Five things that would make charging an EV much simpler
With EV sales soaring in many countries and the Tesla Model Y now the world’s best-selling vehicle, ahead of the Toyota Corolla, it makes sense to look at how our network of charging points urgently needs to grow. Sadly, the evidence suggests that so far, the customer experience has been a disaster.
Let’s start with the basics: recharging an electric vehicle should not be a stressful experience. We’re not talking about flammable liquids or dicing with death, and charging times are, in many cases, a perfectly manageable 15 minutes. However, accustomed as I am to getting around with a Tesla vehicle for four years now, all of my bad experiences with charging have originated when I’ve tried to use another company’s charger. A couple of weeks ago, driving a Tesla rented from Hertz in Italy, it happened to me again: arriving at a charger next to my hotel, and supposedly having to go through an absurd process in a foreign language to sign up for a network that I will never use again. I finally ended up driving fifteen more kilometers to go to a Tesla Supercharger (I had plenty of charge left, so it was no real sweat). Car rental companies typically encourage you to use charging points they have agreements with (in my case it was, of course, Tesla’s own chargers and those at Shell gas stations, and in both cases the charges are applied directly to the card…
