VW e-Golf: ‘Filling up’ at home can’t quite allay range anxiety

If you had a fuel pump at home, would you ever visit a filling station again?”

Tom Callow, Chargemaster’s director of communication and strategy, posed the question at this year’s AM Digitech conference, reasoning that, despite the UK only having 15,000 public charge points, EVs offered greater convenience than doubters may believe.

“You might think ‘well, there’s 70,000 fuel filling points across the UK’, but there are 100,000 dedicated charge points at people’s homes and that’s where 80% of people charge their vehicles.”

While having a ‘pump’ at home is a great thing, longer journeys, often completed for work or with a car full of family, soon throw up complications – usually in the form of a lengthy walk from a public charge point to your desired destination.

A recent range-busting 180-mile round trip to the NEC in Birmingham presented me with the gamble of plugging into one of the Genting Resort’s three Pod Point public chargers and a walk to my scheduled meeting.

There was also anxiety around charge-point hogging. Were I to bag a charger, I would have wanted to return to vacate it mid-way through the day.

Ultimately, I left the EV at home.

It seems that even with a realistic range of 140 miles, the e-Golf – or rather EV motoring – still presents some limitations when time is tight and distances are long.