As some of you may know I will have had my Leaf (Evie!) 4 weeks on Saturday. Last Saturday I wanted to go and see a friend some miles away from me in Guildford. Her place is 36 miles from mine, according to the sat nav so I thought I'd be able to do it without charging. I was going to be stuck for time on arrival and no possibility of charging at hers because she only has on street parking. It was also going to be after midnight when I did the return journey.
I drove carefully, took the 'Eco' route on the planner and didn't have the heating on other than very short occasional bursts to keep the screen clear so I could see. No amount of having the windows open seemed to achieve this. I arrived with 50% left in my batteries and supposedly 47 miles. Bearing in mind that I'd done 36 careful miles to get there I was slightly worried by this but figured there would be a charger fairly close somewhere, so we went off to our do in her car and I decided to search for a charger on returning. BIG mistake. I drove to the first location thinking I'd get a quick blast to find that I couldn't access the charger. Then I didn't want to trust that there was a charger at the Little Chef at Ripley on the A3 because I'd been told by someone at Polar that most of them have been removed. Locally to me this has been true. I had no decent internet signal on my phone to load any of the apps and the car sat nav didn't have the new chargers at Chobham on the M25 listed so I wasn't sure how far away they were or in what direction.
End result was I crawled home through some nightmarishly nasty lanes at 30mph or less with no heating, wiping the screen to see and getting in the way of every other road user who came up behind me wondering why the hell I was out driving at that time of night if I was scared to go faster than 30. I knew full well that if I ran out of battery I had no mobile signal whatsoever to get help. It was cold, foggy and raining and I was on my own. I can honestly say I hated the car and the lack of infrastructure to support it at that point. I was still 16 miles out when the low battery warning light came on and by the time I arrived home (thankfully) I had 7 miles left in the 'tank' and only 4% charge. Not to mention I was stiff and sore from the absolute terror of being stuck miles from anywhere with no phone signal and dead car.
Clearly I should have planned for a backup charger but surely 72 miles in a brand new Gen 2 Leaf should be possible under those circumstances? I started with the Guessometer saying 95 so it's not like I'm driving like a bat out of hell or anything. I guess another question is where are the Guildford chargers? I've looked again since getting home and there really doesn't seem to be anything available between me near Worthing and my friend at Guildford
On the plus side though the car decided it had a range of 109 miles after a full charge the next morning! Yeah right!
I drove carefully, took the 'Eco' route on the planner and didn't have the heating on other than very short occasional bursts to keep the screen clear so I could see. No amount of having the windows open seemed to achieve this. I arrived with 50% left in my batteries and supposedly 47 miles. Bearing in mind that I'd done 36 careful miles to get there I was slightly worried by this but figured there would be a charger fairly close somewhere, so we went off to our do in her car and I decided to search for a charger on returning. BIG mistake. I drove to the first location thinking I'd get a quick blast to find that I couldn't access the charger. Then I didn't want to trust that there was a charger at the Little Chef at Ripley on the A3 because I'd been told by someone at Polar that most of them have been removed. Locally to me this has been true. I had no decent internet signal on my phone to load any of the apps and the car sat nav didn't have the new chargers at Chobham on the M25 listed so I wasn't sure how far away they were or in what direction.
End result was I crawled home through some nightmarishly nasty lanes at 30mph or less with no heating, wiping the screen to see and getting in the way of every other road user who came up behind me wondering why the hell I was out driving at that time of night if I was scared to go faster than 30. I knew full well that if I ran out of battery I had no mobile signal whatsoever to get help. It was cold, foggy and raining and I was on my own. I can honestly say I hated the car and the lack of infrastructure to support it at that point. I was still 16 miles out when the low battery warning light came on and by the time I arrived home (thankfully) I had 7 miles left in the 'tank' and only 4% charge. Not to mention I was stiff and sore from the absolute terror of being stuck miles from anywhere with no phone signal and dead car.
Clearly I should have planned for a backup charger but surely 72 miles in a brand new Gen 2 Leaf should be possible under those circumstances? I started with the Guessometer saying 95 so it's not like I'm driving like a bat out of hell or anything. I guess another question is where are the Guildford chargers? I've looked again since getting home and there really doesn't seem to be anything available between me near Worthing and my friend at Guildford
On the plus side though the car decided it had a range of 109 miles after a full charge the next morning! Yeah right!