This episode of EV Musings reflects on five years of podcasting about electric vehicles and renewable energy.

Gary discusses the evolution of EVs, charging infrastructure, and public perception since 2019. Topics include the growth of Chargepoint Operators (CPOs), the challenges of misinformation, and the increasing integration of EVs with renewable energy systems.

Gary also highlights key milestones in EV development, such as the rise of Tesla, the BMW i3, and the Korean EV market.

Guest Details: Alex Lowe

Alex's Website

@alex.theinterface on Instagram

Alex on YouTube

@alexlowe30 on Twitter

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:

• Making Zero Bill homes the new normal | Octopus Energy | Octopus Energy
• Constituency EV Map | EVA England : EVA England

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

(C) 2019-2024 Gary Comerford

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Mentioned in this episode:

Zap Map

The EV Musings Podcast is sponsored by Zapmap, the go-to app for EV drivers in the UK, which helps EV drivers search, plan, and pay for their charging. Zapmap is free to download and use, with Zapmap Premium providing enhanced features which include using Zapmap in-car on CarPlay or Android Auto and help with charging costs with both a pricing filter and 5% discount*"

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 back at a few things I've learned over the last five years of doing this podcast and what that means to EV drivers. Before we start I wanted to apologize for the lack of an EV insurance episode this season.

I know I promised it last week but we had a number of logistics and other issues with putting that episode together. Sometimes the PR company work with you and add value and sometimes they don't. Sometimes the company itself adds value and sometimes it doesn't.

In this case none of the stars aligned so we booted that episode to next season. Stay tuned for that and if you don't subscribe, why not do so now so you don't miss anything. Our main topic of discussion today is learnings, reflection and a little bit of nostalgia.

The number of the types of EVs you can buy has changed. The price of EVs has changed. The charging infrastructure has changed.

The price of charging has changed. The amount of misinformation about EVs has changed. And the government has changed.

And I'd like to think I've been a party to quite a lot of those changes and might even have helped push some of them forward in some small way. Now on this show we've spoken to many Chargepoint operators, including two this season, SmartCharge and BEV. And I tend to ask them all a similar sort of set of questions and that way I can compare and contrast the answers to see which companies are focused on rolling out infrastructure, which is focused on the company, and which are focused on rolling out infrastructure that's focused on profits.

And by profits I mean focusing on getting the best and quickest return on investment to pay off their capital. Now remember all the big Chargepoint operators have invested huge sums in public charging. At the time of writing there's a commitment of almost 6 billion pounds to increase the charging infrastructure.

But it wasn't always this way. Back when I first started the podcast there were a relatively small number of operators who were doing their best to provide charging infrastructure. And what's interesting is comparing and contrasting the different approaches to their solutions.

Geniepoint, for example, went for a single charger, 50 kilowatt, usually in a Morrison's car park. They made a bad choice of hardware supplier and Dee Humphreys, ex-CEO of Geniepoint, said so on this very podcast. And reliability suffered.

Osprey Charging, or as they were known then, Ingenie, usually went for dual chargers in car parks to start with. They had better, more reliable hardware. Polar, or Chargemaster, were outliers.

They were the largest rapid charge network at the time, but their rollout strategy seemed to be single 50 kilowatt charges in as many places as possible. Usually these were places like Holiday Inn Hotels or pub car parks. They weren't focused on accessibility of chargers, or ease of use, or even reliability.

For a couple of years, they were able to stay ahead of the curve. I mean, they were my go-to CPO for a while. Then they were brought out by BP Pulse.

And, well, let's just say things weren't quite the same. Up north of the border, there was Chargeplace Scotland, a government-funded organisation installing chargers and providing free charging for Scottish EV drivers, alongside a government-provided interest-free loan for people to buy second-hand EVs. The main, i.

e. most visible charge point operator would have been Ecotricity at the time. They contracted with every motorway service area in the country, more or less, to add either one or two rapid chargers in the car parks there.

At the time, these were just 50 kilowatt chargers, and many of them were just CHAdeMO. and AC only. Remember back then the main EVs that you could buy in the UK were the Nissan Leaf and the Renault Zoe.

One charged via CHAdeMO and the other charged via AC. Yeah 43kW AC but it was AC nonetheless. Now of course looming over all of this was Tesla who had their own proprietary charging hardware network with the superchargers.

But over time things started to change. For a start the number of CPOs who were putting hardware in the ground exploded. At the last check of ZapMat we now have something in the region of 70 CPOs in the UK alone, not to mention dozens of others that are searchable in Europe via the app.

