An Honest Look at Going Electric in Ireland
I want to start with a confession, because this whole post falls apart without it.
I planned my 2026 Ireland Wild Atlantic Way trip as an EV road trip. I drive a Kia EV9 at home, I’ve written a book about EV road tripping across the Southeast U.S., and I had a Volkswagen ID.4 reserved for 10 days across the west and north of the country. The ID.4 is the best-selling electric car in Ireland right now, so it felt like the perfect way to test whether the EV life I live in the States actually translates in Ireland.
Then I got to the rental counter, and I did not get the ID.4. I got a hybrid car instead.
So this is not the post I set out to write. I can’t tell you what it was like to charge an electric car around the Wild Atlantic Way, because I never plugged one in. What I can do is something arguably just as useful: I drove the exact same route in a petrol car, tracked every kilometer and every euro of fuel, and then ran the real numbers on what the EV version would have cost and required. I did the research I came here to do. I just did it from the driver seat of the wrong car.
Here’s what I found. And I’ll warn you now: it did not leave me feeling like the easy answer is “yes, just go electric.”
What I actually drove
Over the Bundoran-based stretch of the trip, Galway up to Donegal and back out through Sligo, Tyrone, and Fermanagh, I covered roughly 1,180 km of the kind of driving this region is made of: single-carriageway roads, coastal headlands, mountain climbs out to Slieve League, and a lot of stop-start village driving with my husband and two kids in the back.
Four days in, I paid €72 to replenish about ten gallons of petrol at €1.69 a litre. At the time I was reading 170 km remaining, and when I refilled, my range shot up to 880 km. This was important, as we covered a 210 km Slieve League loop that day (Glencolmcille, Malin Beg, Teelin, and Killybegs). I filled up two more times before returning the car: €68, then €50. That’s €190 total in petrol for the full 1,180 km.
What the EV would have cost
Now the comparison. The ID.4 I was supposed to get has a quoted range of 320 to 445 km depending on the battery, and uses somewhere around 18 to 20 kWh per 100 km in real-world conditions like these.
My first accommodation, in Galway, had a complementary charger on site, and we stayed there on our first and last night. Therefore the 100 km or so between Shannon and Galway have been excluded from costs.
My base in Bundoran had a Lidl charger a short walk away (eight minutes): a 60 kW DC plug and a 22 kW Level 2 AC plug. Lidl Ireland charges €0.45 per kWh on AC and €0.50 per kWh on DC, which makes it one of the cheapest places to charge on the island. So I built the whole estimate around charging there every night.
Across those 1,180 km, the ID.4 would have needed roughly 224 kWh of electricity. At Lidl’s AC rate, that’s about €101 for the entire Bundoran-based portion of the trip. Even at the slightly higher DC rate, it’s around €112. Adjusting for how efficiently the car actually ran, the honest range is somewhere between €85 and €117.
Set the two side by side:
| Petrol (actual) | EV at Lidl (estimated) | |
|---|---|---|
| Distance | ~1,180 km | ~1,180 km |
| Energy/fuel | ~26 gallons petrol | ~224 kWh |
| Cost | €190 | €85–€117 |
The EV would have cost roughly half what the petrol did. That’s not a small gap. Over a longer trip, or a year of driving, it’s the difference that makes EV owners evangelical.
So if this were only about money, the post would end here with a tidy bow. It isn’t, and it doesn’t.
The part nobody puts on the brochure: range anxiety with no backup
Here’s the question I kept turning over as I drove: would I have actually made it through each day without scrambling for a charge?
On paper, yes. My biggest day used about two-thirds of the car’s worst-case range. No single day’s driving would have stranded me, assuming I started every morning with a full battery.
But that assumption, “start every morning full,” is the whole ballgame. And it rests on one thing: the Lidl charger working, being free, and being available every single night.
That’s where my confidence cracked. My experience renting an EV in England taught me never to rely on one charger: if it’s not working, if there’s a time limit, if it’s unavailable. What happens next?
On our longest driving day, through the sheep-covered mountains of Slieve League, I found a charger in the harbor town of Killybegs. It was on the street, one side was in use (proof that it works), and one other plug available. Perfect, right? Two hours at a 22 kW charger should replenish the range used that day (150 to 250 km).
The day before, we visited the Ulster American Folk Park in Omagh, County Tyrone (Northern Ireland). I was pleasantly surprised to see a charging station there, but there was a catch. It was an ESB ChargePoint, with no plug. Broken? No. You supply your own Level 2 plug, which supposedly comes with the car. We arrived at 12:30pm and left at 4:30pm, so at four hours, charging at 22 kW, it would have cost £16.80–£27.72 (or €15.73–€25.96). I’m giving both currencies here because Omagh is across the border in Northern Ireland, so this particular charge would have actually been billed in pounds, not euros, unlike everywhere else on this trip.
But I wouldn’t have needed the full four hours. Bundoran to the Folk Park is 79 km, so call it 100 km round trip with a buffer for road conditions and charging losses. At the ID.4’s real-world efficiency, that’s only 18 to 20 kWh, or about an hour on a 22 kW charger. The honest cost for what I actually needed that day is closer to £7.00 (€6.55–€7.21), not the four-hour figure above. Most of that visit, the car simply wouldn’t have needed to be plugged in at all.
