about whether I had the best route or the quickest route or the most efficient route.

This is about whether this journey could be done in electric as easily as with a fossil fuel car. Now regardless of which route and timing you took there is a finite amount of time anyone should drive without a break and these breaks coincide nicely with comfort breaks, food etc and charging. Yes even the guy on LinkedIn recently who swore blind to me that he wouldn't be able to do an electric car it wouldn't work for him because and I quote I do 700 miles in a day close quote.

When challenged he swore that a daily journey for him a small businessman visiting his customers was home base Glasgow to Harrogate to Manchester to Preston and back to Glasgow which means he's doing 700 miles a minimum of 10 hours driving if he could average 70 miles an hour. which you can't on the UK roads, plus a whole day's work with his customers at several stops at which, incidentally, he could charge. But he was having none of that.

Anyway, looping back, let's talk about charging, especially on the Geneva trip. Now, of course, being in the Tesla, this was simple. We didn't need to charge, although we did stop on the first leg to our overnight hotel in Fontainebleau.

It did have chargers there, so we were able to leave on day two fully charged. After that, we stopped at Beaune, as in Cote de Beaune, the wine region, for about 30 minutes, and we arrived later on that day at Geneva with plenty in the battery. We did a quick, literally 8-minute stop at a fastened charger heading back into France for our overnight hotel in Bourg-en-Presse, which also had a charger.

And the only reason we did this was a safety net in case we hit a hill on the way back that might have sapped our range a little bit too much. Being in the Swiss Alps, hills are a bit of an occupational hazard. Now, on the return, we had lunch in a restaurant just south of Paris, and the car charged while we ate.

We did one quick stop, 20 minutes at a new Tesla V4 chargers south of Dieppe, and we made it all the way back to Leatherhead in Surrey without a further charging stop. And yes, we did make other stops, mainly for toilet breaks and food, nominally every 90 minutes to two hours. Now, the only stop along the way which I would have considered to be quote-unquote inconvenient was the supercharger stop at Beaune.

It was 30 minutes, and the location of the supercharger was such that there were no facilities. Ideally, we would have stopped and eaten lunch there, but it was literally a chunk of tarmac, a square of tarmac, in the corner of a field with 12 chargers and a dumpster. But anyone who knows anything about EVs will tell you that the Tesla could do it without an issue.

What about the other cars? Very good question. Now, I can tell you the only two vehicles that had issues with charging were the Nissan Leaf and the Volta truck, but they had completely different charging problems.

The Volta truck had a completely different set of charging issues. Most of their problems stemmed from the size of the vehicle. For reference, it's about the size of a small bus, both in height and length, and finding suitable charging locations where it could actually manoeuvre in so that the charge port was accessible to a charge cable proved to be an issue at several locations.

As far as actually charging the Volta was concerned, once they plugged in, they had no issues. Of the remaining vehicles, some cars charged slower than others. The SEAT Mi, which is the SEAT version of VW's Up, had no issue starting charges, but it was limited to something like 30kW maximum charge speed.

But as the battery was only 32. 3kWh usable, it meant they weren't waiting for too long at each stop. With a real range of around 130 miles, they made several more stops than the Tesla, but arrived in Geneva about 90 minutes after we did.

The Kia EV9 had a real range well in excess of what we had in the Tesla, and with its 200kW slash 800v charging, it made a similar number of stops to us, arriving before us in Geneva, and the driver was not hanging around. The Ioniq 38kWh, the wind knife, arrived about 30 minutes after us, having amassed the best efficiency figures of any vehicle on the run, and the story goes on and on. Did we have charges which didn't start the first time?

Yes. But they did start. In fact, at one stop, I had a Frenchman who'd never charged his BMW ix2 ask me for instructions, and I showed him how to charge purely using hand gestures and the medium of interpretive dance, and we tried three times before the handshake between the vehicle and the charger worked.

Annoying? Yes. A big issue?

No, not really. But let's assume that you don't fancy heading out to that there Europe. Is it still possible to do a long EV journey around the UK?

Well, again, if you listen to the naysayers, the answer's no. There's no way you can get in a car in, say, Devon, and drive up to, say, St Andrews in Scotland in an EV without it taking days and days or without the car having major charging issues. Well, ironically enough, my co-driver on the trip to Geneva, Tim Ralt Smith, did exactly that in the same 6-year-old Model S a couple of weeks prior to the rally.

The journey was 8. 5 hours, 507 miles, and it was accomplished in around the same time as it would have taken him in a petrol car, and this was also one of those what-if-you-had-a-family-emergency-and-had-to-do-a-long-distance-at-a-moment's-notice sort of trips. Time was of the essence and the car, and infrastructure, dealt with it with ease.

So, how can I reconcile what you've just read to the reports from many new EV drivers about horrendous long-distance journeys where they've taken three or four times as long to do the distance in their EV than they previously did with their ICE cars? And there's one word, repeat it alongside me, EDUCATION. Almost without exception, whenever you dig into the detail behind these horror journeys, you find a couple of major facts that point to this.

A key one is not understanding the difference between AC charging and DC charging, and plugging it into a slow AC charger expecting a rapid charge. Hell, even Maddie Mote from the Fully Charged show did this on her first long-distance rapid charge. Check the link in the show notes to see how that transpired.