What also happened was that the quality of these networks started to become a little bit more defined, both good and bad. People started to have their own favourite networks. There were those who would only go and charge at places like Instavolt or Osprey charging.

There were those who would never use a GeniePoint or a Shell recharge unit. In fact on this very show Steph Weller, full-time wheelchair user and EV driver, said Shell recharge the network you use to get you to the charger you want to use. Now Ecotricity expanded their offering to include CCS charging.

This opened them up for use by cars such as the BMW i3 and the Jaguar I-PACE. Unfortunately that wasn't without its difficulties as the CCS standard wasn't, and still isn't, as robust a standard as CHAdeMO. And we'll come back to this a little later.

As battery electrochemist Dr Ewan McTurk said

Euan M:

I believe that the wrong format is winning. CCS is being foisted upon us despite the fact that it's not currently able to do vehicle to grid charging and despite the fact that the protocol is so loosely defined that you've seen the likes of the Jaguar I-PACE and even Teslas having compatibility issues with older charge points. This is because unlike CHAdeMO that is rigorously defined, CCS is kind of like they've given you the ingredients to make a cake but not the recipe.

Gary C:

As a result of this several cars found that they were unable to actually charge on the Ecotricity CCS units. This was resolved over time but it did leave something of a bitter taste in some people's mouths. To add insult to injury the payment processing was a little lackadaisical shall we say.

Most charge point operators wanted you to download an app to use their units. This included BP Pulse and Ecotricity. The only one that didn't back then was Instavolt who had managed to find the sweet spot of being ultra reliable contactless only and reasonably priced.

Although unfortunately that didn't last. As a result many EV drivers found themselves having phone full of apps or in the hardwired version of that a glove box full of RFID cards. Now don't get me wrong I love a good RFID card as much as the next man but needing a different one for each charge point operator was a little ridiculous.

The other major change that's happened in the last few years is the increase in the number of charge points actually in the ground. The last two years in particular have seen increases of 40% plus year on year. Now this obviously isn't going to last but it does mean that the charges have been put in the units have been installed and the network is growing.

And don't listen to these silly articles that tell you that Stockport has the highest number of registered EVs. That's the headquarters of one of the largest vehicle financing companies in the country, so of course the cars are going to be registered there. That's not where the cars are actually being used.

If you want an indication of where vehicles actually are, it's worth going to the EVA England website and clicking on the link for their EV constituency map. This allows you to click your local area and find out both how many EVs are registered there, alongside how many chargers are available. Now I want to move on a little to the cars themselves.

Back in the day, the two main non-Tesla cars you could get were the Renault Zoe and the Nissan Leaf. A little later on, BMW broke through with their fantastic i3, followed by Jaguar with the I-Pace and Kia with the Soul, which was a compliance car for the US market. And that was pretty much it for quite a while.

These were expensive, fairly hard to come by, especially during lockdown, and the numbers on the road crept up, albeit slowly. Now to discuss this and sort of reiterate a few of the things I've talked about, I want to bring Alex Lowe onto the chat.

Alex L:

I do various car reviews on YouTube as well.

Gary C:

Talk to me briefly about the original market for EVs in the UK. What were the main ones you could buy and which were the game changers?

But we look back on that time now, it's just like the first smartphone, or not even that, just the first phone, like a Nokia phone, in terms of where we've come since then. You had things like the Nissan Leaf, obviously, which everyone knows and there's still a lot of them hanging around now. That's about it, really.

Gary C:

We had Quentin Wilson on the show recently and he likes to tell the story because he and Robert Llewellyn picked up the i-MiEVs on the same day at the same time and they picked them up from somewhere in the Midlands and Quentin drove his home. He lives around the Stratford-on-Avon thing and he basically put the foot down going down the motorway and he ran out of charge and ended up having to knock on the door of some lady on the side of the street and just say, sorry, I've got one of these new electric vehicles. Do you mind if I plug in at your house for a little while?

And she went, oh no, come in. So she served him tea and coffee and he basically had to sit there and chat with her for three or four hours while he got just enough charge he can get back home. So absolutely fascinating.

Alex L:

It's incredible to look at that. Around that time, I think in the US, Ford had the Ford Focus Electric, but that never made its way here. That was quite an early sort of experiment for them and things like that, really.

Gary C:

I think at that time, it started to become a bit more serious for some of the manufacturers. It wasn't just this one-off experiment that they were going to do. It was a bit more, oh, we should probably do something with this.

Talk to me about the BMW i3.

Alex L:

I remember watching a documentary about that. it was very, very advanced in terms of its production and design because it was all carbon fibre, which was really advanced.

And there were obviously different versions of it. So you had a very small electric-only version to start with, and then later on it had much more range. And they had a range extender version as well, which they dropped from the line eventually.

