I recently had a truly brilliant seven-minute experience. No, it’s not what you’re thinking.
It was charging an EV at a public charging station. And it was brilliant.
I’ve spent a good chunk of the past month in the U.K. and Europe. My automotive adventures again reinforced how much the American and Canadian markets are diverging from others around the world in ways we’ve often discussed — including EV penetration and the growing presence of Chinese vehicles and dealerships.
While in Amsterdam, I had the chance to visit my third Nio House (after Shanghai and Hefei). I happily sat in the second-floor café, looking across the canal at the Zeekr dealership. The cars in both looked very impressive.
But I digress — back to my seven-minute experience.
Lawrence Hamilton (my host) and I took a day to drive from Amsterdam to Antwerp (we actually intended to go to Autoworld in Brussels, but that’s a whole other story). We travelled in style in Lawrence’s Lucid Air for the roughly four-hour round trip.
On the way back, we needed to stop to charge. I fired up my mapping app and found a charging station five minutes away, just off the highway.
Connecting to the charger was seamless. There were a variety of options, including good old-fashioned credit cards. It wasn’t necessary to have an account with the charging network — though that too was an option.
We estimated we needed to add about 150 km of range to get us back home. In seven minutes, we added a little over 200 km. We disconnected, hopped back in, and were on our way. No fuss. It felt like a thoroughly modern and efficient customer experience.
Frankly, it was a vastly better experience than refuelling the rental car in Edinburgh two weeks earlier. While that vehicle (a diesel Mercedes SUV) was nice, handling a diesel pump was not. It was smelly, dirty, and left me needing to wash my hands. What a contrast.
Interestingly, Lawrence and I spent some of the drive back talking about the change in mindset that comes with using public EV charging stations while en route. It’s subtle, but meaningful. With an ICE vehicle, we’re used to “filling up.” Whether we need a half tank, a full tank, or whatever, we fill it. Since we’ve stopped anyway, the most efficient thing to do is to fill the tank.
With EV charging, it doesn’t necessarily make sense to “fill it up.” It may make more sense to know how much charge you need to reach your destination — and only add that much. You’ll spend much less time at the charging station, and if you have a charger at home, you’ll spend a lot less money.
So while a full charge might have taken half an hour or so, we were done and on our way much more quickly. Interestingly, if we hadn’t chosen that first charging station the map offered, there were plenty of other options along our route.
So what’s the bottom line? When we reach the point in Canada where charging is accessible and available, we have the potential to create an amazing consumer experience. And it doesn’t have to involve a long wait while the electrons do their bit. Further advances in both charging and battery technology will only make it better — and I won’t have to wash my hands afterwards.
One final thought: You might think that two reasonably well-informed guys who’ve spent their whole careers in the automotive industry would realize you can’t drive into Brussels on the one Sunday a year that Belgian cities are turned into car-free zones.
You might think that — but you’d be wrong.
