The Hyundai Ioniq 5 is an all-electric car, meaning it runs on a battery instead of gasoline. It’s the kind of car that can be tested on long trips to see how well it charges and how far it can go. The podcast mentions it because it was used for a long UK charging journey.
ChargePlace Scotland was a set of EV charging locations in Scotland. The episode says those older chargers are now being taken over and updated.
Term
ongoing maintenance
In public EV charging, “ongoing maintenance” means regular work to keep chargers reliable over time—things like servicing hardware, updating components, and fixing faults. It’s a key reason some chargers can’t stay free indefinitely.
Charging power is measured in kilowatts (kW). A “seven kilowatt” charger is relatively slow, so it’s the kind of power you’d use overnight to add range gradually.
“22 kilowatts” is how strong the charger is. Even if a station claims that power, the car and the station have to be able to deliver it—otherwise you may end up charging slower or not at all.
70–75 kilowatts is a fast-charging level compared with slower overnight charging. Getting it to work usually means the car and charger finally agreed on a high-power charging mode.
Some EV chargers let you start charging by tapping a bank card (contactless) rather than using an app. It can save you if the app is broken, as long as that charger supports card payment.
The Dodge Charger is a large car built for strong acceleration and sporty driving. People talk about it in podcasts when they’re sharing whether it worked well or had problems during a trip or test. The mention of “only one that has had a problem” suggests this specific Charger had a reliability issue.
The BMW M6 is a very powerful BMW meant for fast, sporty driving. The podcast mentions it in connection with a trip where the car’s estimated range kept decreasing. That’s useful information for understanding how it behaves during real driving rather than just in ideal conditions.
Term
M6
The M6 is a big UK highway. Driving on highways usually uses more battery than slower roads, so the car’s estimated range can drop faster.
“Range” is how far the electric car thinks you can drive on the battery. If you drive faster or conditions are worse, the estimate can shrink.
Term
delta between how much charge we had and how far we had to go
They’re comparing how much battery is left versus how much distance is still needed. If that gap gets too small, you may not make it to the next charging stop.
An “eB charging network” is a set of EV charging stations run under one brand. It matters because it tells you where you can reliably charge on a trip.
“Charging rates” is how fast the electric car charges at a station. Some chargers add energy much quicker than others, and the car may slow down as the battery fills up.
“EV health checks” are services that look over your electric car while you’re charging. Think of it as a quick check to help spot issues before they become problems.
Sat nav is the car’s GPS navigation system. It tells you where you are and gives route directions. Turning it off means you can’t easily see how far you still have to go.
Charging networks are sets of charging stations you can use across different locations. If the network is reliable, you’re less likely to arrive and find chargers broken or unavailable.
The Tesla app is the phone app that helps you control your Tesla. It can be used for things like starting or managing charging, so if it has problems it can make charging harder.
They’re talking about how long-distance driving takes a lot of time. Even if charging is better now, going around 400 miles in a day still means you’ll be on the road for a long time.
The North Coast 500 is a famous long road trip route in Scotland. They’re using it as an example of a trip where you still have to manage time and where you’ll sleep/stop.
That “Chargemaster card” is like a membership card for charging stations. You tap it to prove you’re allowed to start charging, which can be helpful when your phone signal or app access isn’t working.
A “Trigulus card” is a charging access card. It lets you start charging at certain networks, so having the right card can prevent you from getting stuck at a station that won’t work with your usual setup.
ChargePlay Scotland is a set of public charging stations in Scotland. Different charging networks can require different ways to start charging, like a specific card or app.
A mobile network is your phone’s data signal. Some chargers rely on an app, so if you don’t have signal, the charger may not be able to confirm you and start charging.
7kW is how fast the charger can deliver electricity to the car. A lower number like 7kW usually means it takes longer to add the same amount of charge than faster chargers.
An RFID card is a tap-to-charge access card. You hold it near the charger so it can recognize you and let you start charging, even if your phone signal is weak.
LIVE
Welcome to the MotionPodGuards, Recharging Round Britain on Saturday the 18th of January,
2026.
Hello, I'm Alan.
Hello, I'm Andrew.
And as we are approaching the final moments of this road trip, we do a roundup of day
six.
Well done.
That was nicely filled in for the distinct lack of notes that he had today.
So just the quick roundup that I've been doing every day.
So it's been 10 years since we did Charging Round Britain, where we took a Hyundai Ioniq
roughly around the outskirts of the mainland UK, and we wanted to see if it was harder,
if it was easier, and if the cars of some of the cars have improved.
This time around, we've taken a Hyundai Insta around the outskirts of the UK.
Day six.
Do we want to quickly finish off about day five?
Yes, we need to bring everybody up to speed since we last left them in the previous exciting
instalment.
