For drivers, filling up a car is a routine that’s as common as buying groceries, mowing the lawn, or running the dishwasher. But, with electrification on the rise, drivers now have to learn something new: how to charge the battery of their electric vehicle.

I had never charged an electric vehicle – until last week, when I picked up a Lynk & Co 01 plug-in hybrid. Here’s how it went:

Friday morning 11:00 AM: I have “subscribed” to the 01 for 500 euros a month, which includes insurance, road tax, maintenance and winter tires. I picked up the car, electronically signed the subscription form on my smartphone and drove home. The car was filled up, but the battery was empty and needed to be charged before I could drive the 01 in “pure” mode. That’s when you use only electric power. Because we do a lot of our driving over small distances, I was keen to rely on the battery for those trips.

Friday noon: We do not have a garage and park our car on the street. Therefore, installing a home wallbox is not an option and I need to charge the 01’s battery with the help of a public charger in the neighborhood. The one closest to our home in western Munich is an 8-to-10 minute walk. Today, my app says two of the four chargers there are available.

That proves to be correct when I arrive at the charging point a bit later. My app from electric utility EnBW doesn’t let me scan the QR code on the charger, which is operated by the Munich city utility SWM. But it does let me choose which one I want from a list of chargers the app displays for that specific location. Charging starts and I encounter the first problem.

Open car window 

I have left a car window open. I want to close it but need to turn on the car to do so. However, that’s impossible because you cannot switch the car on when a charger cable is connected. I end the charging process, disconnect the cable, get into the car, hit the start button and close the window. Then I begin again.

After I restart the charging process, the app says everything is working fine and I begin the 10 minute walk home. It starts to rain and I get moderately wet.

Two hours later I decide to check on my new car. The app says charging is still in progress, but when I inspect the vehicle 10 minutes later, problem number 2: Charging has not worked. This is probably because I failed to properly secure one end of the cable, but everything looked OK when I started the process. Why the app wrongly reassures me is unclear.

I disconnect and reconnect the charging cable, select the charger in the app and now there’s a blinking green light on the car’s charge port. The car is charging and I take an e-scooter home. It’s still raining.

Five hours is a long time to wait for a full charge and I’m eager to try out my new hybrid, the first European offering of Volvo Cars sister brand Lynk & Co. So after two-and-a-half hours, I go back, unplug the charging cable and get in the car. The battery is half full, good for 35 km of electric driving.

Saturday AM: There is a public charge point slightly nearer to my home and the app says one of the two chargers is free. I take the car there, a two-minute drive, but in those two minutes, it turns out someone has occupied the one free charger. I decide to try again a few hours later.

A big SUV

Saturday noon: One of the two chargers is now free again, so I give it a second try. All good. The other charger continues to be occupied by a big BMW SUV whose owner doesn’t seem to mind that the utility will bill him for “blocking” the charger after the maximum allowed 240 minutes are up.

Two hours later, I walk back to my car, which is now fully charged. I’m good to go for 70 kms of electric driving at a total cost of 8 euros. With gasoline at 2 euros a liter and this kind of vehicle capable of doing 20 kms a liter, driving pure electric is slightly more expensive than getting power from the internal combustion engine alone. But, because SWM uses green electricity I’m happy to claim that I do less damage to the environment.

Conclusions: With the apps that power companies provide, finding a charge point is easy. They show whether a charger is available and, once the charging process starts, indicate that it is in progress. Based on my initial experience with EnBW’s “mobility+” app, however, the information provided is limited when using a charge point provided by another company.

Dirty cables

The physical part of charging the car was relatively straightforward, but, overall, the process feels decidedly unsophisticated. The two charging cables – there’s a second one for use with a  regular home socket – are thick and get dirty quickly. When not in use, they take up a lot of space in the trunk. Connecting the cable is easy but beware that public charge points more often than not are out in the open and exposed to the elements. When it rains you get wet.

When leases on hybrid cars are up, the vehicles are often returned with cables unused and still in their original packaging. Apparently, many hybrids, which qualify for sizable tax incentives, are mostly driven in combustion-engine mode only, which means the added weight of the battery merely serves to increase fuel consumption. Given the time-consuming nature of charging my 01’s battery, I understand why this happens. The German government is considering doing away with incentives for hybrids.

It would be much easier to have a wallbox at home, but in our case we do not want to sacrifice part of our garden for a garage or car port. Thus, no option to charge at home. The City of Munich plans to roll out more public chargers in coming years and that’s an obvious way to make the charging process much more convenient. But until then my regular walk to a nearby charge point is likely to become part of my weekly routine. The car, by the way, is fine, but more on that later.