OK in the UK it is Mothering Sunday tomorrow so yesterday we drove to see my mum, it’s about 160 miles each way. Thursday afternoon we charged the car to 100%, it was on about 65% before we plugged it in and as we are not on an EV specific tariff yet it cost us about £7 GBP. Yesterday we switched to an EV specific tariff. This morning I got an email saying we have been switched over (same Energy provider, just changed tariff) which should cut the cost of home charging by 75% but must remember the cost at other times are higher than the normal tariffs.
So we drove to see my mum yesterday, the drive was good, the car went well, and we planned to stop at Cambridge Services on the A14 to top up the car, we normally stop here for 10-15 minutes anyway. When we pulled in there was a couple of free chargers but the BZ4X still had 54% battery left and we was only about 60 miles from our destination so we thought we could easily make it without charging. Toyota claim that the BZ4X can do just over 300 miles, we had done about 100 miles and used about 45% so we’re not going to get the 300 miles on a charge, but should easily manage the remaining 60 miles.
gridserve electicity forecourt
We decided to stop at a Gridserve Electric Forecourt which has a 36 chargers of various speeds. The car was down to 17% but we had been stuck in traffic for a while and for the whole journey I was doing 80-85 mph. Using the forecourt was easy, plugged in, used my contactless card and then went into the Costa for a cofffee and cake, 25 minutes later we had charged upto 80% at a cost of about £33 GBP so off we went to see mum.
This afternoon it was time to head home, made the mistake of thinking we could top up at the Gridserve site before heading home. Again plugged in and went for a coffee again, after 20 minutes checked my app and notice the BZ4X had only increased by 4%. Not happy but then realised it was my fault as the car was 0n 77% before plugging in and once you are charged to 80% the charging slows right down, just like many phones etc. So off we went on our journey home. We decided to stick to 70mph for the return journey, to see what effect the reduced speed would have on the range of the car.
Again we planned to stop at the Cambridge Services but decided not to as it looked like we had plenty of charge left in the car. Nice drive, I should note we don’t use air con normally, no matter how the car is powered, we tend to open windows instead. We didn’t stop at all on the way home but we took a big risk, we got home with 7% battery power left. so even though we had lights on as it was getting dark, we used 73% of battery for the return trip compared with 83% for the trip yesterday, so reducing my speed by 10% increased the range by at least 10%, probably a bit more as I didn’t have lights on (apart from day lights) going down.
We will charge the car tonight with our home charger, lets hope our electricity tariff has been switched so overnight charge should cost me about £5 if my maths are right. In which case total cost of trip will be £37 compared to about £70 it used to cost me in the Hybrid 2.5litre RAV we had before.