Chatting at charging stations
I’d like to ask all those petrol heads out there, ‘when was the last time you stopped to chat to anyone on the forecourt of a gas-guzzling petrol station?’
Sure, if you are lucky, you might get to chat to the cashier but I’m willing to bet that the conversation won’t go much beyond the weather or the traffic. It’s more likely that, when you squeeze the trigger on the pump’s nozzle, your stare is fixed on the flickering pound signs as you car sucks up the carbon ready to release it into the atmosphere. It’s as if the shrinking of your wallet is in exchange for gas takes away the power of speech.
Not so in the wonderful world of electric vehicles where you stand, shoulder to shoulder, with fellow enthusiasts plugged into a grid made of sustainably generated electrons. In this green world the talk is of range, destination, charging rates and the wonders of silent motoring.
This week, we are crisscrossing the country to funerals, minor surgery courses, visits with friends and looking up seldom seen siblings. Today we chatted with a mild mannered, corduroy clad, geography lecturer who was as besotted with his eGolf as we are with our’s. His, though, was rather shiner and newer than our’s but he was clearly entering into the spirit of sociable eMotoring. The overall-clad man in the Nissan Leaf had traded in his Ford Transit for a new electric truck so now his household has now completely abandoned hydrocarbons.
A few days before my 59th birthday we were lashed by one of the many carbon fuelled, named storms of this winter. Amidst the maelstrom I was struggling, with rain splattered spectacles, to get our car charging. A nice guy, in the very posh iTron or iPace next door, popped out of his climate controlled cabin and offered to wrestle with my App, iPhone and Ecotricity terminal. As he did so all the lights went green and hundreds of amps started flowing into our eGolf’s batteries. When was the last time a bloke, half your age, braved the elements on a petrol forecourt to help you fill your tank with dirty, smelly, dangerous diesel?
There is a downside to all this camaraderie and banter. We are still in the depths of winter and, as I write, an ominous, black cloud ahead is is depositing sleet and snow on Shropshire’s sodden fields. The temperature outside is plunging and so too is the temperature inside and we are forced to pull up the hoods of our Himalayan, down jackets. It would be nice to flick the heating on but we know that would cost us some precious miles of range!