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 30th, 2018
And so the learning begins… I’ve been bimbling about around town, running errands, running the kids around, doing the shopping and so on, all the while trying to get my head around how the e-Golf uses the energy from the batteries – and how that relates to precisely how much range the readout in the instrumental panel is telling me I have.
We’ve had a few fairly hot days in the last week and on one recent trip I decided to use the air-conditioning – leaving the windows open isn’t great for my hay fever. I had a 148-mile range when I switched on the A/C’s Lo setting, which immediately lowered the range to 122 miles.
Suffice to say, I turned the temperature back up and restored my 148 miles. If it stays warm over the next few months, finding the balance between maximising the range and maintaining a cool cabin should be an interesting exercise.
As should driving on motorways. My first foray came last week, in the form of a quick trip to Gatwick. A relatively early morning trip through Croydon, then on to the M23, went well. The 23-mile journey used up 27 miles of range, which seemed pretty reasonable.
As I was returning later that evening, I used the valet service at the short-term parking and asked them to top up the charge (a service they offer). Armed with a 186-mile range for my drive home, and an appointment to make, I felt slightly emboldened and joined the M23 at the speed I would drive at in a conventional car.
The result? Let’s just say the range didn’t stay at 186 miles for long. I lost 50 miles instantly, so eased off and, by the time I left the motorway and started to drive through suburban Croydon, I was down to 123 miles. Driving most of the rest of the way home at 30mph meant that I managed to claw back another 9 miles and ended up at home with 133 miles on the readout.
A quick motorway jaunt, using 27 miles of range to Gatwick and 53 miles back was very instructive: I know I drove a little quicker at the start of my return journey, but not for long, so my process of e-driving trial and error is still very much in a nascent period.
And it doesn’t exactly fill me with optimism for trips to see my family in south Wales. But by the time the rugby season starts again in September, I should be sufficiently au fait with my range management that I can travel there with confidence to watch my beloved Scarlets.
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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