Diesel & petrol alternatives? Your thoughts please

I just did a 254 mile (each way - over 500 miles towing and well over 600 miles for the full trip) trip to the Lake District (during the very high rain) towing the caravan with the EV. I plan to do a full write up, but in short - it was fine. As far as the wardens knew, we were the 1st full EV to have towed a caravan and stayed at the Borrowdale (Low Manesty) club site.

Choctrees. Did you charge up en route?

I'm interested to know how you would have fared if the charge points were out of action. Both ourselves and a Tesla driver needed a charge but the charge point was out of action. We could continue because we have a REX, range extender. I will look forward to your write up. 

We are well into EV ownership but are increasingly disheartened by the lack of charging provision.

Edit. Haven't given up though as it's excellent for local driving.

JVB, I have explained previously,  a Rex isn't an internal combustion engine. It's a small petrol driven generator which extends the battery power.

Yes, charged twice on way up and twice on way back (and a bunch while there of course). 

I looked at zap-map carefully for good charge reports at a number of possible locations for both there and back and had a plan A, B and C in mind for each of the stopping zones. Then threw the plan out of the window based on traffic, used live data from Zapmap, and E.ON to determine where I would be good to stop, and the whole thing went without issue. 

To be fair, the most important thing for me was 1) be sure I could park the caravan while I charged (un hitched) and 2) be sure that I had an option to move to a second location if the primary was out of service. Worked out fine.

Petrol drive. Generator ? And not a ice how does that work.

"a Rex isn't an internal combustion engine. It's a small petrol driven generator which extends the battery power."

But the extender is an internal combustion engine based generator, a 647cc one, that's how it manages to use petrol.

Is it or is it not an ICE

Brue, if it uses petrol, it’s an ICE even if it doesn’t directly power the car.

The wheels are only driven by electric. The petrol engine just powers a generator which supplies power to turn the wheels. It's how diesel/electric trains work.

We had a hybrid petrol car the other week and I was absolutely shocked at how much fuel it used. I have never ever been into a petrol station as often as we did with that car in 36 years of driving. I couldn't afford to run a petrol car and more and more manufacturers are not selling diesel cars and hybrid petrol and electric are just not suitable for towing. I'm looking for a new car at the moment and it is so difficult to find a diesel automatic seven seater that will tow our caravan. So difficult that we are seriously thinking about selling our caravan or buying an older diesel car instead of a new one.

The future for caravanning is very bleak. Very bleak indeed, and I truly believe that unless you only tow 10 miles then caravanning will be finished if not banned to keep the electric car dream alive and bury the appalling range of them.

It appears to me that hydrogen powered engines are the future for work horse engines, certainly at the moment. EVs are only good for local running around, there is just too much hassle required on long journeys.

peedee