The Electric Principal Goes To England – Driving An Electric Car In Rural England
[Music] Hey, this is Bob Flirty, the electric principal, and I’m so excited to share my uh video that I took of my trip to England, where I rent an electric car, put on a lot of miles, uh in the hopes of really finding out what it’s like to travel with electric car, particularly in rural England, and uh to see how doable that experience was uh because I had heard that, you know, it was a difficult thing to do, uh not the easiest thing in the world. So, what I’m going to do here briefly is share with you a brief kind of uh route that I took to show you where I was going, the areas I was driving to, uh, a few of the things I saw, but it’s a it’s this is really not a travel log. This is this is meant to be about electric cars. And then I’ll share some of the experiences I had along the way. Uh, and you know, finally, what I’m going to do is, uh, if you would like to travel in England and rent an electric car, uh, I’ll I’ll give you some, uh, pointers that I learned along the way. Uh, but the first thing I want to say is it’s very doable. It was a lot of fun. Truly enjoyed it, and I learned a lot. So, without further ado, here we go. So, I’m just going to give you a brief overview of our trip plan. We were going to fly from Denver to Heathrow where we rented our electric car at Sixth Rental. Uh, and by the way, you know, uh, driving on the wrong side of the road from the American perspective, uh, in a major city was a was a really was a baptism by fire. Then we went to Stow on the Wald, which was a really nice little rural setting. a lot of preserved architecture, beautiful old cars, uh, countryside. We spent a couple of days there and then from there we drove up to Coventry because I’m an old history teacher and I wanted to see the old cathedral uh that was bombed out by the Germans uh during World War II. And then from there we proceeded to Elely uh which is where Robera’s sister lives and uh wonderful old cathedrals, beautiful town and not much tourism there which was kind of nice. From there, I took a short drive to Dexford uh to go see the old World War II air base and saw some fantastic World War II aircraft flying, no less uh while we were there. Uh and then we took a a side trip uh northeast uh to Shipdom, England, and that’s where my dad was stationed during World War II. And I was really hoping to go see the control tower there, but it’s it’s all cordoned off. It’s been turned into a crane construction site. Uh, and for all intents and purposes, it is no more. After spending the afternoon in Shiptim, we took a short journey to Norwich where we spent the night. Uh, and then the following morning, bright and early, we headed off back to the big city uh, and back to Heathrow airport for our trip uh, uh, to Italy where we continued our journey. Hey, this is Bob Flity, the electric principal, and I am in Stowe in the Katzswalts uh of England. Uh and it’s kind of known as a a place that has a lot of old architecture, very agrarian uh here. And uh I thought, you know, if I can go to England and drive an electric car in the Cotswwells, uh I can drive them anywhere. And uh it’s been quite an adventure the last couple of days. I did uh rent a Pujo 3008, which is a really nice car. That that thing is uh beautiful. The exterior is gorgeous. The interior’s got a nice layout. Really like the car. Uh what I do miss is I miss the charging speeds of my Ionic 5. Uh because this thing does not charge fast at all. But in general, let’s let’s talk about the experience so far. So, this is a Tesco level two charger and it’s, you know, Podpoint is the app that you would use uh to use this charger and you have to bring your own plug. You know, you got the plug that goes from one end to the car. This actually is a plug-in hybrid that’s charging here right now. The problem with it is is that it’s not easy to use or get this app. And what I mean by that is, you know, when you try to sign up for this particular app, it uh it wants you to order a card, uh it wants you to have a a English address and phone number. Uh if you just try to use what you have in America for your address and your phone number, you just can’t get the app to work. So, there are a lot of these around in Stow. Uh there’s four or five of them. Uh but I’ve had an extremely difficult time trying to get to use them. And it would be so convenient because they’re they’re fairly inexpensive to charge here. Uh and you’re going to get, you know, your 30 m per hour, only 7 kilowatts, maybe not quite that much. Um but the app makes it almost impossible to get a hold of because it doesn’t really have a guest function where you can just quickly do that. And the other thing is on this one is there is no um access point where you can just put a credit card and that would make life so much easier. Now, I know in the US that’s kind of a a a blessing and a curse cuz a lot of times they don’t work. But since there’s four or five of these in stove, I’d have a chance of getting one or two of them to work at least uh if I could use my credit card, but I can’t. So, you know, I couldn’t get a level two charger to work there anywhere near sto on the wall. So, you might think, well, Bob, you look pretty calm. Why