EV Driving 101

We have managed to reach Bristol, after being on the road for the past 48 hours and although we have been lucky in finding Rapid DC charging stations along the way, it hasn't all been an easy breeze. At this poing, we have travelled the equivalent to a Google Maps route of 280 miles. With all challenges there's a learning experience, and hopefully now we will try to share our learnings about driving an EV from Durham to Cardiff while charging our wee EV. 

We managed to push the i-Miev range to the limit after our departure from York. The symptoms of when the battery discharges are as follows: the mile range indicator goes blank, a whole bunch of stuff starts blinking on the dashboard and a yellow turtle light appears - so as to let you know you the car will slowly collapse immediately. Funny huh?

Let me give you a better picture of the situation: We drove in the wrong direction for a while which resulted on a driving distance beyond the estimated remaining range of the i-MiEV. We knew the location of our next station, about 20 miles away, and we had an estimated remaining range of 15 miles. We had no choice but to head there and do as much as we could to maintain the EV running.  By the time the little turtle appeared, we were in the middle of a hilled town, it was rainy and foggy, it was cold and had no sense of how much longer we had to drive to reach our next station. At this point, we were driving at about 10mph. 

With this in mind, if there is ever an EV Driving 101 course, we think it should include the following topics:

New driving philosophy. So we had to drive in a very conservative way to reach the next station after our undesired deviation. Whenever there was a steep downhill, we removed the foot from the accelerator so let the car go into re-generative braking. If the downhill was not so steep, we simply moved the stick to neutral so as to let gravity move us forward. We also realized that braking is wasting useful energy, so we would typically let the car go into re-generative braking and use the well-known pedal braking only for absolute stopping or possible emergencies. Uphills were painfully slow, as the i-MiEV's battery doesn't like going up very much.

Everything on-board requires energy. When we realized we had to travel more miles than the estimated range, we chose to turn off as much as we could inside the vehicle. We unplugged the SatNav from the lighter charger, rolled the windows down to avoid using the ventilation system to defog the windows. Wipers were used at minimum just to keep ourselves safe. Dimmed the dashboard controls lights. And had our deviation occurred during daylight we would have turned off all outside lights.  At this point, I hope you can get the picture of our learning experience.

Charging station availability. The make of EV that one buys has an impact on the charging stations network. For instance, we have used four Rapid DC charging stations located inside the premises of Nissan Dealerships and in which the staff were kind enough to let us park (and charge) a rival manufacturer's EV. Some of the dealerships we visited however, wouldn't allow charging of vehicles other than the Leaf (using as an excuse that the charging point was not compatible and that we weren't properly insured for damages against their charging stations). This wikipedia entry and our experience shows that there is still lack of technical knowledge which may push consumers to make uniformed decisions as per what EV to purchase based on what sales staff believes is true. 

In the end, we managed to make it to the charging station in Halifax. Cold, wet, and in the dark but relieved that the mixture of our driving mode and the good performance of the i-MiEV prevented us from failing this challenge. Retrospectively, I am glad that this happened to us early in our journey. We have applied what we learned throughout the trip thus far and that had a significant impact on the range of the i-MiEV.

And to spread the good karma, if any of you are considering to purchase an EV, go visit the good folks who helped us in our trip:

• Colliers Nissan - Warwick Road, Birmingham. 
• Holdcroft Nissan - Leek Road, Stoke-On-Trent. 
• Lightcliffe Nissan - Shay Skye, Halifax. 
• West Way Stockport Nissan - Spring Gardens, Stockport. 

All I can say for now is: Next stop Cardiff!