Getting used to an electric car.

I wrote about adjusting to driving an electric car over a month ago. As I have had a few queries about how it is going I thought I would share my experiences so far.

O.H. has become obsessive about using free chargers. It is his new hobby which is fine by me. For the whole of May we drove over 1000 miles, average for us, and didn’t spend a penny by only using free chargers.

We do have a charger at home but as we pay 27p per kWh at home and it takes 90kW to charge it fully it would cost just under £25 to reach 100% charge from empty on which we can travel 340-350 miles. In most cases it is advised to keep the battery between 20% and 80% charged. We have only gone to 100% before a trip from Glasgow to Manchester.

It is possible, (I think with Octopus) to get a nighttime rate of something like 5p/kWh but the daytime rate is much higher. At the moment we are not looking at that as being in Scotland there are currently lots of free chargers.

Someone asked me how often we need to charge, it has worked out about once every 10 days or so. It is simple to do at home but away from home you need to use apps on your phone in conjunction with the public charger. I need to get used to doing that, so far OH has been doing it himself. He used to do the filling up with petrol so it is simply a continuation of that.

I was apprehensive when told I would need to get used to driving with just one pedal, the accelerator. You don’t use the brake except in an emergency. By taking your foot off the accelerator the car breaks itself returning the energy to the battery. It is called regenerative breaking. Curiously I can drive to my local supermarket and return home with more charge in the car than when I started. Because I have always been the type of driver who slows down well before traffic lights I actually found it easy to get used to not using the brake.

The car has lots of additional features. The cameras I am used to as our last car had them. It also drives itself on motorways which is fun. You need to keep your hands on the wheel but it does all the steering, overtaking etc. Scary at first but enjoyable once you learn to trust it. You set the speed and the car will choose a safe speed up to the limit you’ve given it. I usually set it to the speed limit. It recognises the road signs and adjusts the speed accordingly. Sadly the small winding roads we often drive on are not well enough marked to allow this.

One thing I haven’t used yet is the automatic parking. I didn’t use it in our previous car but am determined to master it in this. As well as parallel parking it will forward park and reverse park between lines in a car park. It is the parallel parking I would find most useful.

As electric cars are the future we will have to get used to them. As far as fuel costs go it is a no brainier. OH reckons we are currently saving approx. £220 a month and of course we are not contributing to pollution levels.