The road from Oslo to Kirkenes is 1,879 kilometres of fjords, tunnels, fishing villages and reindeer. We drove it in February, in a borrowed Polestar 3, with a JUICE BOOSTER 2 and an EGG Type 2 cable in the boot, and the explicit intent to find out what fails.
Norway has the most mature EV charging network in Europe. It also has weather that, by mid-February, the rest of Europe would consider preposterous. -22°C in Karasjok. Sideways snow in Alta. A campsite hookup in Lakselv that we suspect had not been touched since the 1980s.
What survived
The JUICE BOOSTER 2 survived everything. It plugged into a Schuko in a barn, into a CEE32 at a fish-processing plant, into a UK 3-pin in a holiday cabin, and into a 22 kW commando pillar at a port. Its OLED display went black once, briefly, in -25°C, and came back twenty seconds later when we'd warmed it in the cab.
The EGG cable survived being dragged through a quantity of road salt that we'd previously thought theoretical. The halogen-free jacket cleaned up with a damp cloth.
If you have to pick one charger to take everywhere in Europe, this is the one.
What didn't
A different portable charger, which we were also testing and which shall remain nameless, refused to operate below -10°C. Its rubberised housing developed cracks. Its companion app required a 4G signal, which Lakselv does not entirely possess.
This is not an argument that all chargers are bad. The gap between a thoroughly engineered product and a competent one is enormous, and you only see it at the edges. -20°C is an edge. So is salt. So is a thirty-year-old socket in a fishing barn.
Jake Wardle and Chris Coussons