Yes.
So we last spoke to you from the ferry terminal car park in, this seems like a long, long
way away, in Ollipool on the west coast of Scotland up in Highlands, where we hadn't
quite finished our day.
So we finished up recording, we did the edits, and then we hot-footed it to Fort William,
the plan being to get there in time to have a curry, which we did, or I did anyway.
That was great.
No problem at all.
Actually, unbelievably, our most economical segment of the trip, with four-point-six miles
per kilowatt, which was kind of cool.
All these numbers, everything, I'll put them all when we do our roundup at the end of next
week.
Week after.
Week after.
Okay.
Whenever we work out when it is, and we tell you, then we will do the live stream of the
roundup.
And of course, if you've got any questions, then that'd be a great time to ask them.
If not, feel free to send them in via all of the usual contact methods before that.
We got to Fort William, and then we had a fun time with some of the local charging in
Fort William.
A company called EZO, you might remember, we talked about it on the news show a little
while ago, has sort of taken over, has a great long contract to provide charging in Scotland
and taking over the kind of charge place Scotland units that were all over the place.
They were free.
They can't really be free anymore.
It's just not viable.
They need to be upgraded.
They need that ongoing maintenance.
And speaking of being upgraded, EZO's done a great job on rebranding and putting coloured
stickers on all of the old charge place Scotland units.
Some of those units really should be replaced.
Well, here's, I was thinking about that, I was thinking, as Scotland is such a big place,
we don't know where they're starting with the reef, with new equipment.
And obviously, we were going to an extreme where we went up across the top of the north,
and maybe they're starting south and moving upwards, you know, where there's the higher
density areas.
Yeah, tongue and leg and are probably quite far down the list of important
places.
William, you would think would be relatively high, but we tried to leave that we wanted
to leave the car actually on a seven kilowatt charge overnight.
So just literally dribbling some electricity in whilst we ate and drank and slept.
But that didn't work.
And then we couldn't get the 22 kilowatt supply to work.
And we did eventually get the 70 or 75 kilowatt charge to work.
So that was a relief.
Yeah, but you could only do that by the tapping your card.
Oh, in the end.
The app wouldn't work.
So EZO has got a lot of work to do.
And if you are traveling to Scotland, bear that in mind.
The EZO, that is the one network that we've used and we've only used a handful, but that
is the one network we've used that has had multiple instances of not working for us.
So that's the only one that has had a problem.
The only charger fails we've had, but EZO won't.
Even then with one of them, we could do a workaround.
Yeah, yeah, we'll come to today.
So that was yesterday.
Basically, by the time we were hungry, thirsty, tired and grumpy, we then found ourselves
with charges being difficult to us.
Today, however, we've driven from Fort William back down to near Preston and we've gone
via Paris, sorry, Blackpool on the way because that's traditional.
I have to try and take a selfie with a Blackpool tram and not get run over.
Which you managed?
Which I managed, yes, twice, which was pretty good.
Two charging stops today?
Yes.
Both of our services on the M73-74, I never get it right despite the fact that I used
to drive them on almost every day, without issue, rocked up, plugged in, sorted.
We did try before Kilington Lake, that wasn't our first choice.
We were going to go to, we were going to stop the TV and charge there.
Well, well.
Well, we weren't actually, no, you're right, sorry, backtrack a little bit.
We were originally going to go all the way down to Burton and Kendall.
Burton and Kendall.
Oh, down to Burton and Kendall.
This morning, we started off and from Fort William, we had loads of charge and so we
were blatting our way down, just sitting cruise control on at the speed limit.
Well, no, not cruise control, but Andrew was driving down to both of our services and great
job, got there far more charge than the car had predicted.
Yep.
At the start of the day, haha, look at us, aren't we clever?
Look at the silly car.
It's like there's a theme in this, by the way.
You can see where this is all going in Burton and we then set it for Burton and Kendall
and it was saying, oh, you're only going to have 18% or something.
Yeah.
Very little.
I'm like, haha, don't be so silly.
You said that earlier on and sure enough, as we were going down the M6, the range kept
dropping and the delta between how much charge we had and how far
we had to go, kept getting smaller and until it was down to, it was going
to be like nine miles.
But the rate it was going would have meant that we would have been in the negative by
the time we didn't make it.
Yeah, it was getting closer and closer and closer.
I thought, never mind, we'll go in, we shall get some organic farm bread electricity in
at T-Base South.
Unfortunately, at lunchtime, on the Saturday in July, just after all of the schools had
broken up, we were not the only people, I'm sorry, that was a du-ri-no-twingo sport with
a body kit on, it looked fantastic and really nice wheels too.
Yes, the Saturday after the holiday, the break up for the holiday.
