Then we’d continue south-east to Dunton, the research centre that nowadays doubles as Ford’s British HQ, ending our journey beside a statue of the founder, Old Henry, erected at Dagenham in 1944 and now overlooking Dunton’s main entrance.
This drive would be typically British: plenty of motorway, plenty of potholes, some sinuous A- and B-roads and some recharging episodes, with all the parking and service area manoeuvring this involved.
Photographer Jack and I arrived in Manchester the night before our journey was to begin, hoping that an unsuccessful meeting with a steam-driven 22kW Geniepoint charger outside our otherwise-comfortable Trafford hotel wasn’t an omen of things to follow.
For no good reason it wouldn’t function, which meant our journey couldn’t begin with a full tank, as it were.
One thing the hotel did have, bizarrely, was a parking line of about a dozen used, obviously recently imported Yankee cars for sale via eBay. Evidently the vendor was using the hotel car park for selling.
We photographed our Explorer beside a US-market Explorer of a very different persuasion, wondering at Ford’s tendency to spread familiar names over models of different characters and layouts.
Before departure the following morning, I rang the Geniepoint helpline to report the charger failure on behalf of other arriving hopefuls, to be greeted by a polite woman with a voice full of concern, who reset the charger there and then.
I watched it click into action, but its charge rate was too slow to justify our waiting. Still, it was a good sign: even when you’re talking duff chargers, EV life is getting better.
The only sign these days of Ford’s former presence at Trafford Park is a blue plaque in one of the many entrance halls of the Trafford Centre, a staggeringly huge and spacious multi-storey mall of satisfyingly appropriate American influence.
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