Meet Daphne!
This is our Renault Zoe. Her names’s Daphne. She’s pretty much the EV (electric vehicle) version of the popular little Clio. But being fully electric, she’s zero emissions at source. We’re planning on being here in the UK for about three months, so buying rather than renting a car makes sense, and going EV was a good chance for us to experience being moved in a different way.
A big part of our new lifestyle is limiting our impact on the environment and we were both insistent that our next vehicle would be fully electric. This is two years after selling my Pajero in Dubai, which I insisted would be our last ICE (internal combustion engine) vehicle, a promise to ourselves and mother earth that was soon after blighted by our driving our lovely, but diesel engine camper van Cyril since.
EVs have come a long way in the past few years. Daphne has a range of 250 miles (400 km) and a typical charge takes around an hour – so you can plan your ‘refueling’ around a lunch break or supermarket shop. We were inspired by our Taupo friends, who’ve been driving an older Nissan Leaf for three or four years. Having a modest 24kWh battery size designed for town driving, they shared their experiences about still managing longer road trips. It reminded me a bit of our solar set up on our little yacht Aroha – we certainly became more aware of the energy available to us. I used to tell friends that we would only eat slow cooking food like chickpeas on sunny days when we had an abundance of solar energy to power the induction cooker, and still leave enough juice for a hot shower later. You really become aware of the energy available and you become accustomed to making small changes to better accommodate this. Our friends recently upgraded to a newer 62kWh Leaf and the increased range between charges makes getting around even easier.
We were also inspired by an “EV Safari” weekend a few years back, where a group of us went on an organised road trip around the UAE in a range of EVs (including the below pictured sexy BMW Hybrid i8), including up and down big hills to see how that affected range and power regeneration.
The range on Daphne can theoretically get us from Manchester to Bristol on a single charge, but with real world range always being less than the brochure, it’s wise to stop for a top up somewhere after halfway. But the point is that we would normally stop at least once for a driving break in a three-hour car journey, so planning that around a rapid charge point (and a Greggs bakery for their famous vegan sausage rolls… ) is no serious inconvenience. Like in Aotearoa New Zealand, the number and convenience of charge points is increasing on a weekly basis, and noticeably so here with super chargers up to 150kW. Our Zoe isn’t compatible with those chargers, but if she was, she would theoretically charge from zero to hero in about 15 minutes.
The UK and the EU are also planning ahead. A new UK law’s just been passed that mandates the installation of a home charger in all new homes. And a public network of 350kW chargers has already being rolled out, even though no compatible cars are available for sale yet!
Interestingly, the Zoe (and all EVs) achieve better range with stop-start city driving rather than on the highway. This is converse to ICE cars, where braking energy is just dissipated as heat – on EV’s it’s regenerated to top up the batteries.
I did a very rough cost comparison and reckon that the cost premium for buying an EV over it’s equivalent ICE car is about 50%. Another rough calculation estimates that it would take about 10 years of use to even that out in savings – through lower fuel costs, servicing (fewer moving parts in an EV…), and car tax – EVs are free in the UK, while ICE cars vary depending on their emissions rating.
This is Nellie our Mini. We bought her instead of Daphne our EV Zoe. We set out on this exercise to buy and EV with such conviction, it feels like we’ve failed. But we were struck by a couple of unanticipated EV challenges.
With a modest budget and wanting a second hand EV, we weren’t helped that EV sales in the UK have increased exponentially over the past years, so if you’re looking for a used car with a few years on it, there actually aren’t many to choose from. These inevitably have far shorter range and far slower recharge time than the new models. There will be about 100 times more EVs sold in the UK in 2021 verses 2019.
A more idealistic challenge with EVs is, that although they are zero emissions at source, it really depends on where the electricity to recharge comes from. In Aotearoa New Zealand we have a respectable level of renewable energy of around 84%. Here in the UK, it’s less than half that, so there’s less motivation to draw power from the grid that still relies on burning coal like it’s Victorian Britain. Here’s a couple of photos I took in Victorian Britain.
As a self-professed optimist, I chose not to dwell too much on negative experiences, but I think I’ll repeat this one just for the sake of amusement! There’s a number of large online car dealers here where you basically select and buy a car online, have it delivered to you, and then you have 7 or 14 days to decide to keep or return it. We selected our zippy, dark red Zoe “Daphne”, paid in full, and then rented a car to drive the five hours across the country to Helen’s official UK address – thank to anti-money laundering, they only deliver to your official address. So far so good, the sun was shining and everyone loves a good road trip! On the day of the planned delivery, the company called and said – sorry, they forgot to charge it – and delivery will be delayed by a day. We had a few other obligations to shuffle around, but it wasn’t really any great problem. But it got us worried about the spec of our car – they were saying it needed 17 hours to charge, whereas the spec said it should take maximum two. Worse, the company was so unaccustomed to dealing in EVs, they couldn’t respond to any of our questions to confirm what it was we’d bought. We were starting to get worried about how we would even get to our appointment the next day, just an hours drive away.
When the world’s-worse-car-dealer failed to deliver at the new time (“we forgot to tell the delivery driver he was working…”), we cancelled the purchase, applied for a full refund and reverted to plan B.
It’s difficult setting out with a firm idea of what you’re doing, yet ending up with another result and wondering in you’ve “failed”. In a way I think that we have. We knew that, like with any new technology, we would have to adjust our expectations and the way we live a little. Like planning longer journeys around a recharge break. But we were willing to do this, eager to try it out for ourselves, and my expectation was that we would find the changes required would be minor.
It hasn’t all been bad though. The we’ve seen a reasonable amount of the country with all this running around.
We consider ourselves pretty green. But not knowing our vehicle range, recharge time, or even the plug and charge type, we found ourselves with cold feet, reverting to a known, albeit less green, alternative.
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