Any fool.....

Any fool can make something complicated. It takes a genius to make it simple.

Sadly there are not many geniuses developing apps for charging electric cars!
Having arrived in Crawley last night and expecting the Tesla Supercharger to available I find it had mysteriously vanished!!!!

So after visiting the Polar charger at the Crowne Plaza Hotel - charger say no you need a card for this latest model - I only had the app on my phone, I arrive at the town hall 'Charge My Car' charging station. Yippee! It says 'Download the app', which I dutifully do, sign up entering all the details with my frozen fingers because just in case I'm trying to preserve the battery life of my car., and then? Err how do I add my credit card details? Finally find where to do this and I'm ready to charge my car.... Only where on the app does it let me select 'Start charging'?

NO IDEA! so I start flicking through all the possible potential options - until finally the 'Start charging' page appears. So I do - but as I have no idea how I actually got there in the first place I daren't navigate away from the page because it also has the 'Stop Charging' button.

Charging an electric car with 40 kwh current is not a spectator sport, so I go to have something to eat, and return when the app bleeps to say I have overstayed by 20 minutes!!! Why didn't the thing bleep just before??? Wouldn't that be more sensible?Luckily no-one else was wanting to charge their car at 10 o'clock on a Sunday night.

But I still don't have enough charge to get home.... But I do have enough to get the Heathrow Terminal 5 Tesla Super Charger. So off I go. The Heathrow Terminal 5 Tesla Super Charger isn't actually at Terminal 5, so that was somewhat confusing ,as I drove down some dodgy-looking road to finally find myself at the Hilton Hotel Heathrow Terminal 5.

There are eight lovely super chargers all of which are free bar one, so I plug in with a sigh of relief . Super chargers have 120 kwh max current - but still exactly entertaining, so I go in search of a hot drink, ending up in the bar and meeting Alex and his son who are complete strangers but somehow due a mix up by the bar man, Alex ends up paying for my hot chocolate too.

Alex, I know it's hardly likely you will read this but if you do - it was a pleasure to met you, I hope you and your son got home safe - as I did eventually!