Gary C:

They're actually really, really underrated vehicles.

So quite a way back. Absolutely faultless. Had a range of 120, maybe 130 miles if there was a lot of downhill involved.

Didn't charge more than 50 kilowatts. So we did spend a little bit of time at chargers, but he always tells the story. The only thing he had about it that he disliked was because he had the suicide doors, basically.

So they both open from the centre and pivot and hinge on the outside. And he had a young child at the time who had to sit in the back with the child seat. And under certain circumstances, if you parked in the wrong way, when you opened the doors to get the child out, you actually blocked yourself in if there was a car parked next to you and you couldn't get out.

He said it was a little infuriating. I was chatting with him recently. He said, I still look back fondly on the i3, he said, but those doors, not good at all.

Not good at all. So what do we think was the next leap after that?

So we've got the Leaf.

I mean, we've kind of conveniently glossed over the Zoe. Do you want to talk about the Zoe for a while?

Alex L:

Yeah, the original Zoe was, I think that was Renault's first, along with the Twizy at the same time, but it was Renault's first foray into the electric world.

Even a few years ago, I'm still seeing a common thread with this nowadays. I'm still seeing quite a few of them around. One thing with that one, which was really strange, is that they did the battery lease program, which thankfully with the second one they removed.

Because even now, if you try and buy one from the first year or two when it came out, you still got to sort of deal with the lease. And I don't really know the consequences if you don't pay for that lease, forget some angry man coming to your door.

Gary C:

It was interesting with the Zoe because it basically had two things that were going against it and two things that were going for it.

One is, it was relatively cheap in the big scheme of things. And two is, it had quite a reasonable range for such a small car. The two things that were going against it was, as you say, there was the battery leasing.

And the other issue that it had was it was AC charging only. And that was something that was consistent across the Renault range at the time, the different Zoes that they had, until they got to the most up-to-date one, the ZE50, which was the first one that had CCS. Now the plus side to that is that all the Renault Zoes charged reasonably quickly under AC.

They had 43 kilowatt AC charging, which is quite good in the big scheme of things. I mean, I've, my first electric was the Kia Soul and there were times when it wouldn't even charge 43 kilowatts DC, and here they were Renault with a 43 kilowatt AC. But what that also did was, that's now carried over onto some of the more modern ones, which we'll talk about next season with things like the Megane where, I mean, obviously it's got DC charging, but it will also charge really, really quickly.

You plug it into an AC charger and it will go straight up to 22 kilowatt AC charging, which not many vehicles will at the moment. So that's good. So what did we have after the Zoe?

What was the next kind of one that came in that everyone went?

Alex L:

So the Jaguar I-PACE, that really, considering all the conversation about Jaguar at the moment, Jaguar really doesn't have much budget to develop new cars really in the general scheme of things, compared to bigger German car manufacturers. For that sort of company to build a brand new EV ground up is pretty impressive really.

Yeah, and there seems to be quite a big, at the moment, there seems to be quite a big following of that car because it is quite impressive. I've never driven one, but from what I've heard, it is quite impressive.

Gary C:

I've ridden in one.

Gary Whittaker, friend of the podcast, actually came on and talked about his I-Pace. Took me out for a ride in it. Very, very, I mean, lovely inside, just as you'd expect from a Jaguar.

Very, very nice fit and finish on it. Very powerful. It's almost like a cult car.

The people who like it really, really like it. But it did have a couple of issues because one of the other things that we'll talk about on the podcast is the way the charging infrastructure has sort of increased. And one of the key things on that was Ecotricity, who originally were AC and Chademo.

And then when they put the DC charging onto their Ecotricity charges at the motorway service areas, the I-Pace was one of those that always tended to have handshake issues. So if you had an I-Pace and you tried to charge at a motorway service area, there was a very good chance that it would kind of go, no, really don't want to do that. And you might have to try two or three times, or you might just end up not being able to charge at all.

Now, yes, they've changed that now, they've updated it, and it tends to work everywhere. But that was one of the dings that went against the I-Pace. Was there any other key milestone in terms of the electric vehicles that came on the market?

Alex L:

Gary C:

I mean, I've got to put the hand up for my personal favourite and a much underrated, the Kia Soul. Of course, that was at that time.

Interesting vehicle, a compliance vehicle. So it was one that was created by Kia to allow them to sell into the California market so that they could meet the, is it CARB, the Clean Air something or other bureau in California, it was to meet their requirements.

The phrase I'm looking for here is the California Air Resources Board.

