The Dodge Charger is a car built for performance, with a sporty style and power. People talk about it because it’s a well-known model and it’s often used to show what kind of driving feel you can get from a bigger, faster car.
“75 kilowatts” tells you how powerful the charger is. More power usually means faster charging, but your car and battery level also affect how quickly you’ll actually add charge.
Term
ESO network
The “ESO network” is the company/network behind certain charging stations. If a charger doesn’t work, their support line is who you contact for help.
The Octopus World app is used to manage and start charging sessions on compatible chargers. In this segment, the hosts say they couldn’t get the charger to work through that app, which affects how easily you can use the station.
The BMW i3 is an electric car made for everyday driving, especially in cities. It’s known for having a specific wheel and tire setup, and the podcast is likely pointing out that the tire choice affects how safe and stable the car feels.
“B-segment” is a European way of grouping cars by size. It generally means a small car class, and the host is noting this one costs more than some other small cars.
“B-segment” is a way of grouping cars by size in Europe. It generally means a small car, and they’re using it to say the loan EV feels small but not too small.
The Hyundai Ioniq Electric is an all-electric Hyundai. They’re comparing it to the other EV they used, especially how far it can go and how efficiently it uses battery power.
“Efficiency” means how economically the electric car uses its battery to travel. They’re saying one EV didn’t match the other’s efficiency, even though it still does well for the trip.
“Slippery” here means how easily the car cuts through the air. If it’s not very slippery, it takes more energy to keep going, especially on faster roads.
“Motorway mileage” just means how much of the trip was on fast roads. For EVs, that matters because higher speeds usually use more battery.
LIVE
Welcome to the Motoring Podcast, recharging round of Britain on Friday, the 17th of July,
2026.
Hello, I'm Alan.
Hello, I'm Andrew.
And on this review of Day 5, you'll learn the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,
also that we spoke too soon, and our confidence in the car continues.
Yes.
So what are we doing and why we are trying to lap the UK in an affordable electric vehicle
within a reasonable amount of time, specifically six days, because that's as long as we both
have.
We did it 10 years ago for charging around Britain.
We are trying to do it again to find out if it is harder or if it is easier.
Have the cars improved?
Has the charging infrastructure improved?
People complain about both of them, and we're going to find out how we are finding them.
Today, we have driven from Inverness to Ulapula, not by the sensible route we have gone from
Inverness to Wick, from Wick to John the Grouch, from John the Grouch to Tongue, from Tongue
to Leg, from a leg to Ulapula, where we find ourselves.
You can see the bustling ferry port behind us, and once we've finished this, and once
our car actually has some power back in it again, we will be making our way down to Fort
William, hopefully in time for a curry.
Yes.
That's the outline plan.
The curry bit may not happen.
It might be something else, but definitely to Fort William tonight.
Yes.
What did we do charging-wise?
Charging-wise, we had charged last night, so we started off with 99% and 200, whatever
miles.
Yes.
We cruised our way up to Wick, where we found an Osprey charger on the edge of town with
fine access to a B&M, a Pizzer at home, an Aldi, and not a lot of us.
No, not us.
Phenalgos.
There are toilets in the B&M, if you ever find that yourself at that Osprey charger.
It was cracking the quick, to be honest.
We went in and did what we needed to, and that was that.
Again, it was another charger, because most of our experience has been with GoodServe,
thanks to them as our sponsor.
It's rare that we're using outside that network, but we did, and it was a pretty seamless
experience.
That was good, yes.
The app was fairly easy to use, intuitive, and it showed the sort of information that
you want if you're charging your car.
Yes, it was good.
It was very likely GoodServe, to be honest, but it was a little bit more orange.
It worked a treat.
I was very pleased with that Osprey.
We could have topped up had we decided we needed it at John the Groats, as well as the
Osprey chargers up there, 75 kilowatts at their bank of them, some of which were in
use whenever we got to them, but we decided we didn't need it.
We trotted along.
We spent most of the day with more money than we needed to come all the way to Olapal.
Yes.
We set out to do that whenever we got to town, we thought, well, we'd give it a wee splash.
While we have our lunch, we'd been doing quite a lot of climbing.
There was quite a lot.
Most of the morning, in fact, a lot of the day feels like it's been up hill, and we
thought we'd give it a splash while we had our lunch, what we actually did was we spent
time, Andrew actually spent time on the phone to their call center, trying to reboot the
charger, all sorts of things, and it was not wonderful, was it?
No, it's our first failure.
It was our first failure, so.
Day five, lunchtime day five, we encountered our first failure, and the person on the other
end of the helpline tried what they could, and they were very helpful, very lovely, no
problem with the ability to get hold of help either, by the way, with the ESO network.
And it just didn't work for us, so we cracked on because the idea was we just top up while
we're having lunch.
It wasn't that we needed to.
