Electric cars

Recently I’ve had my first test-ride with an electric car. A Nissan Leaf Accenta from 2012. In the middle of nowhere. In a lot of snow.

When the car rolled backwards out of the garage, I couldn’t tell if it was on or off. A typical electric car, I guess.

The main setup is somewhat different. The pedal for changing the gears is missing. You drive automatic in that thing. A huge button puts the car into parking, a slight moving of the joystick switches to drive. The only indication for that the car actually is switched on are the lights in the cockpit and the huge touch-screen in the middle of the dashboard.

When pressing the foot throttle down, the car “magically” starts to move. First you can’t make out a correlation between the moving and your action. The sound of an engine is missing; therefore you don’t have that backchannel telling you something is actually happening before the car moves.

The first 500 meters I expected the car stopping any second and running out of power. The displays indicated something else, but: you never know,.. There’s surprisingly much power and acceleration in a car like that: Press the throttle a little bit and there you go. Press it hard and the whole car jumps onto the street. And after a while you forget the missing engine sound.

The snow didn’t do anything special. All the electronic handled it pretty well. My current 12 year old car is sliding more (and weighs more as well).

The car itself has plenty of space, down-foldable back seats and enough space for four grown-ups, five if you squeeze like in every other car as well.

Charging with 10Amp takes around 12 hours, with 16Amp you’ll up to 80% in half an hour. During winter you make 100km, up to 200 during summer. Also depending on how you drive and what you use in addition. That’s something that stroke me right away: The moment I switched something on, I were painfully aware of what this would do to the distance I want to drive. Every single gizmo, every button nibbles on the kilometers you can do. I don’t have this on a gas car, though it’s the same there as well.

On the other side: charging the car costs about 20kr each time, not 600kr. Assuming 600km driving distance (which is a lot), it differs by a factor of ten. Not mentioning the other costs that are significantly lower.

For the inner city life this seems to be better and cheaper solution, I think.