TimMcC
Tyre Kicker
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- Drives
- BMW i3S & Jaguar I-Pace
I promised I'd let you know how my first family holiday went in the I-Pace, so here I am. Unfortunately, nowhere near as much driving was done as we had to cancel the Hampshire -> Nottinghamshire leg when the family members we were visiting came down with Covid.
So the trip became New Forest -> Cornwall (near Liskeard) and back a week later. The car was easily capable of this 4 hour journey without stopping, but we did stop each way at Exeter Moto for lunch where they've just installed 12 new chargers to complement the existing 2. Both times there were 6/7 empty spaces (despite the services being very very busy!) and we got more than enough charge just stopping for lunch.
We arrived at our destination with about 50% charge. We were staying at Forest Holidays (which we really liked), and unfortunately our cabin didn't have parking directly outside which meant we couldn't use the 'granny' charger on the 3-pin plug. There was a single type 2 7kW charger for the 24 cabins, and there were at least 3 other electric cars which I saw charging on it. This did add undue stress when I wasn't able to get on it when I hoped, and I was looking at the pretty poor local rapid charger provision nearby. I'd have had to drive 20 minutes to charge for about an hour since the chargers were all quite slow. Thankfully, I was actually able to get on the charger twice which was enough for the driving we did. So the net effect was it wasn't any less convenient that diesel, and we did the same amount of driving. But I could have done without the worry of 'will I get on the charger?' to be honest.
Cornwall services are about to open a major charging hub like the one in Exeter, and had that been operational I wouldn't have had to worry at all.
So the trip became New Forest -> Cornwall (near Liskeard) and back a week later. The car was easily capable of this 4 hour journey without stopping, but we did stop each way at Exeter Moto for lunch where they've just installed 12 new chargers to complement the existing 2. Both times there were 6/7 empty spaces (despite the services being very very busy!) and we got more than enough charge just stopping for lunch.
We arrived at our destination with about 50% charge. We were staying at Forest Holidays (which we really liked), and unfortunately our cabin didn't have parking directly outside which meant we couldn't use the 'granny' charger on the 3-pin plug. There was a single type 2 7kW charger for the 24 cabins, and there were at least 3 other electric cars which I saw charging on it. This did add undue stress when I wasn't able to get on it when I hoped, and I was looking at the pretty poor local rapid charger provision nearby. I'd have had to drive 20 minutes to charge for about an hour since the chargers were all quite slow. Thankfully, I was actually able to get on the charger twice which was enough for the driving we did. So the net effect was it wasn't any less convenient that diesel, and we did the same amount of driving. But I could have done without the worry of 'will I get on the charger?' to be honest.
Cornwall services are about to open a major charging hub like the one in Exeter, and had that been operational I wouldn't have had to worry at all.