The fact that it didn't work wasn't critical for us in this instance.
Other people's management may vary or not, and that could have been a problem for somebody.
But we then went on to leg, and we were able to charge there enough to just give us the
confidence that we had more than enough to get to Ulupul.
What happened at leg, actually, is there's another ESO charger, a kilowatt charger there,
and it says 50 kilowatts on it, and so it's got two plugs on it, but of course if you
plug two vehicles in, it's only 25 kilowatts.
So it was a charge from one of the energy supply companies that was there and plugged
in, so we halved his charge for a little while, as you said, felt slightly guilty, so we only
put in the minimum amount just to give an extra little buffer to get from leg to here.
Which was handy?
Which was handy, we would have been...
Because we rolled in with how much left?
We rolled in with 10% left.
We rolled in with 10%, but it had been 10% for quite some time.
There was a lot of downhill that you were managing very well.
There was a lot of downhill where all the regen was turned off, and I literally coasted into Ulupul.
In fact, at one point, I was coasting through, I was doing a whole roller coaster thing,
but I felt the worm supposed to be dropped to 45 miles an hour.
I didn't need to give it a wee squeak more of actual power.
But we treated him with what, with 10 miles?
10 miles of range?
Yeah, we had 10 miles more than we needed to get here.
It was 10% on the battery.
And now we're charging up at a 4EV charger that's throwing in 66 kilowatts,
as we sit here talking to you now, looking at the wind.
We were warned that this one was very stroppy.
And the chat we spoke to up in lag, he hadn't made it work the other day,
when he tried to use it.
We couldn't make it work via the Octopus World app.
I'm getting bored of downloading more charging apps.
So I thought I would give that a try.
We couldn't make it work via that.
So frankly, I just dabbed my debit card in the end for this one.
And that worked fine.
Dubbing the debit card worked fine.
He had trouble as it makes it harder for me to get an invoice out of it,
but there must be a way to do it.
All doable?
All good.
We're going to have plenty of charge from here to get to Fort William,
the plan is to plug in over there to Fort William enough.
A slow charger in one of the car parks there,
and just let the car do its thing.
So we're not a couple of hours down there.
We'll see how we get on.
This is why we're recording now at earlyish in the day,
relatively early in the day.
What else?
That was really what we wanted to talk about.
And so tomorrow, the final day.
Tomorrow, the final day.
The final countdown.
So from our discussions when we were doing our planning
for 15 minutes whilst driving the other day,
tomorrow is Fort William back to near Preston, to yours,
and we're probably going to stop at both services.
And in other services, I think we're talking about Westmoreland.
Yeah, it's something above the Lancaster turnoff,
because we need to take the Lancaster turnoff.
Or Lancaster.
So the chat we're talking to today said Lancaster was pretty good.
But that's after the Lancaster turnoff.
So we're going to have to stop before,
because we're going to go via Blackpool.
Maybe we'll do it at Westmoreland.
But it's a case of saying, if it's too busy at Westmoreland,
we can always do a wee double back.
We want to go via Blackpool,
because people go down and Bradley have history in Blackpool,
and I think that's funny.
Yes, he does.
That's it.
Andrew just not thinking.
Frankly, I tried to do this the last time.
I tried to get a picture of myself in front of a Blackpool tram
for the Lolls.
And it was a really bad picture.
It was awful, because a terrible selfie face as well.
So hopefully I'll get Andrews to take one of me.
And you can have a good chuck like that.
That is about it.
The Insta, as you said, is it just continues to be a cracking wee car.
Yeah.
I mean, I've been feral handling test today.
On single track roads, lots of really crummy surfaces,
frankly.
And it's just nice to drive.
It's not felt unsettled in the passenger seat in any way.
There's been no moments where I've gone, oh, hang on.
He's pushed it a bit too hard there or anything like that.
It's got proper tyres.
It's a proper width.
Yeah.
I mean, and proper wheels, not something fancy that's used.
Yeah.
It's not like an i3 where they had very thin wheels.
A very dangerous spring.
It just continues to feel like a bigger car than it is.
It handles all the surfaces and everything we're throwing at it.
It's just handling perfectly with a plumb.
And you feel utterly confident in using it in all conditions.
Yeah.
I mean, we were discussing that it's one of the more expensive B segment vehicles.
But you are buying something that isn't what you get at the lower end of the price bracket
for that range.
As I was just discussing about whether this is A or B segment size,
I say it's B segment, very much sizes with my Yaris, which is a slightly older.
Older car admittedly in quite small in that segment now.
But this, certainly the room and everything, it's a, externally it's a small B segment.
Yeah.
It's definitely not small enough to be A segment.
Yeah.
Talked about yet tomorrow between to do that.
I would say we need to thank Hyundai for the loan.
We do, we do.
That's one of the reasons we're singing it's, it's not the reason we're singing it's praise.