aren’t you panicking? Well, cuz I really didn’t need to charge at that point. you know, I had enough charge left over uh from Heathrow, the original charge in the car that I wasn’t really really panicked. So, what did I end up doing? Well, in this case, uh I just waited till I had an opportunity to go to a DC fast charger and that problem was solved. But as far as driving electric cars in England, what’s really nice is, you know, things are not that far away. Uh I mean, I can drive halfway across this country on one charge. And so that’s been a pleasant surprise. And and you know, for the most part, the speeds I’m going are fairly low. So far, consistently around 60 mph. So the energy use isn’t that bad. I mean, we’ve been, you know, somewhere between 3.5 4.5 miles per kilowatt hour. And and that has not been a a difficult thing to do. So we’re going to go through some of this a little more detail in the video. Stay tuned here. Uh, and uh, hey, I’m enjoying England. Uh, Robera’s now had a couple days of driving, right? And and when we first started driving, we were only going about half speed, right? We’d go maybe maybe 40 miles in the 60 zone sometimes. And I know that my British uh, and English uh, followers will say, “You you Americans are the problem.” Well, we were. we admit it, but the roads are so much narrower uh and there’s no shoulder uh on any of the roads we’ve been on. And so it’s a little nerve-wracking being on the right side of the car and being in the left lane and kind of trying to see what’s going on, right? Yeah. Trying to see where your wheels are. Yeah. And this car is very wide. Yeah. It’s not the narrowest vehicle in the world. So that’s kind of where we’re at. So, the rest of the story here is uh uh that, you know, when Robera says the the roads are narrow and the car is too wide, she’s exactly right. Uh and you know, no problem on the M system, the big interstates version in England, no problem at all. But those side roads, those country roads with 60 mph speed limits, when a car was coming towards you and you were on the left side of the road and you’re heading down the path, uh, you know, in the right side driver’s seat, you felt like maybe you were going to hit that car coming at you. Uh, and the truth be told, you’d compensate by by going towards the left to the shoulder or really lack thereof. Uh, there is no shoulder. And so once in a while you’d you’d hit that edge and you would feel it especially when you’re the passenger sitting right next to that edge on the left hand side. And to be honest, my blood pressure and I’m sure Roberas was as well when I was driving just kind of goes through the roof. I would use the word terrified sometimes to be honest. I mean, I have to would I would have to say there were times where I I was slightly terrified that we were going to go off the road and you’re saying, “Oh my gosh, we cannot take this car off the road. You know, we got we got to stay on the road.” So, that took a bit of getting used to. And once you get used to the angles that you’re seeing when you’re driving, it’s fine, but go get yourself a small car, right? I mean, there’s a reason the Brits drive little tiny cars, right? Uh that are half the size of ours. And I think one of the reasons is because the roads are so narrow. Uh you know, you can’t replace every single road in England and and make them wide with these these these uh uh areas on the side of the road that are 6 ft wide like in the States. Uh so you got to get used to that. Drive a smaller car. Boy, if I was going to do this again, I would have gotten a Volkswagen ID3, a little tighter, a little smaller. It would have been perfect. So, one of the uh ways you get to the charging menu, it’s kind of in the middle of the car here, is you just slide this over and it gets you to uh applications. Touch that. And once I’m there, I can look up on the screen and it gives me a new set of choices up here. And so, we’re just going to push energy. There we go. and it’s going to kind of uh give us uh what we have here. We can just kind of go through the menus here, the history. All right, since last start, we we did 3.8 miles per kilowatt per hour. And considering at times we were doing um you know, pretty high speeds. That’s not bad. But let’s look at 30 mile range. That’s actually overall 80% history we want down here. 30 miles 3.8 8 is that’s pretty darn good cuz that’s all today’s driving. Uh and uh I’m pretty impressed with that. Uh considering some of the speeds we were reaching. Uh it seems like the car is pretty efficient in England. So we stopped in Ketar and uh we have 54 miles to go till we get to Ele and that’s where Ba sisters live. So uh we have you know 101 miles to go. Uh, but this is the closest fast charger to Elely. Uh, except if we head south down to Cambridge, then we have a couple others. So, we’re going to make a stop here. The car doesn’t exactly charge as fast as a Demon. Uh, but we’re going to we’re going to put it in a good chunk of fuel so that when we go visit her sister, we have no worries about fueling up. And sometime when we go and head down to Cambridge, we’ll have fuel again. Now, we’re at 46%. We have 82 kW. You’ll notice this Tesla charger is different than others, right? Because first of all, the cord is