Funnily enough, it was mobbed, T-Base was mobbed and one of their chargers was out, all the
rest were busy, there was some Tesla one, so I tried to charge it, charge with a Tesla
one, try to use a register for the Tesla app, it just didn't really seem to want to know,
to be honest.
He just wouldn't acknowledge that I was anywhere near a charger just by the fact that I was
standing between two of them.
But we thought we'd try it just for the lot, we needed the electricity, and we needed the
electricity, the electricity would have been nice.
So poked about with that for a bit, decided it wasn't going to work, got back in the car
and went down, we knew we had plenty of range for Killington Lake services 10 miles down
the road, so that's what we did, went down there, went to another grid serve, we charged
up, and it grid served basically, it did its thing, it did what it said, the app worked,
everything just worked first time seamlessly, we were at 16% and by the time we went in,
we had some lunch, we came out, did other things you do in service station, and then,
no, not that, and then it was 79% and we waited, so we just let it click over the 80% and
that was that, so we've been two charges so far, we're almost back, we've got 99 miles
left as I look across the car, so all of that seems to work pretty well, just as you'd expect.
Car stuff, only thing we've got noted on the car stuff was the fact that the car was right
and we were being cocky and wrong, especially when it told us twice we needed a stop, but we
didn't expect that top section of the M6 to just eviscerate, by sitting with the crews at 70,
we didn't expect that top section of the M6 to eviscerate our range in the way it did the car,
however, was expecting that. That's about it I think, worth mentioning that obviously grid
serve have been our charging sponsors on this and they have an eB charging network that spans
almost the whole of the UK, you can tell where they don't because that's why we've been using
other networks, well you can just turn up and pay in the way that we've been doing it with a debit
card or with their app, you can also get 25% off charging rates at all of their 200 locations with
grid serve plus, grid serve plus costs just £7.99 a month, it 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 health checks whilst you charge pet portraits and similar,
many people take out grid serve plus for a month at a time to cover a holiday or seasonal travel
and a friend of ours was planning something and he worked out that if he'd done it, we're using
grid serve plus then he would have immediately saved to £7.99 in one day. Much more information
on that at grid serve.com slash membership. Do we want to quickly talk, I mean we're going to do a
proper round up with the live stream, Andrew, but do we want to quickly talk about overall how this
has been? Yeah, I think we should. should give it like our immediate sort of gut
feeling reactions to this live as we come over the last few miles actually of the trip. Yeah.
You are joining us as we almost hit the ticker tape at the end of this amazing adventure.
He's turned off the sat nav so I have no idea how far we actually have to go to be frank. Oh,
the hotel at a reasonable time each night. We have generally left between 7.30 and 8 o'clock in
the morning, but a certain chunk of that is because we've known we've had long days and we're both
kind of early morning people anyway. Yeah. And because we got in handy, we could go to bed
at a reasonable time. So we had a proper night's sleep. For me, it's the stuff we hoped it would
be, which is more relaxing in the point of view that we would achieve what we wanted to achieve
in as reasonable a time as possible. At the end of the day, we were still going the same distances.
However, because of the car and the range and the confidence in that plus the networks have
improved and the networks we've used generally have been reliable. I mean, grid service has been
100%. The others have been 100%. It's Iso that we've had the issue. Osprey was a piece of cake.
Yeah. Iso is the one we've had an issue with and the Tesla app today was we had an issue with.
But other than that, it is meant that it's been, apart from the last two days, it's been seamless.
It's been simple to do and it's taken the stress out of it. The only thing that's been stressy is
you are going, in some instances, we are going 400 miles in a day and that just takes as long as
it takes. There's no way around that. Yeah. And that would be the case no matter what we're doing.
If you were doing the North Coast 500 section, for example, and you were doing it in a Porsche
or a McLaren, you would, well, I don't think you'd be doing it much quicker. No. Certainly,
not seenly. And you would still be pushing on and having to think about, okay, well,
we've got a hotel booked here tonight. We need to make the progress to get there.
That's been the bit that, if you call it stressy, has been stressful, has been stressful.
Just the whole little bit. But we've never got to the hotel and gone, oh, that God, another day.
No. Which kind of happened a wee bit last time. Yeah. The after midnight, the repeated
after midnight last year, last time. That was tough. We're very tough. I mean,
arriving in Inverness, for example, six hours earlier than we had arrived the year before,
at the time before. I keep saying the year and I keep saying last year, I'm sorry,
it's a really bad verbal ticker. I'm trying not to. So what's the takeaway for you?
Yeah, it's not been, has it been easier than I thought? I don't know. I knew it was going to
be easier. I rocked up saying this is going to be much easier. I think I was surprised.
The only place we would ever have had to wait for a charger was a TV. Every other time we have
never been iced. There has never been, which didn't happen last time. There's always been charges
available, even if it's only one or two. And I've been surprised how easily stuff has worked.
