Blog 4. Road Trip Scotland - An EV journey

Author: Michael Thompson, 11 October 2021

Having got used to an EV in day to day life it was time to test it a little bit further with a holiday road trip. Like many, having forgone overseas holidays over the last 18 months of Covid, I was really ready to get away a little further than the North Coast (beautiful as it is), so a week in Scotland beckoned for relaxation and to see some friends – 500 miles of a trip around Loch Lomond, Stirling and Edinburgh via Cairnryan. 

Now with my car’s theoretical range of 330 miles fully charged I would need to get at least one charge somewhere in the trip, and that would depend on access at the right time. Off we went with the first leg from home (via Ferry) of 160 miles to Inveraray. When we reached our first hotel on the shores of Loch Fyne I must admit I was pleasantly surprised to find 4 dedicated charging stations right at the front entrance. 2 x Dual charge points were available with only one space occupied. All I needed was to get access.

I had obviously done a little research before the trip so I was pretty sure there were chargers in Inverary courtesy of Chargepoint Scotland. However it wasn’t entirely clear how I would access them or what they cost. Strangely the hotel receptionist didn’t really know either but the chargers had the Chargepoint Scotland web address on them so I pulled out my phone. After 10 minutes of creating and logging into an account I was ready to rock – congratulations the website said, your Access Card is in the post! 

Since I was on holiday, we had 4 days in this location and I still had 160 miles on the car, I didn’t panic. Luckily Chargepoint have a helpline so I gave it a try, and after providing the reference number on the actual charger they told me they couldn’t find that one on the system. But never fear there is a back up way to activate the charger I was told, just waive your Debit Card over the RFID sensor – Doh! Feeling slightly stupid and thinking about the wasted half hour, the charger sprang into life with 22Kw of power to top me up. 

The next few days of the holiday saw us tour around Loch Lomond and across to Stirling for a couple of days, before ending up in Edinburgh for our last night. The final day was a simple trip back to Cairnryan and home – 150 miles required. I would need a small top up to (confidently) make it, which I could either do at our last hotel or at a Tesla Supercharging station between Edinburgh and Glasgow. I’ll have to admit here that I bottled it a bit and decided to do both, a couple of hours on the hotel charger (again a debit card swipe) for enough range to get home and a stop at the Tesla site mainly because I’d not tried one before and I was curious how they worked – and they work very well at some 165 miles of range an hour capability. 

Done and dusted we headed home, a little more confident on getting access to a charge when it suited during a holiday. Scotland is beautiful and a great place for a relaxing holiday too.