Long-term report: Trying out long distance driving with the Audi Q4 e-tron

You know the butterfly effect? When one small event has a knock-on to others down the line? Well, it feels as if I’ve been experiencing that an awful lot with the Q4 e-tron recently.

A work trip saw me needing to park the Q4 at Heathrow and, after my return, I’d need to drive back to the south coast to pick up my partner and the dog before driving back up north to family in Warwickshire.

I’d checked Zap-Map beforehand and, low and behold, there appeared to be 30-odd chargers located at Terminal 2’s short stay car park. Perfect, I thought. I’d be able to leave the Audi there, hook it up to the 7kW chargers and, by the time I’d get back, the car would be fully charged and I’d have more than enough in the ‘tank’ to do the whole journey.

But getting to Heathrow kicked off a whole catalogue of issues. Arriving at the car park, I saw the first bank of connectors awaiting me behind nice, wide spaces. Things were looking up. But then I tried to connect to one – nothing. I checked the app – nothing. I moved my car to another adjacent charger – nothing. Right, I thought – I’ll try the next level down.

Again, a bank of chargers lay in front of me and there was even a Mercedes EQC on charge at one of them. I thought that would mean they were in operation but sadly not. Again I tried a connector but with little success.

At this point, I called the operator – Pod Point – to try to get to the root of the problem. The person on the phone was really helpful, but informed me (after trying to reset my particular unit) that the charger I was trying to use wasn’t working – and none of the others in the whole parking area were operating correctly. All 30-odd chargers at one of the world’s biggest airports weren’t working as they should be. Even the charger connected to the Mercedes wasn’t working, apparently. But this issue just seems like absolute madness to me – particularly as the chargers are in place and the hard work of installing them all has been done.

And so this kickstarted a whole catalogue of problems. My inability to charge while I was away for the night meant that I returned to a car with around three-quarters of a full battery. That meant I wouldn’t be able to do the full journey down to Chichester and back up to Warwickshire in one crack – a charge would be needed some way on the road.

No problem, I thought, as there’s a rapid charger operated by BP Pulse close to me that delivers a 150kW charge and that should be enough to fully top up the Q4’s batteries in well under an hour. So I arrived at home, quickly got the car packed and my partner and dog inside and headed to the charger nearby.

Connected up, we strolled around the otherwise deserted section of motorway service station while the Q4 charged. It was already nearly 10pm at this point, I should add, so we were quite keen to get going.

But I noticed that the charger wasn’t running as fast as it should, with the rate of electricity being fed into the car going at a crawl. I even switched connectors – paying a £30 pre-authorisation fee for each connection in the process – but that didn’t work. Again, I turned to Zap-Map which revealed, through other user comments, that the charger wasn’t operating at 150kW, rather around 35kW. Bear in mind that these units command a serious premium, and this is like filling up with super unleaded and getting cooking oil. And the cooking oil is taking an hour longer to fill up than usual.

So, with only just enough charge in the car to make it there, we headed off again. But sitting at 70mph in the Q4 really chews through its range – as pretty much all EVs do – so it became clear, once again, that another charge would be needed.

My partner looked through local chargers and found another 150kW BP Pulse unit near Didcot. We still weren’t even close to reaching our destination. Hooked up, the same problem struck again – a painfully slow charge despite paying for rapid prices.

Now I’m a pretty calm person for the most part but even here I was beginning to lose my cool. It was now nearing midnight and we’d barely cracked the halfway mark. So we left the car to charge as best as it could and bought a burger to try and ease the pain. Even the dog seemed annoyed.

Left for as long as we could stand, the car finally had just enough to make it to our destination. By the time we got there, the two and a half hour journey from the south coast had taken four hours – and that’s not counting the hour and a half from the airport. We reached our end point without too much range remaining and – with an early start the next day – I blearily plugged the Q4 into another 7kW charger for the overnight leg. It worked without fault, but cost 30p/kWh – which is pretty expensive for a slow charger. This was, again, operated by BP Chargemaster.

Now I don’t want this to turn into some sort of electric car pile-on. I’ve had some brilliant experiences with EVs – I even drove a Skoda Enyaq back from Inverness and didn’t suffer a single charging mishap.

I get electric cars and I’m fully behind what they offer and the benefits they bring but yet again we come back to the infrastructure. It’s not often that you turn up at a petrol station and can’t fill up, but that’s something EV drivers are having to deal with time and time again. The Government has announced a radical shake-up of the infrastructure and a comprehensive increase of chargers by 2030 – but people are buying these cars now and, in my opinion, this change needs to be rapid.

And the Q4? It’s a good car. I think the ride is too firm and the steering wheel buttons are fiddly beyond belief but on the whole it’s a decent EV. But that’s one more reason why this situation is so annoying – manufacturers are pouring investment into electric vehicles, only to be let down by the plugs that power them.