We're singing praise because it's good.
Yes.
But yes.
It helped make the journey very easy.
It has, it has.
And one of the reasons we chose the Insta was because it's kind of prices roughly as close
as you can get these days to the Ioniq Electric that we did in the first time.
Yeah.
And range wise, it's one of the closest, but importantly, efficiency wise.
Yeah.
We haven't got the same efficiency out of it that we got out of the Ioniq, but it's not
nearly as slippery.
And I would suggest we're doing more motorway miles.
We have done much more motorway mileage and because we are confident in the range,
we have been able to proceed towards the national speed limit of the roads we've been on.
Whereas the other one, we couldn't.
I mean, partly because of the traffic last time as well.
No matter how hard you pushed people out into gorges with an Italian.
But far fewer, far less.
Yeah.
Agreed, far less traffic.
I mean, some of the locals were a bit.
There was one guy who went five meters past the passing place and expected me to reverse
35 to the one I passed on the corner.
And so there was a small, small standoff until he gave in.
Yeah, but the traffic has been, the roads have been pretty much
effectively clear compared to last time.
And as a consequence, we are driving it much more like we do our own cars.
Yes.
I'll let you think about my cars for a moment and then decide what that means.
But I did thank Andrew for being a very good passenger earlier on.
Thank you, Tiki and I, for loaning us the InstaO2.
May need to find us to get it back again.
I'm quite happy with this.
Yeah, yeah, this might, this might have a, be stolen or something.
Allegedly.
Yes.
God, why fit his net, we've said that.
I think that's us for today.
Yes, definitely that's us for today.
He's going to be slightly later and we're trying not to do the whole arrive after midnight
places.
Yes.
We're trying for arriving time for dinner.
Yes.
This time, which by the way has been one of the biggest differences in this course thing.
Yes, we'll cover that in the summary when we do the live stream, which we haven't worked
out a date for yet.
We've got some complications happening next week, just as we were coming along to add to everything.
So, yeah, we'll, we'll let you know.
We'll give you as much notice as possible when we're going to do the live stream.
Cool.
But it's going to be shortly.
That means we're at the end, doesn't it?
So, everyone, don't forget between now and tomorrow, you can give us any feedback,
share your thoughts with the show at motoringpodcast.com on Blue Sky,
at Motoring Podcast on Instagram and Facebook,
and on the contact page of motoringpodcast.com, the hub for all our activities.
Now, remember, you can support us financially by Patreon and please leave a review rating on
Apple Podcast, YouTube or every other podcast app that lets you do such a thing.
Andrew, what's the best way to get in touch with you?
Best way to get in touch with me this week is if you search for Crackwindscreen on Blue Sky.
And as long as people want to get in touch with you personally for those short moments
when you're not behind the wheel, hooning it around hairpins in Scotland,
what's the best way for them to do that personally?
And Blue Sky for me, please, where I'm at, ajpbrandly, that's b-r-e-d-l-e-y,
dot b-sky, dot social.
We'll be back very soon and hopefully, and thankfully,
are finishing off before they start loading the ferry and all the noise that comes with that.
But until then, I've been Alan Bradley.
I've been Andrew Clews.
And safe motoring.
About this episode
Day 5 of the Round Britain EV challenge focuses on whether EVs and charging access have improved since their earlier trip. They set out the six-day goal, then hit real-world variety: an Osprey charger near John o’ Groats (75 kW), a first charging failure that required rebooting and call-center help, and power limits when sharing a setup (25 kW). They also manage downhill efficiency with regen turned off and run into an Octopus World app issue.
Today, Friday 17 July 2026, we continued with Day 5 of Recharging Round Britain, where we are trying to, as closely as we can, recreate the route we undertook nearly a decade ago. Hear how we got on today as we travelled from Inverness, via Wick, John o’Groats, Tongue, Lairg, Ullapool and hopefully ending up at Fort William.
CHARGING SPONSOR
Thanks to our charging sponsor, GRIDSERVE, They have an EV charging network that spans almost the whole of the UK.
While you can just turn up and pay with a debit card or their app, you can also get 25% off charging rates at all 200 of their locations with GRIDSERVE Plus.
GRIDSERVE Plus costs just £7.99/month and can be cancelled at any time, much like many gym memberships, and as well as the discounted charging, there are many other seasonal membership benefits such as EV heathchecks while you charge, pet portraits, and similar.
Many people take out Gridserve Plus for a month at a time to cover a holiday or seasonal travel.
Thank you to Hyundai, who once again have loaned us an electric vehicle enabling us to travel around as much of Britain as we can in six days. This time, we are using an Inster 02. To find out more on the Inster, you can listen to Alan’s time with one during the UK launch of the car, by clicking this link here.
If you like what we do, on this show, and think it is worth a £1.00, please consider supporting us via Patreon. Here is the link to that CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT THE PODCAST
