My annual circumnavigation of mainland Britain and Northern Ireland presented the perfect opportunity to try to prove that it was not only possible, but, ideally, a breeze to complete a four-week road trip in an electric van.
Volkswagen thought so too, lending me an all-electric ID Buzz five-seater van, in two-tone candy white and bay leaf green, for the duration. The specs were as impressive as its surfy two-tone looks: an 84kWh battery that charged from 5 to 80 per cent in as little as 30 minutes and claimed a maximum range of up to 293 miles.
The job was to survey the English, Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish coasts — a distance of some 4,800 miles — but since I had the entire month of May to complete the journey I set a maximum of 240 miles a day, leaving a minimum 53-mile safety buffer within which to find a charger for my anticipated daily 30-minute top-up. That may sound overcautious, but over the 16 years I’ve been doing this journey, I’ve seen loads of old service stations closed down, but never seen a new one open.
You need apps to find chargers. A single app won’t do because you can’t be sure that it lists all locations, or that it will communicate with the actual charger you want to use so you can get loyalty discounts and receipts, so I downloaded Charge Assist, Electroverse, InstaVolt, Plugsurfing, Pod Point and Zapmap. They’re all free, because they make their money in a variety of ways — that may include commission from charging providers, advertising or data analytics, for example — and soon their icons were crowding my phone.
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