I haven’t written one of these posts for some time as the public charging infrastructure has improved significantly in scale and reliability over the last three years. However, so far today has been a bit like returning to the bad old days.

We’re driving from Northampton to Stoke for one of our daughter’s regular gymnastics events. It’s fairly relaxed as with the new i3 94Ah we have plenty of range to get there without charging en route.

However as the family needed two comfort breaks on the way I took the opportunities to try charging. The results were disappointing.

At Corley Services on the M6 there was a Leaf at one of the two Ecotricity charge points. Unfortunately it was the only one that had a CCS connector compatible with the i3 so I could see I wasn’t going to get a charge. In fact it looked like he was having problems and was on the phone to Ecotricity. However when I came back out of the building later I could see and hear he was charging.

I was more hopeful at Stafford services when pulling in as both charge points were vacant. However I had 3 failed attempts to charge using the Ecotricity app, with the message ‘Remote Start failed’.

At that point I gave up and we got back on the motorway. At least with the i3 94Ah we could get where we were going without needing to charge.

[Part 2]