the same, but the plugin is a CCS plug uh designed for Europe. Uh right now we’re at a whopping 87 kW. That said, with some sarcasm cuz we’re at 47%. And we put 1.6. And once again, we are charging a little uh earlier than I normally would because um you know, we want to have plenty of fuel in the car when we get to Roberta’s sister’s house in Elely, England. So, uh all going smoothly, but not quite as quickly as I would like. So So that the charging isn’t blazing hot here at 61%. We’re at 50 kilowatts. But the good news is, and the reason I’m using Tesla chargers, because I usually don’t use them in the States, uh, is because it’s really easy to use here. My app that I have, uh, that works in the States, also works here. I don’t have to download another app. I don’t have to look for a European version, which I can’t because my phone is hooked up into the US app store. I don’t have access to those things right now. And somebody out there smarter than I am is probably think there’s a way for me to do that. But right now I’m just using the Tesla chargers because it’s simpler even though it’s painfully slow here. It’s really part of a dealership because you’ve got cars parked here with Tesla. You’ve got a a sign on the car that says uh you could pay 349 pounds a month for 36 months. 8,000 miles and 12 months uh you pay in advance plus that. But you know, you don’t have to drive that much here. And when you do drive, it’s not that many miles. So I think 8,000 would do just fine. This is typical, right? We’re cruising across here and we’re trying to figure out where we’re going to go. It’s got trucks on it. Yep. Trucks. Dogs crossing. There we go. Lots of these bumps right here. Boom. Boom. Okay. Now, in 7 miles, we’re just going to keep going straight here. At 7 miles, we’ll take a left turn. There we go. All right. Bounce. Bounce. So, city driving takes a lot of concentration. Roads narrow. You’ve got to give right away to people coming the other direction all the time. Um, got little narrowings here. You know, I look at that and I’m not sure why they did that, but the streets are already narrow enough. You don’t have to artificially do it at the crosswalks, which is what they do. Kind of pull pull you towards the center in the crosswalks. Hello. Hello. So, your name is Hello. My name is uh Georgesov. I’m origin from Bulgaria, but I live in UK 12 years. Oh, okay. And actually I drive Audi Q7 but yesterday I traveling from Bulgaria to UK with my car and I spent like two months in Bulgaria do it surgery in my leg and do it the miles uh and I leave my car today in uh Northampton to change the oil and they give me courtesy car full electric with 35 miles away just to drive it. I don’t know how to use uh to charge a car. And praise the Lord. Thank you, God. I see that wonderful man here to help me. Yeah. And this is a a Q6 he’s got. I mean, they weren’t cheap. They gave him one of the best electric cars you can buy. But as usual, they did not teach anybody anything about it. So, we’re going to do is use my Tesla app. I’m going to plug him in for a little bit, give him some energy, my good deed for the day, uh, and then we’ll move on. And so, this is not unfamiliar in America either. Same situation all the time, especially with rental cars or or cars that people are given as a uh loaner cars. Well, thanks. Actually, actually, I have 25 miles to go to my home. If I don’t charge the car, I can’t go home. Yeah. Well, he wants to go home. All right. So, let’s get going. First time he’s plugged in an electric car. It’s my first time. So, we’re at a Tesla charger. We’re plugging it in. Push it in all the way there. Make sure it clicks. Yeah. Yeah. That’s good. All right. All right. Now, we’re going to see what’s happening over here. We’ll come on this side. and we’ll take a look and see if we have magic. Okay, it looks like the it’s communicating. And so we’re going to give him about 10 minutes of charging. There we go. 1 kilowatt. That’s not fast yet. 13. Do I hear 25? Let’s see how fast this thing goes up to. Okay. Yeah. Now, now we’re starting to cruise a little bit. But my little Pujo uh 3008 could not charge anywhere near as fast as this thing because he’s already at 117 kilowatts and that Pujo has never charged that fast. But he has got a super cool Q6. So tell him they gave you a nice electric car, but they got to tell people how to charge it if it’s empty. Yes, that’s true. Right. Right. And so right now he’s already got almost a kilowatt in there. So, we’re just going to wait about 10 minutes and we’ll get him some miles and away we go. So, right now we are charging at uh he’s got 96 miles in here and he’s charging at 128 kW and that’s way better. Accomplished. You’re ready to roll. It was a pleasure meeting you. Thank you so much. Now I go home safe. Thank you so much. All right. Bye-bye. Bur and I were just uh taking a few minutes to talk about the difference just little differences that we’ve noticed driving. Since we’ve got 9.6 miles before we have to do any roundabouts, we could we can do this because we don’t have to think too much uh about what we’re doing. But uh a couple things that are that are that are different. Uh number one is there are no political stickers on any cars of any kind. None. It’s kind of pleasant. You