Range Anxiety ain’t no thing
First and foremost: what about the range anxiety of the vehicles in your EV car park?
People generally are anxious when it comes down to the vehicle’s range.
Range anxiety is the fear that a vehicle has insufficient range to reach its destination and would thus strand the vehicle’s occupants.
Wikipedia, Range anxiety
I can tell you that this has not been an issue with me. Especially because the Kona boasts a 415KM range.
Real talk though, when you’re pushing the boundaries and you’re driving early in the morning with all of your heating to the max (leather seats, steering wheel, window heating, what have you…), yes you will see a dramatic drop in range. From 400KM to 320KM or something like that.
The same goes for the evening, when you want to put your car’s airco to the max because it’s been in the sun for the whole day.
The range drop is real — but still, you will always have a fairly ridiculous amount of KM’s available to you.
So it’s safe to say that a full charge can easily take you 300KM’s with all your gadgets and gizmo’s turnt to the max and not minding your ecological driving style one bit.
I’d say that is a win.
Also I need to note that when the car indicates a certain range level of available KM’s, it is true to its word with their real-world range. Hyundai did a pretty nice job here.
I’m just talking out of sheer personal experience here. I’d say you need to try this out for yourself. Merely driving around with it and personally experiencing the healthy range is eye-opening.
What about long trips?
The times I personally make “long-range trips” are when I visit my family in my home town about 50KM from where I live. This translates to a 100KM trip back and forth.
This home town is host to two charge points with two spots each — and I’ve never had it happen to me that all 4 spots were taken.
The only time it was taken was on a saturday evening at 21PM (when everybody is out in town) and some car was parked there illegally (not an EV and not charging :/). This is like someone parking on a handicapped spot, to my opinion.
What it boils down to when it comes to long trips is you kind of need to plan ahead, somewhat. For example, finding the good charge point is a number one priority when you first take your EV for a ride. After a while, you know where the good charging spots are. And it’s only when you plan to drive to distant area’s that are new to you, that you need to check first if there are charging points available. But to me it’s nothing different than Googling where the best (& cheap) parking spots are at your destination.
Charge points ‘a plenty
Make sure you arrive at work early in the morning so you have a no-fuzz charge point at your disposal. When there are no spots available because you like to sleep longer than 9AM, then it can happen that you have to wait ‘till someone’s car is fully charged and/or they move it elsewhere. There is a system in place with a closed Whatsapp group at our offices so people get to share the charge points fair and equally.
Easy. So far so good.
I pass a quick charger on the E19 before I go home. There I charge it for 30 mins whilst I go drink a coffee or get some water. Additionally, I pack an e-reader in my car, so whenever I’m bored I just read up a little in one of my thousands of books that I still have to my disposal. I’m currently reading “The Happiness Advantage”, if anyone is curious.
I’m also quite fond of “observing” other people. Where else do you see such a diverse flock of people passing than a highway between Antwerp and Brussels? I love it 😀
Easy.
So my charge anxiety has disappeared entirely over the course of two weeks of driving this car.
Living with an EV in the city
I rent a place in Antwerp city. Antwerp is home to a few charge points, compared to smaller cities like my home town. So charging it up in the city is still quite a challenge.
Luckily, thanks to my flow of activities, I never HAD to charge it there.
Then again, people who can have a charging point installed at their home will have no issue at keeping their car charged to the max. Even less range anxiety in that case, I would imagine.
My rule of thumb is: I try to stay above 80% (by charging it at work whenever I can) and when I take long trips, I try to remind myself to pass a quickcharger on route so it easily charges up to about 80% in less than 30 minutes.
By the way, the quickcharger has an output of about 50KWH. Thats legit 10 times faster than the general charge points you find in the cities. That means a 30 min charge in the quickcharger, is equal to 5 hours of charging it at a public charge point.
It’s worth taking a detour 😉
Luxury & Driving experience of the Hyundai Kona
For me personally, I feel quite humbled by all the fancy gizmo’s the car has.
I’m especially quite fond of the adaptive cruise control.
Driving long stretches of 70KM/H limit roads where people are not as smooth as you (yes, it happens….), you can just flick on the adaptive cruise and you can just chill out whilst the car drives you home.
It’s such a breeze and I cannot stress enough the calming effect it has had on me and my driving style.
Also the 200PK engine is just fun to drive around. In dire moments you can quickly decide to “get the hell out of here” and off you are: flying away like a rocket (this one is especially handy when someone is tail-gaiting you and you just want to get away as fast as possible so he/she can pass safely.)
The feeling of going green with an EV
Thanks to the go-green effort of my company, I get to feel like an early adopter of this new technology. Me personally, I’m quite aware of my impact in the world and especially because I live in the city, I feel great knowing I’m not one of the people that is spoiling the air quality of my environment.
I honestly believe the future does not involve fossil fuels and I for one am quite fond of kickstarting this new frontier of mobility technology.
Who knows what the future brings? I’d like to be ahead of the curve when it happens.
Brought to you by our first EV driver, Stéphane Michaux.
More to be announced.
