According to The Guardian, a Kent couple’s 130-mile (209 km) drive home from Bournemouth, England, took over nine hours as Linda Barnes and her husband met with a multitude of non-functional or sub-par chargers for their Porsche Taycan 4S.
“We left Bournemouth with 45 miles of range left and followed the car’s navigation system to the nearest fast charger, plugged it in but nothing happened,” she says. “A parking attendant told us it had been out of action for weeks.”
The couple went through another five charging stations — a slow charger at a nearby Porsche garage that gave them enough juice to get to the next motorway services (the EV charger at which was also out of order), a largely unhelpful 7 kW slow charger (most EVs today need fast 50 kW-100 kW chargers to recharge quickly), one that was simply not operational and had an uninformed local staff, and a Supercharger that, while offers up to 250 kW of power output per car, only serves Tesla owners.
The Porsche Taycan 4S, the Taycan Turbo‘s little brother, comes with all the latest trinkets and has a 250-mile range.
However, an excruciating evening like the one Linda and her husband experienced is enough to give anyone buyer’s remorse, seeing as the same journey in a conventional car would have only taken the couple two and a half hours.
According to Edmund King, the president of The AA (the British equivalent of AAA), the couple was simply “incredibly unlucky”.
While that may be true, this incident highlights significant issues with the U.K.’s EV charging network — issues that will need to be remedied if the government hopes to ban the sale of new petrol/diesel-operated cars by 2030.
Below is a map of Bournemouth to Kent:
This is why when you buy a Tesla, you get access to the growing Tesla Supercharger network. When you have a planned journey, your Tesla routes you to Superchargers and you get real-time status updates of chargers and whether or not they are online or offline.
Here’s Tesla Superchargers shown along the way:
Tesla has a huge lead in this department compared to traditional automakers and it’s something that should be highlighted as a major advantage when you buy a car from Elon Musk.
