Home on the range?
The adventures of a Co. Wexford dweller driving an electric car from Dublin Airport
IWAS nervous. My home is 119km from Dublin Airport (I spend so much time there I should just move to Swords and be done with it) and I had to make the journey in a BMW i3. The car was left in QuickPark for me, and I had hoped one of the two chargers there would be free so it could top itself up after the 36km trip to deliver it. That wasn’t to be, because a Tesla Model S and the inevitable Nissan LEAF had got there before the driver dropped it off.
So when I hit the start button, my first concern was to check the remaining range, which was 163km in Comfort mode, and just over 200km in EcoPro mode. The problem with EcoPro is that it lowers the heating, and it was a cold night. It also works only up to 90kph, and I would be on the motorway for almost the entire journey, so that wasn’t going to work.
I set off at a clip, somehow hoping that the faster I drove would see the range ticking down more slowly, even though the opposite is the case. I ran into the usual jam at the Bray North junction (does anyone have any clue why this happens every bloody day?) and those nerves kicked back in again.
A little further south, I was thinking about playing motoring Russian roulette but, erring on the side of caution, I stopped at the Applegreen services in Coyne’s Cross on the M11 and stuck the i3 on the fast charger.
No sooner was it connected than a man pulled up beside me. ‘Will you be long?’ he asked. ‘Oh, about 40 minutes,’ I said. He looked crestfallen. ‘Right, I’ll have to go to Wicklow Town, so,’ he muttered, not entirely generously, and disappeared silently into the night.
I picked up a few groceries, performed my ablutions, ate chilli cheese bites, a Chicken Royale, chips and a Coke Zero in Burger King, surfed the internet and whiled away the minutes.
After the aforementioned 40, I went back to the car and the battery was up to 98%, which was great, and cheap too. Unless you count the 11 quid spent on the food…
And that, no matter what all the carmakers say, is the problem with electric cars – range.
It’s getting better all the time, for sure. I drove a KIA eNiro in France recently and that genuinely does achieve over 400km on a single charge. So too do the Hyundai Kona and the Renault Zoe. Only when that’s the norm will we see anything like mass-market adoption of the technology.
Electric cars are great if you have a home charger and your daily commute is less than 100km. I don’t have one fitted, and powering the i3 battery on a standard socket would take 11 hours, which is a great deal longer than I’d want to leave a window open in winter just to trail a cable.
There’s a halfway-house charge point in Courtown, faster than domestic but not as fast as the Applegreen one, and I had to top up there for two hours one day, and again in Lidl in Gorey.
I was due to drive to Dublin and back for a lunch and had to cancel, because the restaurant was in the Financial Services Centre area, and I could find just two public charge points on the map. I definitely would have had to charge the i3, but since that area is full of tech companies too, and the employees tend to be early adopters, there was no guarantee I wouldn’t end up like that poor man driving off to Wicklow.
Instead, I sat at home, looking out at the rain, thinking of the new i3 coming next year, and its 120-amp battery instead of the 94-amp in this one; with it will come a range of 260km, which is more like it.
On the day I drove it back to Dublin, I engaged EcoPro as soon as I hit the suburbs, and only then did I relax, because that’s exactly what these cars are designed for – city driving. Here, the range matched exactly the distance I drove. For the first time, I had a chance to look around without worry and decided, yes, nice car, and not bad value at 44 grand after the SEAI grant and VRT rebate are deducted from the actual 54 grand price.
The moral of the story is simple. If you’re buying electric, make sure you know exactly what your needs are, and if you’re off on longer journeys, plan carefully and bring low-calorie sandwiches. Even a week of fast-food dinners as you watch a car charging would pile on the kilos – and the heavier the load, well, the shorter the range.