For years everyone laughed at the idea of electric cars . The battery would have to be the size of the car itself! The expense would be insane! Then Tesla came along and made the electric car thing look not just like a possibility, but like the future. Then other manufacturers, envious, had a go.
The government, also keen to look like they were doing something about reducing emissions, offered incentives and tax breaks on the purchase of electric vehicles. It was in this climate of hope that we bought an electric Jaguar i-Pace, in 2020. Up until then we’d driven about in an elderly Ford Fiesta, which smelled of ancient biscuit crumbs, coffee stains and old fag smoke.
Driving the Jaguar, by comparison, was like being in a spaceship. It was so clean, so quiet. So un-smelly.
The luxury was immense. “This is the future,” we said to ourselves as we purred about the place, feeling self-righteous and chic. But then we tried to leave town.
And we quickly discovered that you cannot reliably charge up your electric car on the motorway. Ever. Anywhere.
Charging up the car at home was bad enough. It took days and required nabbing a parking space outside the house (never a certainty), and then feeding a long cable out of the window and across the pavement, with special rubber mats laid on top. This is all fine in the summer, when fiddling about with cables through windows and across pavements is tolerable.
But in the dead of winter, connecting or un-connecting the blasted cables in .