Last time we had a card with us, which we always use, because we had that Chargemaster card,
and we used that for the Trigulus card, the ChargePlay Scotland charges as well.
And we needed that because the mobile network and stuff wasn't there.
This time, we never had actually faced that problem at all.
I was actually surprised how ESO repeatedly failed in different locations.
That was, I was surprised. That was disappointing. Although, to be honest,
that charger, that tongue, which didn't work, was also a charger that didn't work the last time.
I'm not surprised by that one so much, but I am surprised the multiple failures in Fort William.
Yes. I think that a lot of people don't use the 7kW or the 22kW one. So they kind of forgot about it.
But I think maybe if we've had the RFID card, it would have worked.
Maybe.
Maybe. But we don't know. But we're hoping that ESO are going to be able to,
well, they better be able to provide the investment. Maybe the Scottish Government
hasn't been able to provide, and that's why they have signed that deal with ESO.
Yep.
Otherwise, in summary, it's been pretty good. We've made it. It's just about four o'clock
on the Saturday, and we're pulling into Preston. And that's that. Gosh.
It feels like it's been simultaneously a long time and very, very quick.
Yes. Yeah.
And I will confess, driving down the M6 today has been a little bit, oh, I have to drive back up
that again tomorrow. That has not the fault of any charging network or of the car. No,
it's been really good. You and I haven't fallen out.
Don't think so.
Don't think so.
You're hiding it well if we have.
Yeah. The Ice Buy book.
Oh, yeah, we've got more to tick.
We've got more to tick in this. We've seen lots of stuff that's been missing,
which is good, including a Spanish car and had a Spanish car.
Kit car.
Kit cars as well.
Horse and cart.
Oh, horse and cart was another one, which we didn't think we were going to get.
So that was pretty cool. But yes.
That is it.
Recharging round Britain. We have done it. I don't think there's any need to do a third one.
No.
I don't see why there would be a need to do a third one.
Not in another decade.
Not in our decade as well.
But just generally, I think we've proven it, it's doable.
And we've not even done it in a big car with a big battery.
We've done it in essentially a sort of EB segment car,
which doesn't have a relatively big battery for an EB segment car,
but it's efficient. It's been very, very comfortable. It's been quick,
where we've needed that. It's just nice to drive.
Yeah.
And the seats have been really comfortable. We've been done at least 350 miles every day.
And I've been...
There's no aches and pains or anything like that.
No aches and pains.
So you don't feel sore after sitting. Everything's great.
Yeah. Yeah. So huge, huge us to the little Insta, Insta for that.
Yeah. And if you want to know more about the Insta, in the show notes,
there is a link to Alan's review after being at the UK launch,
as well as a link directly to Hyundai's, Hyundai UK's own website.
I've given you more details about the Insta and as well as deals and all that sort of stuff.
Yeah. And of course, don't forget about Gridserv as well.
Yep. Links in the show notes.
Last thing to not forget about is that between now and next time,
you can give us any feedback and share your thoughts for the show at motoringpodcast.com.
Blue Sky at the Motoring Podcast on Instagram and Facebook,
and on the contact page of www.motoringpodcast.com, the hub of all our activities.
Remember, you can support us financially via Patreon and please leave a review and rating
on that podcast, YouTube or whatever your podcast that lets you do such a thing.
Sorry, speed bumps are hilarious when you're trying to do this.
Andrew, what's the best way to get in touch with you?
Best way to get in touch with me is if you search for crapwindscreen on Blue Sky.
And Alan, if people like to get in touch with you personally,
what's the best way for them to do that?
The best way is also via Blue Sky where I'm at AJP Bradley, that's B-R-E-D-L-E-Y
dot B-Sky dot social. We'll be back very soon, but until then, I've been Alan Bradley,
I've been Andrew Clues and Safe Motoring.
About this episode
Day 6 of the Charging Round Britain run looks back at the hosts’ earlier Scotland leg and the cars they’re using—switching from a Hyundai Ioniq to a Hyundai Insta. The conversation then gets practical: EV efficiency numbers, why older “free” chargers aren’t viable, and how EZO is rebranding and running Scotland’s network. Reliability varies by site and app—22kW failures, Tesla auth trouble, and range dropping to “like nine miles” on the M6—while Gridserve is praised and the day ends with a drive into Preston.
Today, Saturday 18 July 2026, we continued with Day 6 of Recharging Round Britain the final leg, where we are trying to, as closely as we can, recreate the route we undertook nearly a decade ago. Hear how we got on yesterday to the final destination of Fort William and today as we travelled from Fort William, via Bothwell services, Tebay services, Killington Lakes services, Blackpool and the end of the road near Preston.
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