So it was basically a petrol car that they literally took all the petrol stuff out and put a motor and a battery in. And ugly as sin, as the saying goes, had a face only a mother could love, but extremely underrated as a vehicle. I drove one for four years and yeah, 105, 110 miles range, maybe 120 if it was nice and warm, but ultra reliable, lots of room inside.

Was that about right?

Alex L:

I believe so. Yeah.

And we're 20 years on and the Koreans are doing incredible work with anything they're doing and especially EVs. It's just, it's incredible to watch.

Gary C:

One of the things that they did, which was revolutionary at the time, and I think it's still not adopted by a lot of OEMs, is they gave the seven year warranty on the vehicle.

I mean, yeah, most OEMs will give a seven or eight year warranty on a battery now for an electric vehicle, but Kia slash Hyundai gave the seven year warranty for the whole lot, which gave a lot of people a lot of confidence to actually go in and buy one. So what do we know about the eNiro? You've driven the eNiro, the original one?

Alex L:

I've not driven the Ineo, no. I know Andrew Till has one of those. I guess he's a friend of the show, but yeah, he has one of those and he loves it.

And I've heard they're very good. So at some point I need to drive an original eNiro.

Gary C:

Warren Phillips, chair of EVA England, is also a huge fan of the Ineo.

I was chatting with him the other day and we were in the Ioniq 5N at the time, which is my all time favourite electric vehicle at the moment. And it's his. And I said to him, are you going to get one of these?

And he said, I might do. He said, but I really, really love the Ineo that I've got. It does everything I need.

It's comfortable, the software works, and it's got a huge range. you can get on a good day with the right weather, you can get 300 miles out of that. And for a car that's five years old, maybe six years old now, absolutely unbelievable.

Alex L:

I think the original things that people would be concerned about is, would it do enough miles for them, which is still a little bit of a concern. And then also, you're just powering it off the grid, which is dirty. That was one of the concerns, which isn't really a concern anymore, much anyway.

Gary C:

What I find interesting about that is, that wasn't necessarily misinformation at the time. I mean, there was a genuine concern that you would run out of charge. Because at the time, if you discount Tesla, a hundred miles, I mean, even on some of the 24 kilowatt-hour Leafs, 60 miles, 80 miles, there was a genuine concern.

Plus the powering off a dirty grid. Yeah, it wasn't quite as dirty as people thought, but it was a genuine concern. You're taking the pollution from the tailpipe and you're moving it to a power station somewhere.

And I think the key difference now is when you come to what we're hearing today, specifically, as we're recording this, they've just announced the closure of the Lotus, the closure of the Volkswagen plant at Luton. And of course, that's all EV-related, and they're trotting out all the old tropes, none of which are true anymore, and a lot of which are deliberate misinformation. And I think that's a key thing that's changed in the years since then.

We've gone from, this is a genuine issue and it needs to be addressed, to this is something I'm effectively making up to try and slow down the transition. And it's a big issue. We've got to do something about it.

I want to wrap this up. Any final thoughts, Alex?

Alex L:

It's definitely interesting to see what's going on at the moment, like the progress that's being made and all the other car companies sort of like struggling to compete with China a little bit.

And it is, for all the naysayers out there, you have to be optimistic, which really, really helps. And it's just interesting to watch. That's my main takeaway from what's happening at the moment.

Gary C:

These are, I think, key when it comes to public confidence in charging. They cover items such as reliability, payment processing, and payment transparency, roaming, and open data. None of these things were around when I started driving EVs.

Each one of them is like a small stepping stone in building public confidence in charging. Now, we discussed payment transparency in the payments episode with Sarah Sloman recently, episode 228. It's important that people know in advance how much it's likely to cost for their charging, whether it's a higher price for some of the ultra-rapid charge point operators or a more reasonable price for the likes of AC charging with Chargy.

Now, roaming is a big one for me, though. Now, I said it several times on this show, I don't care that there are numerous roaming operators. For me, the more, the merrier.

What I want, though, is regardless of which roaming operator I use, that it can roam across all CPOs in an area. Within reason, obviously. There are about 70 CPOs in the UK at the moment.

I'm looking for consistency among the top 10 or 15 major ones. So far, no... has achieved that.

I mean, who roams with GridServe, for example, or BP Pulse? Well, actually, GridServe are linked with the PlugSurfing app, it seems. Do we know anyone who uses that app in the UK?

And as for BP Pulse? Well, moving on. One thing I've seen at a macro level, which is very encouraging, is the increase in people who are starting to look at EV ownership alongside energy generation and the whole energy production equation.

