Wilverine drove from Manchester to Inverness in his Vauxhall Corsa-e 2021 electric car.
Introducing your road trip
Manchester to Inverness +287 miles.
Planning & preparation
I wanted to drive the section of the NC500 that Richard Hammond chose for an episode of The Grand Tour. I had already driven from Rochdale to Moffat & ChargePlace Scotland have an extensive & reliable network. I checked the route using Zap-Map & selected primary & secondary charging points along the route.
Charging
I could have gotten all the way to the first campsite in Nairn with only using 2 rapid chargers but I added a pleasant coffee break in Pitlochry for extra peace of mind. The rapid charger in Nairn didn’t fire up at the first attempt but the helpful chap on the 24h helpline soon sorted it out. We went to Culloden Battlefield one day & I discovered a brand new rapid charger that had just come online.
The NC500 has about as many chargers as petrol stations, it was amusing to see signs for ‘Last petrol for 50 miles’ dotted around the place. Oh, my sweet summer child…
The rapid charger over in Poolewe was out of service but we were stopping for a couple of days & the campsite were happy to let me use the 3-pin mains adaptor.
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Did you encounter any great driving roads on your road trip? If so, where were they and why were they great?
The NC500 is well worth the trip, just bring your 3-pin adaptor for peace of mind. Chargeplace Scotland do an excellent job of maintaining the network but outages may leave you high & dry. The sad thing is that some of the outages are a result of local funding cutbacks. The Hammond 287 route cuts the North East section out: from Golspie to Scourie. Beautiful scenery but be ready for sections of single track road and closures due to snow.
The Vauxhall Corsa-e
Long range journeys in an EV are distinctly less physically draining than an equivalent ICE journey. Stopping to use a rapid charger is less inconvenient (and sometimes faster) than a bathroom break. It’s easy to monitor your range & predict your energy consumption vs. cruising speed. If you approach bingo energy, the sat nav automatically finds you the 5 closest chargers & presents a single-button selection screen so that you can re-route yourself at a glance.
Economic driving will dramatically stretch your range and prolonged high speed will equally drastically diminish your range. The occasional burst of rapid acceleration is, thankfully, inconsequential on the overall power usage; which is nice because even fully laden & spending hours at economical speeds it’s refreshing to tear away from the lights like a greyhound out of a trap to the dismay of an overpowered BMW turbo diesel.
Road trip conclusion
So successful that my wife started planning the next one during the return trip, this time aiming even further afield. Also, she routinely borrows my EV for long journeys.
*library image used for Corsa-e.
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