It is fair to say that the regular Volkswagen Golf is one of the best all-round buys – competitively priced when new and holding its value well. Does ditching an internal combustion engine make it a better day-to-day bet than a bespoke electric car?
Our car: Volkswagen e-Golf List price when new: £32,730 (excluding PICG grant) Price as tested: £35,490 (excluding PICG grant) Official fuel economy: n/a
May 24th, 2018
If buyers are going to adopt electric cars, some familiarity will be helpful. There’s almost nothing more familiar on the road than a Volkswagen Golf, so the e-Golf variant is the perfect vehicle in which to experience battery-powered daily driving.
I’ve been driving electric cars for years, but almost all my previous experiences have involved single test drives, after which I’ve been able to walk away, leaving someone else to worry about charging.
Living in a terraced south London house, with no off-street parking, borrowing one for a short-term loan from a manufacturer has always been tricky: I can’t trail a cable from my house across the pavement (a health and safety nightmare waiting to happen) and signing up to a public charging network requires opening an account, etc – which is way too much hassle for a week.
This has always irked me, because living in the metropolis makes me the ideal candidate to be a regular EV driver. Most of my journeys are around the capital, so while I want continued access to what’s increasingly being called a “personal mobility solution”, I also want to do my part to help improve the city’s environment (and its poor air quality).
So I jumped at the chance to run a Volkswagen e-Golf, especially as my local council is starting to roll out more charging points – albeit slowly and in what seems a rather haphazard way (but that’s something I’ll no doubt return to weeks and months to come).
One week in, it is clear that there’s lots to work out about the logistics of running an EV, compared with one powered by an internal combustion engine. As Kyle Fortune has found during his long-term test of a BMW i3S, range anxiety is a real thing as long as a public charging infrastructure is still so sketchy – and it takes on new meaning when you’re already someone who gets twitchy when a fuel gauge drops below half-full.
Working out how to maximise the battery will be a fascinating exercise and one that I’m really looking forward to. And yes, I’m fully aware of how sad and nerdy that makes me sound.
Electric motoring is the future – but until that future arrives, a present in an e-Golf should make life interesting for the next few months.
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