They say that owning an EV is a gateway drug to bigger things, and it certainly was in my case. When you realise that you can power your car from things like solar panels, or that owning an EV gives you access to time-of-day tariffs, which can cut the price of electricity to your car and even your whole house, you then start to consider the bigger energy picture. Many new EVs have what's called vehicle-to-load facilities, and this can be useful when looking at alternate ways to power things around the house.

Friend of the podcast Andrew Till, who we've already mentioned, was able to pull energy from the battery of his IONIQ 5 when they had a power cut, and he could keep the fridge, TV and Wi-Fi router going. Rooter? Router?

Hey, tomato tomato. There are also companies like 3Ti who are looking at using energy from batteries in cars they're charging to help balance the grid. Their Papilio 3 install can link multiple CCS rapid charges to vehicles and the grid, and facilitate energy both ways to both reduce costs and charge cars at the same time.

In fact, there are buildings in Utrecht, Holland that have run almost a hundred percent from vehicle-to-grid energy pulled from cars connected to the building. Octopus Energy, who we've mentioned numerous times on the podcast, also have taken this a step further with their Octopus Zero Bills offering. If you're living in a new build house, kitted out with the right combination of solar panels, home battery and heat pump, this tariff will allow you zero bills for the first five years.

Guaranteed. All this is something which has increased or come into play over the last five or so years. But I couldn't do a Reflections episode without addressing the elephant in the room when it comes to EV adoption.

Range anxiety was a thing. I mean, the Nissan Leaf, the Kia Soul and the BMW i3 all topped out around 100 miles, maybe a little bit more on a good day. There were huge areas of the country with minimal to no charging infrastructure and the vehicles were, relatively speaking, incredibly expensive for what they were.

And these aspects and more were covered in the very first episode of this podcast, Myths and Legends. But since then, misinformation has become a lot more insidious. Poltering, the selective use of truths to mislead, alongside mainstream media printing one-sided inaccurate and uninformed pieces about EVs, have also become rife.

When it comes to misleading articles, I always tend to quote the same example. Usually it's written by a journalist who's never driven an EV before and indeed might not even be a motoring journalist. Could be a restaurant critic, no names, no pack drill, somebody who picked an EV up in London on Friday night with, usually, less than a full charge and then attempts to have a weekend away in Scotland with no preparation.

And naturally, it's gonna go wrong. In much the same way that when I first handed an iPhone to my elderly mother, she found it difficult to use and wanted to go back to her old dumb phone. Does that mean it was the wrong choice to go to smartphones?

Absolutely not. It meant there was a learning curve, as there is with most new things. Do you think people who drove horses and buggies all their lives could get into a Model T and instantly know how it all worked?

No, absolutely not. The likes of Quentin Wilson, Colin Walker, Lorna McAteer and the aforementioned Dr. Ewan McTurk, all former guests of the podcast, have joined forces with the Fully Charged team to create Stop Burning Stuff, which is focused on misinformation in the media.

And this has morphed into being part of Electric Vehicles UK, a body focused on improving EV uptake. Together, these people and groups are working to try and reduce misinformation and allow people to make more informed choices. about their EVs.

Now don't get me wrong, whilst I would love everyone to be driving around in an EV, the fact is that there are many people for whom the move doesn't make sense at the moment. If you do lots of daily miles and you don't have home charging, it could be a challenge. If you need something that can sit seven people, tow a two-ton caravan and not lose too much range in the cold weather, that might be difficult.

But that's why we have an adoption curve rather than the cliff edge. My interest is making sure that people who are on the adoption curve are informed enough to make the right decision based on facts, rather than listening to some of the naysayers on social media. And I think that goes for a lot of my listeners.

This season we're looking at raising the awareness of carbon literacy with our listeners and one way we're doing that is with a carbon fact as read by carbon literacy trainer, Anse 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 limit.

Gary C:

That's a staggering 48% increase from the previous year. Wind power has also seen significant growth reaching 480 gigawatts as the nation accelerates its commitment to clean energy sources. This rapid expansion highlights China's leading role in the global transition to a more sustainable energy future.

We'd love to see this.

I hope you enjoyed listening to today’s show.

It was put together this week with the help of Dr Euan McTurk and Alex Lowe. Links to their respective sites are in the show notes.

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

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Thanks as always to my co founder Simone. You know he loves to sit and reminisce about when he was a young kid and could still look at the world and marvel at the things around him. Unlike the old cynics we both are now. In particular we were talking about the brand new toilets they’ve just installed at his workplace and how they’re built on the Bauhaus principals.

Alex L:

I remember watching a documentary about that because it was very very advanced in terms of its production and design because it was all carbon fiber which was really advanced.

Gary C:

Thanks for listening. Bye!