I travel most months to the Norfolk coast where our cottage does not have off-street parking and I cannot therefore charge my car overnight. As it’s about 150 miles away I need to charge while I’m there in order to have enough charge to get about and then get home again.

North Norfolk is practically a desert when it comes to rapid chargers but an enterprising local business did install one on their forecourt in a town about 15 miles from our cottage and this is where I’ve been charging up to now. (This was the catalyst which allowed me to buy my Tesla in the first place.)

On my most recent visit I noticed that the Morrisons in Cromer, the local town, has also installed one which is quite a bit more convenient.

In theory both these chargers offer the same thing. They have three types of connection – AC type 2, Chademo and CCS. The fastest are the last two, both DC connections, and they are supposed to provide up to 50 KW of electricity.

In practice, though, not all chargers are created equal. In my my limited experience so far with these two, the Polar charger has provided the best speed using both my Chademo and CCS adapters – about 45 KW on a sustained basis. The Genie-Point charger would only charge on Chademo and gave me 30 KW.

There are differences in how the services work, too. Polar have a free smart card which allows touch access to the charger (you are billed monthly – £7 for the service charge and then electricity which is about as cheap as home). Genie-Point have a web app which you have to have an account which you have to put £10 into, and then it’s pay as you go from there. If you are in an area with poor mobile signal you could be in trouble as the app is the only way I could see of starting a charge, whereas Polar does everything through the RFID card.

So on paper the Polar charger wins, but there is another variable – location. The Polar charger is much further away and is on an out-of-the-way industrial estate which is 15 minutes walk from the nearest coffee shops in town. The Genie-Point charger is in Morrisons’ car park, near their facilities and also five minutes walk from the town centre. If you are charging for 40 minutes which is pretty typical on a rapid charger for a 100 KW Tesla then things like that matter.

Which brings me to the alternative. On my way back to London I have the option to use the Supercharger at Elevdon which is just off the A11.

The eight stalls are never all occupied in my experience and I can get between 80 KW and 140 KW depending on the state of charge of my battery (the lower the better). The supercharger is right next door to a pub and restaurant. This is one of over 70 superchargers in the UK – by far the largest network of fast chargers in the country. To use them I just plug in and off it goes. I get charged automatically on my registered credit card and the Tesla app tells me when I’ve charged enough to get home.

The best option for me then at the moment is to charge in Cromer just enough to get to Thetford and then use the superior Tesla chargers and nearby facilities.

The contrast between my charging experiences in Norfolk demonstrates quite graphically how much of a lead Tesla has in the electric car market, and what a real challenge the other car companies who are launching dozens of new EVs in the next couple of years have to meet. Tesla’s charging solution is slick and intergrated; the patchwork of rapid chargers, all with different models and sign-up requirements are poor competition currently.

And Tesla is not standing still with more chargers planned for 2020, though not sadly for North Norfolk yet. I can but hope…