Innovation Europe > News > Innovation blog > Richard Scrase crosses Europe in a Think City electric car

He and his three fellow travellers aim to travel over 4000 miles on a record-breaking journey, during which they will talk to major European carmakers to find out how close they are to getting their electric cars out on the road. They will visit cities that are wiring up charging stations and ask politicians what they are doing to promote the electric cause.

Stopping off at manufacturing plants and research centres, the team is hoping that hotels and restaurants from Norway to Spain allow them to plug the car in and that the battery lasts long enough to get around Scandinavia, through Germany, over the Alps and across Spain and Portugal.

By the end of the trip, the team will have built up an impression of the state of electric car manufacturing and policy across the continent, and have heard from people on the way about whether they would switch to an electric car.

Electric Ride: Day One

I’ve just set out with three colleagues to drive a Think City electric car around Europe. During the journey we’ll make a series of programmes for BBC Radio 4. The basic premise of our show is extremely simple – we want to look at the emergence of electric cars as a dawning reality across Europe. 



Transport accounts for about one quarter of Europe’s use of oil and gas and the consequent carbon emissions and other pollution. Personal transport – driving cars – is responsible about half of this. One feasible low-carbon alternative transport system would use renewable energy to charge electrical vehicles.



By embarking on an ambitious journey like this one, we will be able to share with our listeners the picture across Western Europe. We’ll be investigating the technology, infrastructure and political will behind the growth of electric cars and their associated infrastructure.



We left London on a bright June morning drive to Harwich to catch a ferry to Denmark, on the first leg of a journey that will take us through 10 countries before returning to London early in July. The first difference between our journey and a typical car journey is that we had to stop at a caravan site in the green heart of Essex at the mid-point of the journey. Here we plugged into the 16A supply for a ’fast’ charge. An hour later we continued our journey on to the ferry where we plugged in for the duration of the crossing.



The m.s Dana Sirena carried us across the North Sea to the Danish port of Esjberg. During the journey I took the opportunity to interview the captain and asked him whether he could cope with a future where he is transporting hundreds of electric cars.



I was surprised to discover that the ferry already has the generating capacity and infrastructure to cope with hundreds of electric vehicles. This is due in part to the fact that the ferry regularly has lorries with refrigeration units on board. These are connected up to a high voltage supply onboard for the 18 hour crossing to keep the cooling units running.



He did admit that in an EV-rich future the ship might charge for a charge to pay for the impact on fuel consumption that adding hundreds of kilowatts to the electricity demand will make.



We left the ferry to drive on to Denmark with a charge of 103%! This carried us across to catch our next ferry, this time just an hours journey across to the ’energy island’ of Sandsoe. Here we’ll discover how the island has become self-sufficient in energy.

 



BBC Electric Ride will be broadcast on Radio 4 on Saturdays at 1030hrs (BST / GMT +1) for four weeks from 19 June and will also be available globally on BBC i-player from the same date. The team can also be followed on BBC Online www.bbc.co.uk/electricride and on facebook at www.facebook.com/BBCelectricride 

BBC Electric Ride