In summer 2010, my old friend Kevin Dawson (then a BBC Radio 4 producer and now a public radio executive in the USA) was invited to take part in one of the first long-distance electric car journeys across Europe. In my capacity as E&T’s features editor at the time, I commissioned him to write an account of the pioneering rally for the magazine’s September issue. The article generated considerable interest, and Kevin, to his surprise, was repeatedly complimented on it.
No wonder; electric cars were then something of an exotic novelty and Kevin’s story was pretty much a chronicle of numerous problems with charging an unruly stallion whose 100-mile (160km) range was minuscule by modern standards, as well as maintaining it in good working order. “People looked at us as if we were crazy... and their eyes said: ‘Who is this deceived English fool?’,” he wrote.
I was reminded of that article from nearly 13 years ago while reading ‘Charging Around: Exploring...