know, the argument in politics doesn’t continue on the on the highways, right? Driving along. Yeah. You’re not you’re not saying, “Well, that guy’s dumb because he’s got a he’s got a sticker from a different party.” And and Robera notices something about the license plates. Yeah. There’s there’s no uh vanity plates. So, um which I kind of miss because it’s fun to see people’s, you know, how they form words and express themselves. And there’s seven or eight, well, it looks like seven letters on the license plate. So, you know, I think England’s missing out a source of revenue there for vanity plates because there there’s a lot of words that can form seven letters and it would be fun, but no one has one. So, I don’t know why that is. There also there are like we’ve talked about before, there’s we haven’t encountered any accidents and I think in America we would have some accidents for sure. At least 15 by now. Yeah. And that ever it’s although the it’s confusing because there’s so many winding things and roundabouts and ways to go that but people either know their way very well but no one seems to change their mind and have to wedge in like certainly I do back in America I maybe in the left lane and then think oh well I really think I should duck in here so I rely on people to let me in to change. And I I’ve seen none of that. There’s no backups and with very few traffic lights and certainly none that are long, there’s no line of cars waiting at a light and then having to go quickly to beat the light before it changes again. Right. So, everything’s moved really smoothly for all those reasons. And I Yeah, we’re just sticking in this lane and we got to we got to roll here because we’re in the right lane. Yeah, I’m rolling. Yeah, 270 here. I’m doing 69. Yeah, I’ll do I’m doing something. But I know people are hanging behind us and I’m sure they’re saying, “Why don’t you get evol?” Well, they haven’t they haven’t haunted me, nor will they. So, so we’ll see how many cars pass us now that we’re doing the speed limit. We’re doing over the speed limit. You know, the other thing is I don’t see anybody getting really angry. You know, nobody I mean, we’ve made our share of mistakes, but I I don’t see anybody uh uh giving us uh fers. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, signs of their displeasure. Yeah. Well, there was one, but that’s cuz I almost hit him. But he he had a scowl more than anything else. Yeah. He didn’t leap out of his car to tell me what he thought about me. Right. Yeah. There there seems to be uh just from our little little survey of the uh England between Norwich and London is there’s not a lot of road rage in the at stone. So to conclude, there’s there’s three tips I would give anybody who is thinking of renting an electric car uh over in England uh coming from the states. Number one is get a small car. Don’t rent a big pujo like I did. Uh nice car, but too big for the roads. Uh we don’t need that big a car. Everybody drives small cars in England, and that’s because I just think they’re way easier to drive through those narrow streets. So, get yourself a good ID3, get yourself a small Fiat, uh get yourself any car that’s got a little bit of decent range. Uh doesn’t even have to be that great and drive it because you’ll have a much more enjoyable experience. Uh number two is, hey, when we drove, I navigated for the most part. Robera drove. Robera doesn’t like navigating. She finds it difficult. Uh but I enjoy it. Uh and it just worked better. You’re going into all kinds of new situations. Uh you’re doing a lot of roundabouts. You’re doing things that normally in America we don’t have to do. Roadsides are different. Streets are different. Parking is different. Uh you name it. So have somebody navigate. Have the other person drive. It’ll make a better experience. Uh, and last but not least, uh, you know, when you do this is, you know, use the Tesla chargers because they’re way cheaper. They’re about half the price that I would normally pay using, uh, uh, a different brand of charger there because the discounts uh, that I get uh, from Tesla when I pay that $13 fee per month on the Tesla app. Uh, and uh, it’s well worth it when you go to England to sign up for that uh, and use it because you’re you’re going to save money. And you can see from from this little picture that there’s there’s a lot of Tesla chargers in this country, especially the southern part driving east to west, north uh, to south uh, in the lower half of the country. It is not a problem uh, just using Tesla chargers. But, you know, feel free to use other brands. Almost all of them take credit cards. uh and you’ll be just fine. So, go to England, enjoy yourself, and uh enjoy the new experience for many of you of driving electric car in England. Hey, thanks for joining the channel. If you like this content, please subscribe. I really do appreciate it. We want to keep the channel growing and we’ll see you the next time on the Electric Principle. [Music]
The Electric Principal takes a road trip in rural England in an electric car. This was my first time driving in England and I wanted to see how difficult it would be to find chargers. I had been told by several people it would almost be impossible and that I should rent a gas car…no way!
