Giving up on the electric car?
We bought our electric car in April 2022. It's a Škoda Enyaq iV 80. Its battery has 77 KWh of usable capacity, and its range varies from less than 300 km (at 125 km/h on the highway, fully loaded, on the coldest day of the winter) to 500 km or more (driving alone in the city with mild weather). (Yes, it changes that much.)
I reckon we paid a premium of around €10,000 over a comparable small SUV with a combustion engine. My back-of-the-envelope calculation back then suggested that cheaper fuel, simpler maintenance, free parking in (and free access to) many city centres (definitely Madrid), and lower ownership taxes would cancel out the extra cost after seven years or so. Perhaps that was still an optimistic estimate because it ignored the higher depreciation of electric vehicles in the second-hand market (batteries, which are the critical component and the most expensive one, degrade significantly over time).
Importantly, this is our only car. (I still think that is one car too many, but with two adults working and two small kids, it seems impossible not to own one.)
There are many things to love about an electric car. Really. But we humans get used to the good quickly, and then take it for granted — while the little annoyances keep on annoying us. And, oh boy, is it annoying sometimes to use an electric car and the public charging networks in Spain, 2025.
Today I want to tell you about the last time I was seriously tempted to sell my sleek, quiet, powerful, fragrant car — and buy a fricking Humvee. That was two days ago. Nothing special about that day, just another negative anecdote piling up.
To be clear, some of the UX issues that follow have more to do with my insistence on using free software (free as in “free speech”) and preventing digital surveillance than with electric vehicles or charging stations per se. And yet.
Sunday morning. As we're having family breakfast, a friend who is also a neighbour texts me to say they're about to go with their kids to a farm school that is 70 km away, and then do a picnic. We want in.
First issue: I check the crappy Škoda app on my phone and see that the car, which is parked in our communal garage, is at 32% charge. Nothing strange: usually we don't plug in the car until SoC is below 30% or so. The problem is this gives us a range or around 130 km only. Last Sunday, that was not enough. (Okay, this is easily preventable if one bothers to charge more often and always keep the car at least half-charged.)
Second issue: our own charging station is AC and works at ~4 KW. For our car, it takes almost two hours to charge 10%. That is perfect to charge overnight (22:00 → 7:00, 30% → 80%), but too slow when in a hurry. So we have to either stop along the way (possibly on the way back home) or find a fast public charging station nearby and plug it in for ten minutes to give the car a quick shot. So I check on my phone for chargers in town using the crappy Electromaps app. I discard the ones that would be too slow or seem unreliable (eg, the ones in supermarket parking space), and conclude that there are two decent ones that I should be able to activate using the app. While the family finishes breakfast and is getting ready to go, I drive to the nearest station (a mere five minutes away), find both connectors available, and park near one of them.
Third issue: the crappy Electromaps app thinks that I'm still at home, and won't let me charge because I'm not “sufficiently close” to the place. On the map view, it's like I'm still one or two kilometres away. I move around the map with my fingers, wait a moment for the GPS signal to catch on, and walk out of the shade to have clear satellite view. I open OsmAnd~ and confirm that my location is the right one on that application. I stretch my arm towards the sky to surrender my phone to the gods above, to no avail. I try killing the Electromaps process in Android, and starting it again. Nothing. I check the permissions of the app and grant it every stupid, colon-inspecting permission it wants, including fine-grained location in the background, even when the application isn't “running”. I stop the app and start it again. Same thing. Then I get in the car, drive out of the place, do a one-eighty at the nearest roundabout (holding my phone in my hand with the app open; don't try this at home), and get back to the same connector. This time Electromaps understands where I am, and lets me tap its “charge now” button. So I plug in the connector to the car in sweet anticipation.
Fourth issue: after a couple seconds, Electromaps shows a generic error message and informs me that the charge cannot start. This is one of my favourite features of our green sustainable future. Discarding that error message to try again isn't easy either: back, back, exit button, exit button, tap outside the modal, tap outside the modal, back, back, okay now I'm back. I try again, with the same result. I can never remember for the life of me if it's “tap button, then plug in” or “plug in, then tap button” (and I suspect it isn't even consistent across apps and charging networks), so I try plugging in first. Doesn't work, so it must be the other way around; let's try again. Same error. I reach for the connector at the other side of the pole, which fortunately is long enough, and try with that one. Same error. I give up, get in the car and drive to the other charging station, which is very close. This one is empty too, and the spots painted on the pavement on both sides of the monolith are very spacious, so I park the car head-first in one of them.
Fifth issue: when I get out and stretch one of the cables to plug it into my car, I realise it is thirty centimetres too short. I pull the connector taut for a moment like an idiot, looking at the chasm between male and female, and I can almost hear the laugh track behind me. I get in the car again, back up, turn, then park backwards in the other space.
Sixth issue: which connector is which?
On the pole there are two signs, one at each side, with their IDs; something like
XJ429-3321 and XJ429-3322.
But on Electromaps I only see two identical connectors, with no codes.
I tap one at random.
Seventh issue: Electromaps won't let me charge here, either.
A few seconds of hope, then the car gives me a red light and the app an unhelpful error.
The good news is that I suspect I'm on the right connector because, according to the display
on the pole, the other one is much slower (and on Electromaps I've tapped on a fast one).
I try a couple of times (“tap button, then plug in” or
“plug in, then tap button”?).
I give up.
I call my wife on the phone, who uses
a slightly less crappy app
that sometimes works when others don't.
I tell her the charging station I'm in, and that it's the connector ending in 3322.
She does her thing and for some reason this time it works, and the car starts charging fast.
In less than ten minutes SoC is above 50%; more than enough. I leave the place, pick up the family at home, and we drive to the farm school. Although we got there a bit late, the day ends up very well and we have a great time with our friends.
Yes, half of those hiccups the other day had to do with one app in particular. But I could tell you similar horror stories when the culprits were other crappy apps, the crappy software of the car, the crappy software of the charging station, unreliable charging networks, the interaction between car and charging station, bad design decisions somewhere along the chain, or a combination of the above.
And to reiterate: there are some great things about driving an electric car.
Some other day we'll talk about those.