Screw your CCS cable to the sticking place…

I am in Liverpool for a conference and the two realistic transportation options were to take the train, or drive myself. You probably realise by now that I’m a big advocate of both active travel and public transport. Getting cars off the road makes things better for drivers and other individuals, but doing so comes at a cost. At least it does in this country.

A return ticket from Plymouth to Liverpool is just over £200. That’s a hell of a lot of money, and would buy you flights to a lot of locations in Europe (barring Northern Ireland in a lot of cases, bizarrely). How can you encourage more train travel when it costs that much? It’s a little moot for this trip because I would be reimbursed (minus the tax) by work, but the unreliability also harms the appeal of train travel for long distances. I normally get where I’m going, but it’s not uncommon to be on a different train than the one you started. I’m not even talking about changes. On a direct train to Sheffield last year, I ended up changing at least twice because the first train broke down, then we had to take a train to Bristol, followed by a further train to Sheffield. It turns a long journey into an excruciating one.

So I thought why not take the car for a change? I wouldn’t typically consider this kind of journey for work in one of our previous cars, but the Polestar 2 felt different. It was such a comfortable car to drive around Cornwall that I thought it would be able to handle the 600 mile round trip. I wasn’t wrong.

Setting Off

The planning started with the previous evening. We’re on Intelligent Octopus Go so I plugged in the car last night and let it calculate a charge schedule to fill up the car by 7 am. Given the long distance, I set the charge limit to 100% (normally defaults to 90% for battery longevity). As long as I let the tarrif and charger dictate the schedule, the rate is 7.5p/kWh. Crazy cheap compared to the average unit rate and 10 times cheaper than a Tesla Supercharger (InstaVolt charges even more than 75p/kWh!).

The drive to work took 2% battery so I set off for Liverpool with 98% charge. Plugging in Liverpool, Google Maps suggested I charge to at least 67% at Gloucester services at a Tesla Supercharger, before heading on to Liverpool. I had anticipated several stops, so one was easily manageable.

155 miles later and I was at 51% charge. At the services I grabbed a sausage roll and chips, something to drink, and a coffee to keep my caffeine levels healthy. By the time I’d finished eating and got back to the car, it was already charged to 87%. This was going to be even easier than I expected. I had none of the issues I originally experienced with my Polestar 2 rental. As expected, that was a fault specifc to that car rather than challenges with the model in general.

I set off again making good use of adaptive cruise control and pilot assist. Not having to contend with gears and maintaining a constant speed makes motorway driving a cinch. The only thing you have to contend with is the chaos of other drivers making dangerous manoeuvers. The number of middle lane hoggers and undertakers is startling when you have to be on the road with them for such a long period of time. Pilot assist worked well in the motorway setting, keeping a reasonably constant speed and maintaining my position within the lane.

And Then There Were None pairs perfectly with a journey to Liverpool, as it turns out. I’ve almost got through the whole audio book in the time I’ve spent on the road. I did pause it while navigating in Liverpool as cities can be a little trickier to navigate. Thankfully the roads were relatively quiet and the route was straightforward to get to the dock/waterside area.

I pulled into the hotel car park (after a near incident with a psychotic minibus driver) and started looking for the charger. For a big car park there appeared to be a single Polar charger (now BP Pulse) with very out of date signage directing you to the Polar website which no longer exists. I recognised the logo as BP Pulse so opened the app and tried to start charging. I noticed something wrong fairly quickly. The emergency stop button was pressed in and the charger disabled. Thankfully there were instructions on screen.

Then I tried to use an Electroverse card and that killed it again. Another reset later and I managed to get it started with the BP Pulse app. I’m glad I did charge it as the charger appears to be out of order completely today. It’s not really what I’d expect from a decent hotel with a lot of electric cars parked there. I did manage to get to 95% last night which will be more than ample to get most of the way home. I’ll probably stop in Gloucester again on the way home and charge if only to have a break after three hours of solid driving.

The only thing left to do after a long day of driving is to find a cocktail bar and relax. I stopped in at Hummingbird and had a couple of excellent cocktails, tasty olives, and great conversation.