I’m still recovering from a long weekend in the Lake District with my old schoolfriends – all of us are Dads and normally have a limited social life week to week, so there was a certain amount of being let off the leash. I’ll maybe leave it there, but I probably feel better than I should.

On Saturday night we headed to a nearby town for dinner in our designated drivers’ electric Audi. We pulled up at a public charger and he got out a cable, plugged in and… nothing. Cue lots of muttering, swiping and tapping – at one point his app told him the charger couldn’t be used as it was charging another car. There wasn’t another car anywhere close. Eventually a charging light came on, seemingly at random, and we set off. But when we got back to the car, it hadn’t been charged at all.

This was very frustrating, not just because my mate had to wrestle with technology in front of an audience of four, but because this should be an easy process if EVs are to continue to rise in popularity. It would be extraordinary to turn up at a petrol station and find all the pumps out of order.

But over the weekend we also struggled with the plethora of car parking payment apps, at least one of which didn’t seem to be able to handle someone paying for a car that wasn’t theirs, and all of which needed an update to be downloaded before they worked which, given the weak 4G signal in those narrow valleys, wasn’t a quick process.

Why does this matter? Well various commentators will use a charging anecdote like mine above to argue against EVs, when they would never use the parking app anecdote to argue against using a car. We naturally see a glitch in a novel system as much more catastrophic than a glitch in a familiar system – and in the green space there are plenty of politically motivated people ready to pounce on the smallest problem. Therefore it is much more important to get green technology to work properly than it is for other systems.

So to green technology (or system) developers, I would say “get it right first time, you mightn’t get a second go.”