Why we got rid of our electric car

We sold our electric car last week. I have been thinking about it for a while now as we were frustrated with broken charging points, maps pointing to charging stations that are not available to the public, and an inability to travel long distances. The final straw was the council removing the charging stations at Duthie Park and Holburn Street in Aberdeen. We depend on these to charge our car as we have no driveway and cannot charge it at home. The council do not permit residents to lay a cable across the pavement although I have seen others do this. They are replacing the Duthie Park charging point but it’s been out of action for a month and they’ve not provided any alternative in the meantime.

Prior to selling the car I was running three miles to and from a charging point in town and because our car takes several hours to charge I had to go back again to collect it later. Then the final-final straw was getting a parking ticket from Aberdeenshire Council when I plugged it into the charging station in the Stonehaven carpark. Since we can’t charge our car at home we often choose destinations that have somewhere to charge so we went for lunch in Stonehaven with dad one day only to return and discover a parking ticket. Typically an electric car doesn’t have to pay for a separate parking ticket at pay and display car parks because we pay for a connection fee at the charging station in addition to the electricity we use. Since my car sometimes takes 12 hours to charge it would be absurd to require me to also pay for 12 hours of parking.

There are some new charging stations at a fuel station near us but none support the type 2 charger our car required. In the years we’ve had our electric car I haven’t seen any improvement at all in the infrastructure which made me think our car was becoming obsolete. The infrastructure that is going in supports EV owners with newer faster chargers who can charge at home and only require recharging on motorways for longer journeys. That is not us as our car can’t do long journeys and we have no charging at home so we depend on destination chargers like the one at Duthie Park for day-to-day charging. Motorway charging is useless because we don’t want to sit waiting beside a motorway for several hours while the car is charging. The other disincentive is the price of electricity at charging stations. The market rate for electricity is now around 23p per kWh which is how much we pay at home. The rate at public charging stations is 47p per kWh with an additional connection fee of around £1.

The kids are disappointed we no longer have an electric car but I hope it’s not forever and I pointed out that the best thing we can do environmentally is not drive very much and that is still the case. We walk and cycle every where in town, indeed I can now drive less as I’m not having to drive to charging points all over the place. We would have gone back to using the car club but they don’t allow pets which is no good for us now that we have a cat. Instead we got a cheap second-hand ULEZ-compliant combustion engine car which is worth less than our old car but without the range-anxiety, a working heater for winter, and a big boot for all our crap when we go on holiday.