Alan drives a Polestar 2 Long Range Dual Motor 2022 electric car and shares his experiences to-date on public charging.

What do you think of the UK public charging network in general?

Variable. Recently drove from south of London to Inverness and then drove the North Coast 500 coming back via Whitby & York. Generally. the motorway network as far north as Perth was excellent. Reliable chargers, simple to use and almost no waiting. Especially impressed by City of York’s charging hub. North of Perth it gets a bit flaky. Nothing over 50kW, seemingly all owned/operated by ChargePlace Scotland and extremely variable levels of reliability with a very clunky app and web payment portal.

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What and where are your favourite UK public chargers?

IONITY

What’s been your best experience with a UK public charger?

IONITY – all work flawlessly with my Plugsurfing card, very quick and I’ve only had one occasion when I needed to call them to get some remote help.

What’s been your worst experience with a UK public charger?

ChargePlace Scotland. Without their RFID card (and why would I have one living south of London?) their machines are difficult to use. We also experienced non-starting machines, slow running machines and one completely non-functional machine. None accepted contactless payment. That said, their help centre were really helpful and really nice but you really shouldn’t need to call them almost everytime you use one of their machines.

What’s got to change about public charging in the UK to get more people driving electric cars?

Universal contactless payment so any user can rock up, plug in, tap to pay and charge would be the single biggest improvement in the UK charging network. After all, it’s pretty much how we pay for petrol & diesel.

See other public charging reports here