It began on Twitter, when I saw that there was an electric charging station in the parking lot at John O’ Groats in Scotland, (almost) the most northern point of the Scottish mainland. The village is about as far from the most south-westerly point in the UK, Lands End in England, as it’s possible to get without leaving the mainland: 874 miles (1.407km) to be precise. So, I idly wondered what the fastest journey time was for an electric vehicle. The idea then caught the eye of a TV presenter named Gareth Jones, host of the eponymous podcast Gareth Jones on Speed.

“Absolutely, it’s all your fault,” he told me when we spoke last week. “When you tweeted—I think it was March 7—a picture of the recharging point in John O’ Groats, which has an Ecotricity charger, you said, ‘I wonder what the record is from Lands End to John O’ Groats?’ I thought, that sounds like a plan. So I fairly casually, without much forethought, retweeted it, mentioning anyone who sells EVs in the UK asking if any of them wanted to give us a car.”