I've been on a trip to the UK, renting an electric car (not a Tesla, but I welcome the opportunity to try out another EV! The car I was expecting to get, an MG4, was down for maintenance, so they upgraded to a more luxury vehicle for free), the Lexus RZ 450e. As a cousin of the Toyota BZ4X, it has a pretty poor range of around 200 miles, and a relatively slow charge rate, but neither of those is a big issue for this trip.
What is annoying, however, is how shockingly expensive most charging stations here are, and how inaccessible many charging networks are to visitors like me. Unfortunately, while there are some superchargers vaguely nearby, they're well out of the way of my particular destination area.
Most charging networks seem to have a standardized price of £0.85 per kWh, which works out to $1.09 in USD. The few that are cheaper (such as Connected Kerb), instead require use of their app, which is only available on the UK App Store, so I can't install it without jumping through hoops of either changing my Apple account region, or buying a cheap garbage android phone just for the use of a single app.
Connected Kerb in particular does supposedly support payment through another app, ZapMap which is available on the US App Store. However, ZapMap's payment processing seems nonfunctional, as it reports "payment declined" for any credit card you try to use it with, and even with Apple Pay it gives the same error message.
I'm curious if anyone else has had similar experiences traveling in the UK, or any tips for improving the experience?
I'm also surprised this sort of thing doesn't seem to be discussed more, considering how universally people complain about California's electricity prices that are between a quarter and half of these prices!
What is annoying, however, is how shockingly expensive most charging stations here are, and how inaccessible many charging networks are to visitors like me. Unfortunately, while there are some superchargers vaguely nearby, they're well out of the way of my particular destination area.
Most charging networks seem to have a standardized price of £0.85 per kWh, which works out to $1.09 in USD. The few that are cheaper (such as Connected Kerb), instead require use of their app, which is only available on the UK App Store, so I can't install it without jumping through hoops of either changing my Apple account region, or buying a cheap garbage android phone just for the use of a single app.
Connected Kerb in particular does supposedly support payment through another app, ZapMap which is available on the US App Store. However, ZapMap's payment processing seems nonfunctional, as it reports "payment declined" for any credit card you try to use it with, and even with Apple Pay it gives the same error message.
I'm curious if anyone else has had similar experiences traveling in the UK, or any tips for improving the experience?
I'm also surprised this sort of thing doesn't seem to be discussed more, considering how universally people complain about California's electricity prices that are between a quarter and half of these prices!
Although, mostly in the context of huge bills for homes, and people having to go on payment plans with their electricity providers since they can't afford the bills. .. not really the typical EV driving crowd.
