The musings of an electric car owner
I’m into my third year of owning an electric car and it seems that others are beginning to cotton-on to the Great Electric Car Swindle as more and more people begin to suffer with charging anxiety, yes, it is a real thing according to my wife who is a very successful psychologist.
In this, my latest tirade against electric car ownership, I want to share my experience of servicing, something I know that even those who have the privilege of owning a well-thought-out brand (I.e. the blessed Tesla owners) seem to have issues with.
My first experience of servicing was a disaster a 2-day service and software update ended up takin 2-weeks because the update kept failing and bricking (an IT term for completely ballsing it up) the car. I could have told them that computers do that, which is why modern military jets have several layers of computer redundancy to stop them falling out of the sky when the main computer goes all hour-glassy (another IT term, familiar to those who run windows). So, I was a little worried when I went to book my car into a second service some 18-months later for its two-day service, yet it was another problem I faced this time around and even before I got my car to the garage; a three-month waiting list to get a service, four if I wanted a courtesy car. It seems another aspect of the infrastructure has not been planned as part of the government’s forceful assertion that fossil fuel cars are evil and will be banished from the UK starting in 2030; the equipment to service electric cars and the technicians trained to use them.
It seems that electric cars are not only a headache to people who drive them with VW suspending production of electric cars at their Zwickau and Dresden plants due to supply chain issues, effectively eliminating 5,000 electric cars from supply to the end user. So six-years from the ban on new Diesel and Petrol cars we don’t have enough chargers, service locations, and now it seems we may not even have enough cars. In the words of that AC/DC song, it seems we really are on a “Highway to Hell”.