Chargers galore at M11 Birchanger Services

My short innovation road trip this week would see me leave home from Bournemouth for a few days in London to attend the Systems Innovation Conference. From there I would set off to Cambridge for Cambridge Tech Week before returning home via Bletchley Park. 

This is a 360 mile round trip. I left home with 100% charge but didn’t take a note of the mileage on the guess meter but probably 320 or so giving that it’s summer, sort of. 

Getting to London was not an issue or to get to Cambridge from there but I decided to top up in the M11 as I saw there was a service station with lots of chargers and wanted to try it out. 

Birchanger Green Services

It was the Welcome Break Birchanger Green Services at Junction 8. 

Driving in, I didn’t realised that it also has masses of Tesla chargers (24 it says in Google) and 14 very fast Applegreen chargers. 

It was busy on all chargers and the first chargers that I reversed into had a sign saying not working. Luckily the car next to me was just leaving so I took that slot. I think they had problems trying to start it, maybe via the app. I had no problem with contactless payment. Took a few more seconds than other providers to show the payment going through and then starting the charge. 

I started off with 45% battery and a range of 132 miles. 

The charger quickly got up to its maximum rate of 150kW pretty quickly. I’m not sure whether using the Hyundai sat nav helped as I used it to select the chargers as the destination, as it has battery preconditioning as a feature. 

For DC charging I set an 80% limit. It went from 45% to 80% adding 120 miles in 13 minutes. On our MG ZS it would take more than an hour, so the Ioniq 5 hardly impacts my travel time in terms of having a stop. It was all I need to visit the toilet, pop into WH Smiths and walk back to the car. 

This stop is one to add to your map favourites. 

I was hoping to find a decent bank of Gridserve chargers as they were doing 20% discount for the month of September but the one I saw listed were only 50kW and had a couple of feeds. 

How it ended