Image: Hurry Krishna
In July, our intrepid road tripper Hurry Krishna took to the road in her trusty Hyundai Kona EV and shared the journey in a series of blog posts with The Driven. You can read them here.
Now, Hurry Krishna shares her “Lessons from the Road” in an EV driving 10,000km from Perth to Sydney in 23 days on what is one of the world’s harshest and trying road trips.
You can read Lesson #1 and #2 here.
The Nullarbor Plain is flat, straight, predictable. On the way from Perth to the Eastern States with the Westerly behind us, we got pretty used to our Kona EV’s projected range of nearly 400 kms as we cruised at 100 kmh on open roads. In a few years, with the implementation of Labor’s plans to put fast chargers every 150 kms, the Eyre Highway will be an EV Driver’s paradise.
Other range issues, though, might persist for a while.
On the way back west from Sydney, we drove through Cowra and Mildura to Port Augusta. Some of the roads are narrow, curly and with more elevation, compared to the Hume Highway which we had taken most of the way from Melbourne to Sydney. Particularly over the Blue Mountains, and a couple of days later on the Goyder Highway from Mildura to Burra, the wind was strong and against us. It all has an impact on the range.
On the Goyder Highway, even driving 20 or 30 kms below the speed limit, the projected range remained low and the all-significant statistic of “kWh/100km” stubbornly above 18. What that number actually measures is a mystery to me (like most things technological) but I do understand that it is an important sign from EVs to drivers.
Image: Hurry Krishna
Headwinds also impact on ICE car efficiency and increase their fuel consumption. But the infrastructure of easy access to petrol, stops us thinking about it in the same way as we tend to with an EV.
And then there is cold weather!
When we try to drive out of Yarra Junction, Monday 4 July, the night’s frost still clinging to the windscreen, temperature 1 degree Celsius, heater blazing inside, the car’s range even with battery at 85%, plummets to 220 km before we have left the driveway of our B&B! The kWh/100km reading is 420!!!
‘She don’t like Mondays?’ I offer unhelpfully.
Armed with prior research, Co-pilot expounds: all EVs are less efficient in cold climates, as there is no internal combustion to produce heat and the cold slows down the chemical reactions in the battery.
It turns out some EVs (like some people) are less tolerant of cold and so lose more range than others. There are scientific papers about this sort of stuff. The Kona we are driving is somewhere in the middle of the pack in terms of cold weather efficiency.
I am not sure how any part of this lecture is useful in the middle of freezing in the Yarra Valley, except that we need to do something to reduce that absurdly high reading Evie is giving us for kWh/100km!
We put on our down jackets, turn off the heat and crawl along at 50 km per hour keeping an eagle eye on the range projection. This strategy works (or maybe it’s Co-pilot’s prayers working) as15 minutes later kWh/100km is down to 52 and dropping fast.
Range rises to a sensible 370 km, though it falls to 315 when I turn the heater back on. Who would have thought that down jackets are so useful when driving an EV in the winter!
Lesson No. 3: Your car is an individual. The projected battery range is best seen as a negotiation between you and your EV. There are too many variables that impact on your EV’s range calculation, that mere mortals like me will never precisely understand. But most times you can come to an amicable settlement with your car by driving slower, turning off climate control and other electronics, without sacrificing safety or sanity.
Keyword: Lessons from an EV road trip: Headwinds, and that nagging range question