Secondly, you've then got people not using ZAPMAP to check the status of chargers before arriving, resulting in pulling up to a charger that may be out of order. And then there's choosing one of the, shall we say, less favoured or less reliable charge point operators in the lower half of the ZAPMAP survey list. Now, I've talked about all these and other issues already on an episode called the First Charge episode, which was the third show of this season, so check that out for more information.

Again, the link's in the notes. Now, any one of these rookie errors can leave a bad taste in the mouth. Many intrepid reporters or first-time EV owners hit two or more of these errors, compounding the issue.

But every single one of these errors can be avoided with just a little education. The fact is, public charging can be daunting the first time you do it, but a couple of simple steps beforehand can avoid a lot of the tension and make it much, much simpler. Neil Riddle from Power, today's episode sponsor, recently put together an episode with Rick Bullemeier from Generate Media talking about long-distance journeys, and he came up with four top tips for those of you considering longer journeys, so let's go through them one by one.

Top tip number one. If it's your first time in an EV, go out and charge when you don't have to as this removes the stress of a first time experience. Love this, excellent tip and it's one I mentioned in an earlier episode this season when I talked about your first public charge, episode 223.

Top tip number 3, always have a plan B. Don't wait until you're at 10% to start looking for a charger. Again, it's another rookie sort of mistake that a lot of people make, especially if this is a journey or a car with which you're unfamiliar.

What you need to do is start looking for chargers around 25%, maybe down to 20% state of charge, that way if there are any issues, especially if you're abroad on foreign chargers, you can still continue to another charger without worrying about your charge. And top tip number 4, on a longer journey, short top ups every 60-90 minutes make a lot more sense because it's always safer to stop for a short break anyhow. That links into top tip number 3.

Basically Neil's saying that on a longer journey, there's a safety aspect. Stop a little more frequently than you probably would do if you were on a shorter journey. It's better for you.

It's better for your passengers. Don't be one of those drivers who likes to keep the foot to the floor for four or five hours straight. It's not good for your health and it can lead to accidents.

So there you have it, Neil's top 4 tips for a long distance journey. Now I think the last word in this episode should go to the people who know more about long distance EV journeys than anyone on the face of the planet. Chris and Julie Ramsey recently took a Nissan Ariya on an epic journey from the North Pole to the South Pole.

They're the first people in history to do this. You literally cannot get much further in terms of drivable distance before you effectively start to come back on yourself. Now Chris is usually the face of this couple and there are literally hundreds of places on the internet where he can be heard talking about the adventures and the world record things he's done.

So I don't want to hear from Chris today, I want to hear from his wife Julie. What are her thoughts on long distance EV journeys?

Julie R: If someone said to me today, electric vehicles cannot travel long distances, I say that is no longer true and I encourage you to look at our pole to pole electric vehicle expedition which dispels that myth and many more in one journey.

We drove through the harshest and toughest terrains on earth imaginable and can happily say we successfully achieved it. It's not the car anymore that has range limitations, it's us and our mindset. Electric vehicles can do the distance, we have proven that through our EV expeditions so range should no longer be a barrier to going electric.

If you have not tried driving an electric vehicle before and range is a concern for you, I highly encourage you to do your research and to give an EV a go. Do use the hints and tips provided on this podcast and take that leap of faith and just go for it. Come join us and choose a cleaner solution for your everyday transport needs.

The decisions you make today will have an impact on the future of our planet tomorrow. We made that decision and took that leap of faith a decade ago. We have never looked back since.

Gary C: This season we're looking at raising the awareness of carbon literacy with our listeners and one way we're doing that is with the Carbon Fact House read by carbon literacy trainer Ann Snelson.

Anne S: To save money, fuel, electricity and emissions, try eco-friendly driving if you possibly can. Accelerate and brake less and make sure that if you're driving a petrol or diesel car you're using higher gears.

Check your tyre pressure before you travel long distances and drive at 70 on motorways rather than sneaking over the limits.

I hope you enjoyed listening to today's show. It was put together this week with the help of Tim Rault-Smith, my Tesla co-driver on the London to Geneva rally and Julie Ramsey from Ple-to-pole Adventures. Many thanks to the two of them for their help.

If you have any thoughts, comments, criticisms or other general messages to pass on to me I can be reached at info@EVMusings.com

On the socials I’m on Twitter @musingsev

I’m also on Instagram at EVMusings where I post short videos and podcast extracts regularly. Why not follow me there?

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They’re 99p each (or equivalent) and you can get them on Amazon

Check out the links in the show notes for more information as well as a link to my regular EV Musings newsletter and associated articles.

I know you’re probably driving or walking or jogging now. But if you can remember- and you enjoyed this episode drop a review in iTunes, please. It really helps me out. Thanks.

If you’ve reached this part of the podcast and are still listening - thank you. Why not let me know you’ve got to this point by tweeting me @musingsev with the words [I can see for miles and miles! #ifyouknowyouknow] Nothing else.

Thanks as always to my co founder Simone. You know he does find it difficult to find new and interesting places to ride his one wheel electric unicycle. He’s tried city streets, country lanes, Alpine mountains. In fact - on the whole he’s probably done it all.

Julie R: We drove through the harshest and toughest terrains on earth imaginable.

Gary C: Thanks for listening. Bye.