For sure you need at least an outdoor socket, so you can charge over night.
Google tells me the Polestar 2 has 330 miles of range, so you could do the 5h30m drive from Swansea to Norwich on a single charge - if you leave home with a full charge.
But if you can't leave home with a full charge? If you've got a complicated schedule, like using a charger at work but only working 1 day a week? I can see how that would be a lot more hassle. And public fast chargers cost 4-5x as much as charging at home too.
The UK is about 300 miles across and about 600 miles long, so there's not that much scope for long trips. Mind you, I've done the 400 miles of Edinburgh to south coast quite a few times myself.
(Currently thinking of getting a Peugeot E208, if anyone has any experience with those?)
It's pretty hard to drive in a straight line in the UK though, so even though it's 600 miles from John O groats to Lands end, it's actually 840 miles of a drive. Longer if sections of the M6 are closed.
But, I do agree with you. Driving 400 miles here from Edinburgh to Southend is not a straight 400 mile motorway drive at 75mph like it would be in the US, it's practically guaranteed to hit standstill traffic at one point or another. I'm sure you technically _could_ do that journey in one sitting in a car, but the vast, vast majority of people will be pulling over to break, even if it's just to the bathroom.
I drove from Edi to Cornwall , which is about 550 miles. We stopped twice on the journey, once for a coffee/toilet break (15 minutes by the time the coffee was made and we had queued for the toilet), and once for food (45m). Adding 1 hour onto a 9 hour drive was not a deal breaker, and if it was then we wouldn't have made it on time because we were also delayed by numerous breakdowns, accidents, lane closures, horses on the M6. We lost more time to all of that than we did to rest stops.
I've had e208 from on.to. It's a lovely nimble city car.
The downside is that it charges at 60-80kW, and it's not especially efficient car either. Purely from BEV perspective it's a low-end performance for a mid-range price.
I've heard that e3008 is better, but the first gen EV powertrains from Stellantis just weren't good.
ID.3 is a bit better with charging speed, and Hyundai/Kia's e-GMP platform runs circles around them with 2-3x faster charging for not much more money.
Not especially efficient? Hmm, I'd noticed that range per kWh varies a lot but not checked in detail. That's disappointing.
The Ioniq series look amazing and are very popular, but are significantly larger cars (disadvantage for me, maybe advantage for others).
Edit: on.to? oh.no more like:
> "On 11 September 2023 Jonathan Lees and Gavin Maher of Teneo Financial Advisory Limited were appointed as Joint Administrators of Onto Holdings Limited. On the same date, Gavin Maher and Ian Wormleighton were also appointed as Joint Administrators over Onto Tech 1 Limited, Onto Tech 2 Limited, Onto Tech 3 Limited and Onto Tech 4 Limited, each a subsidiary of Onto Holdings Limited (together "the Companies"). "
:(
It does vary a lot. In city it's easily 4mi/kWh or more. But I remember being pissed at Stellantis when in cold rain on highway the efficiency dropped to 1.7mi/kWh, and the range estimate was still calculated based on the marketing number, going down by 2 miles for every 1 mile driven (it was a version without a heat pump).
Ioniq's worst case is better than this (~2.1 in bad weather, 3.1-3.3 at highway speeds in good conditions), and it displays accurate range based on real usage. Ioniq is indeed a bit too fat for UK's parking spaces.
on.to was great. I think they took advantage of tax breaks when leasing for a business, and during lockdowns they couldn't buy new cars fast enough.
BTW, if you want something for road trips, check out Bjorn Nyland's data:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1V6ucyFGKWuSQzvI8lMzv...
We found that 330 miles to be very unlikely as well. More like 270 and then you need to make sure you’ve got 40 miles spare to make sure you can make it to a working charge without going flat.
So in reality the comfortable working assumption should be 230 in my experience. We had the car in winter, perhaps didn’t help.
> We had the car in winter, perhaps didn’t help.
Yeah, especially if it wasn't the higher end model with a heat pump. Winter is definitely the biggest challenge for EV range at the moment (if you live in a place where heating is necessary for any significant part of the year a heat pump is pretty much a requirement).