Inside the charge point factory
The BBC’s Brian Milligan attempts to drive an electric Mini from London to Scotland, using only public charge points.
Just before Christmas, the government proudly announced that 2011 would be remembered as the year the electric car took off.
In an attempt to make that prophecy come true, it announced a subsidy of £5,000 for each electric car sold in the UK.
But what is electric motoring actually like?
Does it bear any resemblance to the smug self-satisfaction of those who glide along in petrol-lubricated luxury, untroubled by the fear that they might not actually reach their destination?
Because despite the hype of the battery revolution, it is still not easy to drive an electric car any further than the supermarket and back.
So, in what is arguably an unfair test of a car designed mostly for short-distance motoring, the BBC decided to try and drive an electric Mini the 484 miles from London to Edinburgh.
It is unfair in one sense, but surely fair in another: if the electric car really has come of age, won’t potential owners want to know that if they wanted to, they could drive it from London to Manchester and back at the weekend, to see uncle and auntie?
It would be easy to charge the car by asking successive pub landlords between Westminster and the Royal Mile if they wouldn’t mind you plugging into their electricity supply while you had a drink.
That is until you mentioned that it might need a ten hour charge and would need to leave a cable dangling out of the window overnight.
No, the only practical way for drivers to charge their cars is by using public charge points, of which there are thought to be as many as 500 in the UK.
No one has actually added them up.
Even OLEV, the government office for low emission vehicles, doesn’t know exactly how many there are.
So are there enough? And are they spaced correctly for me to get to Edinburgh within a working week?
To try and get a better idea of feasibility we went to visit Calvey Taylor-Haw, who runs a business called Elektromotive.
At a factory in Lancing, West Sussex, he manufactures many of the electric charging posts that make up the network.
After looking at the map, he pronounces that the journey as far as Tyneside is perfectly achievable.
But between Northumberland and Edinburgh it will be a significant challenge.
“The gap is 87 miles,” he says, “which is more than the range of your car.”
“Ideally you need another charging post half way between the two. Otherwise you are going to suffer range anxiety.”
From where I’m about to sit, that’s a serious understatement.
You can follow Brian’s journey here on the BBC News technology page – or for more up-to-the-minute updates, he will be tweeting from the #electriccars hashtag on the BBC Business Twitter feed and sharing other material via the BBC Business Facebook page
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