Two days before our Slieve League trip, we left our car in Sligo as a cousin took us to our family’s ancestral home. My cousin informed us of a charger about one kilometer away from his home. An ESB ecars station with a fast CCS charger and a Level 2 22 kW charger. Had we charged our car here for the four hours we were away, once again we could have easily replenished the car’s range. The official European range for the standard version of the EV I was supposed to have is 520 to 553 km (323 to 343 miles). The lower trim model “Pure” drops to 360 km (224 miles).
If Lidl didn’t work, I had a backup at Kee’s Circle K in Laghey, a 50 kW station less than 20 minutes from my accommodation, and en route to Donegal, Slieve League, Omagh, and Enniskillen. The downside? It wasn’t within walking distance of my accommodation. I would have had to build in charging time along my route, either before or after our excursions for the day (30 to 45 minutes at Circle K? Not ideal while on vacation… I learned that lesson in England too). It also would have cost €20 to €30.
So to recap, I had access to chargers in Galway, Sligo, Donegal, Killybegs, and Omagh. I came prepared, knowing where chargers were, how much it would cost, and with backup plans if the first tier options didn’t work or weren’t available. But here’s the thing that cost comparison misses. I had no reliable network of EV drivers ensuring me their charging stations were fully functional and recently used. Many PlugShare check-ins are a year old or more. And most were negative. That could just mean that only one person had a negative experience and wrote about it, while everyone else had a positive experience and didn’t tell us. But how can I know which one? I won’t until I try it for myself.
The infrastructure, honestly
Let’s dig into the data on infrastructure, rather than rely on skeptics who think the infrastructure exists, or me, someone who still has never driven an EV in Ireland.
Ireland has somewhere around 3,200 publicly accessible charge points as of early 2026. That sounds like a lot until you set it against the 204,000-plus EVs already on Irish roads, or roughly one public charger for every 63 electric cars. And the gap is widening, not closing: the EV fleet is growing far faster than the charging network. In April 2026, the number of new EVs registered in a single month nearly equalled the entire national fast-charging network added across the whole previous year.
Worse for a trip like mine: that infrastructure is densest in Dublin, Cork, Galway, Limerick, and along the main motorway corridors. It is thinnest exactly where I was: the Sligo and Donegal coast. The very landscape that makes this region worth driving to is the landscape the chargers haven’t fully reached.
And a lot of what is out there is older and slower. Plenty of public chargers are aging units that don’t deliver true rapid speeds. The government knows this and has a national plan to add high-power hubs every 60 km along national roads, and a 43% jump in fast-charger numbers over the past year is real progress. But “coming by 2030” doesn’t help the EV traveler today feel confident in existing reliability.
What the cars on the road were telling me
You can read the market mood just by watching the traffic, and I did, for 10 days.
EVs are here. I spotted Kia EV3s and EV6s, Hyundai IONIQ 5s, Volkswagen’s ID.3 and ID.4, plus several Teslas, and more. They’re no longer exotic. But they were vastly outnumbered by hybrids, plug-in hybrids, and small, frugal petrol cars. The numbers back me up on this. Hybrids are the single most popular new-car choice in Ireland right now, sitting around 27–28% of the market, ahead of fully electric cars at roughly 22%.
That tells me something important. Irish buyers are interested in electric cars; combined, electrified vehicles now make up nearly two-thirds of new car sales. But when they reach for the actual keys, most are still choosing the option that removes the charging question entirely. A hybrid never strands you. A plug-in hybrid gives you the electric commute without the road-trip gamble. And in a mostly rural country, I can understand why.
The EV owners who are all-in almost certainly have a different setup than I did. Industry data is consistent that 80–90% of EV charging happens at home. The Irish EV success story is a driveway story: plug in overnight at 5 to 12 cent per kWh, wake up full, and only ever touch public chargers on the occasional long haul. Those owners likely drive mostly within their range and charge at home, which is a wonderful way to own an EV, and almost the opposite of a 10-day touring road trip through the most charger-sparse part of the country.
As an anecdote, I spoke with someone who said they knew several people who had purchased an EV, and confirmed that they all appear to charge at home and generally do not rely on public charging. This person also confirmed that no one has expressed regret for switching to an EV, and they have never complained about needing to charge on the road. Few locals would be driving enough to require it.
So where does that leave me
The momentum is genuinely real. EV registrations are climbing fast, every county is growing, and I heard EV advertisements on the radio more than once as I drove. The incentives are substantial: purchase grants, reduced tax, cheap home-charging tariffs. The case for electric, on cost alone, is strong, and my own numbers prove it: I’d have spent about half as much to move the same distance.
But I can’t end this by telling you it’s all doable, because I don’t have the proof. In theory it is doable. But in practice, the hybrid is just more relied on.
Incentives get people to consider an EV. What gets them to commit is proof that it won’t interfere with their actual lives. It’s not just about the school run or work commute. It’s like what my cousin said, he wants to be able to drive to Shannon and back to pick up a friend at the airport, without having to stop and charge. By the way, that is currently doable with the ID.4’s 500 km range (the trip is about 400 km roundtrip). But I can’t prove that to him just yet.
What needs to happen isn’t mysterious. More chargers, newer and faster, spread into the places people actually drive, not just the motorways and the cities. The plans exist. The funding is being announced. The growth is happening. But the people must feel, without a doubt, that the network is reliable, functioning, and prevalent. Until then, their money and their faith will go to hybrids.
Next up: I sat down with an EV skeptic during this trip and let them make their full case. Some of what they said lines up uncomfortably well with what I saw on the road.
