Coming up on 2,000 miles

It is three and a half months since I took delivery of my Nissan Leaf and I'm heading towards 2,000 miles on the odometer. It is about time I wrote down my impressions based on months rather than days of use. So here goes.

For me, there has been one, and only one drawback to owning an electric car. You guessed it. Range. Let's get that out of the way for starters. I'm in the lucky position that we have two cars in the household and if necessary, I can use my wife's Aygo for long trips. If we didn't have that, it would be a significant problem. So what is the useful range turning out to be? I'd say that if a destination is more than 35 miles away, then I would need to think carefully about my options.

I wrote in an earlier post about driving to Bathgate (33 miles) and being left with about 16 miles indicated range by the time I got home. That was in summery weather. I did another trip in roughly the same direction when asked to give a talk at Forth, a village 33.5 miles away high up on the moors between Glasgow and Edinburgh. 

Before the trip out, I topped the battery to 100 per cent and we left well wrapped up, choosing not to use the heater heavily - just enough to keep the windscreen clear. It was a wild night. Mild temperatures but heavy rain blowing in from the south. As we climbed from the M8 motorway into the Lanarkshire hills, we were driving into the wind and I watched the instruments as the battery's charge smartly headed towards 50 per cent. There was nowhere at the destination to easily get a charge and there wasn't time to set anything up, even from a domestic socket. We were busy enough trying to get props and books in through the rain and gales.

The one thought that told me it would be nothing to worry about was that, having come uphill, we would be going downhill on the way home. Additionally, having driven into the wind, we would have the gales behind us on the return journey. So it turned out. We took the battery to 54 per cent on the way there. The journey home took us to 15 percent and by the time we were hitting the Glasgow outskirts, I knew we were home and dry so chose to luxuriate in a bit of heat. I'd used the climate control for most of the journey because the humidity demanded a flow of air over the windscreen but I had kept the temperature at 20C and set a slow fan speed. Now, with energy to spare, we could raise the temperature and enjoy the last ten miles in warmth. A great night and an enjoyable drive in hard weather. But I wouldn't have liked to have had to travel much further.

There were contingencies. There is a rapid charger at Hamilton Services on the M74 that we could have diverted to and another at Whitburn, further out from Glasgow. Twenty minutes on either would have given us a buffer, should I have found myself short of charge, but it illustrated a continuing infrastructure shortcomings.

Despite Ecotricity having the Electric Highway rapid chargers along nearly all of Britain's motorways, an important service station they have yet to cover is the Harthill Services between Glasgow and Edinburgh. Another invitation for a talk illustrated this when I was asked to go through to the capital. At 48 miles distant, Edinburgh is firmly outside the radius I could do on a single charge. Plugging in along the way is a necessity if I am to use the Leaf for such a trip. Had there been a rapid charger at Harthill, it would have been straightforward. As it was, my wife kindly lent me her car for the trip.

I was also surprised to note that Edinburgh is very poorly served by chargers, especially when compared to Glasgow. A week spent working in Glasgow city centre illustrated how good Scotland's largest city has become for electric car drivers. Parking in Glasgow centre is expensive, like most big cities, and I took the train in for the first of five days. I knew there were charge points in the big multistorey carparks but I didn't know how the system worked.

It so happened that my wife came in that first evening to meet me and she parked in the Cambridge Street Carpark, only a few hundred metres away from where I was working. After dinner and before we returned to her car, we asked in the carpark office how parking worked for electric cars. Simple. Drive in and get a ticket as normal. Park at one of eight chargers and get plugged in. They use the 'Charge Your Car' network for which I have a smartcard and the power is free. I should then go to the office and sign in (name, date, car registration, time in, time out) and they would give me a second card. This second card would clear the parking cost indicated by the first card.

The next day, I drove in, plugged in, signed in and went off to work clutching two cards for the carpark. Over ten hours later, having put in a solid, busy shift, I returned to the carpark and put my main ticket into the pay machine: £24.50. Ouch! I put the second card in: £0.00. I must admit there was a bit of a grin on my face as I got to my car and unplugged. Thirty minutes earlier, I had used my phone to switch on the climate control so the car was not only dry but also cosy and warm, as well as having a topped-off battery. This went on for the rest of the week and there was never any problem getting a space.

I know I'm a bit of an evangelist about electric cars so I try to only talk about them when people actually ask. However, it is a distinct pleasure taking someone for a spin and watch their preconceptions about electric cars get left behind as the vehicle smartly takes off out of a junction. This is especially so because of people's expectations of me as a driver. I'm seen as a slow, cautious ecomiser with a light right foot, constantly trying to stretch my miles per gallon figure. Therefore the last thing they expect is when I take off like a thoroughbred fighter jet on afterburner and no gear shifting. In these scenarios, the only things shifting are paradigms in people's minds.

I had another long distance journey to make in the last few weeks as I wanted to travel to Pontefract to see a lecture by the great Jim Lovell, the commander of Apollo 13. As a purchaser of a new Nissan Leaf, I had read that Nissan will offer a loan of a long-range car for up to two weeks once each year. It was time to test this. Nissan customer services referred me to the dealer who could not have been nicer. They offered me a Nissan Pulsar demonstrator; diesel-powered and with even more fancy knobs and whistles than the Leaf (and that's saying something). I returned the Pulsar three days later with only two complaints about it: it had a gearstick and it had an internal combustion engine.

The driving experience in the Leaf is still enjoyable. The unfussy, easy but powerful acceleration doesn't get old. All four of us were returning from a restaurant and I took us up the nearby Boclair Hill, a 12 per cent gradient coming from a set of traffic lights that normally has all but the largest ICE powerplants roaring to provide the power to get up from the standing start. I floored the Leaf's accelerator and as we quietly reached the top close on an indicated speed of 50mph, my son commented, "So, what's a hill?" It was like it wasn't there. I wonder what it will be like if I ever get a Tesla.

Running costs are paltry. Our electricity bill will doubtless rise as I'm starting to see the effect of the occasional charging on the house's consumption. But as best as I can tell, and ignoring any electricity acquired for free out and about, fuel costs are roughly one quarter of what I would expect for an efficient ICE car. I've really stopped worrying about it. In addition, with only one moving part to the motor, servicing costs are likely to be minimal with brakes, tyres, wipers being the chief concern at the one-year service. I'll report on that when it happens.

Given our increasing awareness as a civilisation of the damage we do by putting carbon into the atmosphere, it is incumbent upon us to remove ourselves from our reliance on fossil fuel. My Leaf not only allows me to do my bit towards that goal, I'd argue that it has raised my standard of living in the process. Watching gases come out of the tailpipes of other vehicles seems just so anachronistic, so last century, and we're expected to breathe that stuff along with our life-giving oxygen.

I accept that a fraction of the electricity I use was derived from the burning of fossil fuel, but here in Scotland, that is a fast-declining method of generation as well as being a more efficient means of converting carbon to energy. Nuclear, wind, hydro and solar, all near-zero carbon sources, dominate the electricity industry here. If the Sun is shining, my own solar panels can put photon-derived energy into my car. This is a cleaner, quieter, more civilised means of personal transportation and I thoroughly recommend it.