Volkswagen e-golf
UPDATE We’ve warmed to VW’S Car-net app
WINTER’S here – and this brings an especially cold chill for electric vehicle owners, who, having got over the basic concept of range anxiety, now have to take a second gulp as their EV’S normal range shrinks by a few miles.
Part of the problem, of course, is that heating up a car from freezing temperatures takes a lot of energy. And merely sticking on a few extra layers of clothing for your daily commute won’t quite solve the problem either; you still need electricity to defrost the windscreen and rear glass, after all.
Fortunately, Volkswagen has an app for this. In fact, the system, called Car-net, works across not only Apple and Android phones, but also in your web browser. It feeds through a constant stream of information from the vehicle to your desktop or smartphone, via the security of the cloud – and allows you to send configuration instructions back to the car.
In other words, this means I can sit in the Auto Express office and check that the e-golf is still safely parked and locked. But crucially in the winter months, Car-net also allows me to save ‘departure times’ and tell the e-golf to warm up the cabin and defrost the windscreen.
The joy of this is that the whole process can occur when the car is plugged into my Chargemaster point at home, so it doesn’t cost me a single mile of range.
I’ve also started to override the system a bit when I know that I’ll have more than enough battery capacity to get me home anyway; there’s nothing quite like getting into a pre-warmed car after a long, cold walk.