I’m listening to the wireless, parked in a disorderly queue at a rank of Ionity fast chargers, all of them occupied. I’ve been here for 20 minutes already and one woman is having a meltdown with the operator about why she can’t charge her Kia, while a man is pointlessly squeezing the last few per cent of range into his Mercedes-Benz.
Meanwhile, down in what the Cornish call ‘That London’, Vicky Read, CEO of the charging trade body Charge UK is being featherbedded by Radio 4’s Today programme. She’s doing a great job dodging questions about the National Audit Committee report saying the charging industry has picked all the low-hanging fruit installing chargers in the South East, but done little about dealing with rural areas and installing facilities for the disabled.
Later on, we’ve got Ed Miliband, Secretary of State for energy security and net zero and bacon sandwich fan. I can’t wait, but I’ve got to as the next car, a BMW with a 100kWh battery, takes its place on a charger. When I took delivery of this long-term test Ford Mustang Mach-E at the beginning of the year, Ionity charging was an outlier in pricing its fast chargers at about 85 pence per kWh; these days that’s normal and I recently had to pay £1.12 plus a hook-up fee at a Shell Recharge.
