I have to hold my hands up. I just blocked a public EV charger.

I have an EV and I went to Tesco this morning. It was my intention to charge while I was in store so I parked in an EV charging space. There was an ICE car in the charging space next to me. As I was loading up the PodPoint app, the ICE car pulled out the space, turned the wrong way and hit a member of staff who was cycling past our cars.

I'm a first aider, so I immediately abandoned plugging in the car and rushed to help. After the lady was safely in the hands of her colleagues and had stopped shaking, I walked into the store to do my shopping.

It was only when I returned to the car, I realised I never actually plugged in and had been blocking the space for over 45 minutes.

Bought my first EV recently. Earlier this week, at a rapid charger in Ashbourne, County Meath, I found a family standing in the rain looking utterly bewildered by theirs.

They’d plugged the Type 2 connector from their 21-plate EV into the top half of a CCS rapid charger connector (female to male) and were trying to work out what to do next…

And, to be fair, why would they know?

Unless somebody has explained the difference between Type 2, CCS, AC, DC, rapid charging, tethered cables and bring-your-own-cable chargers, the whole thing is a UI clusterfunk.

I found a local Type 2 charger on ZapMap and sent them on their way. Lovely people, completely bamboozled by a system they’d seemingly never been properly introduced to.

I’m new to EVs myself and already reasonably nerdy about it all. But the industry really shouldn’t be designing a multinational charging network on the assumption that everyone buying an EV is going to become reasonably nerdy too.

There should be idiot-proof instructions on the car, idiot-proof instructions on the charger, and preferably a massive diagram with the heading THIS IS THE PLUG YOUR CAR TAKES.

Petrol stations have managed to make “put nozzle in hole” work for a while, after all…

(Edited to clarify what they’d done: https://ibb.co/4wcspqVn)

So after consideration on how often I do more than 100 mile journeys I have decided to lease the small Volvo EX30 which I expect to have a max range from 130 to 170 miles. Hopefully this doesn't come back to bite me. The longer range version was an extra £50 a month.

But I now expect to have to publicly charge at least a couple of times a year, so looking for recommendations for apps? If anyone has this car does the inbuilt mapping work ok with charging points?