One of the things you can do with a hybrid car (or an electric one) is charge it up at a public charging station. For whatever reason, you can't wander up to any old charger, wave the credit card at it and charge up (like you can for a tank of petrol). Oh, no, you need to subscribe to a service, pay for a special membership card, and then use only those chargers that accept it. A great step forward, I'm sure you will agree.
Regardless, it happens that our local Leroy Merlin, a DIY chain, has two chargers in the car park (solar powered, how green can you get?), each good for two cars. So we thought we'd check out our new charger membership card to see what happens. (The first first) We waved the membership card at the first charger and it told us it wasn't acceptable. Oh well we thought, perhaps our card isn't good for this station. But we tried it on the other one and it worked. We plugged the car in and went into the shop.
We were in there for about half an hour, came out and unplugged the car. I think we got abot 4Km extra electric range in that time.
The second first was parking the car in a confined space using the backward-looking camera. This will take a bit of getting used to, regarding the scale, but it did work well enough.
We got home and looked up our charger card account to see how much the charge at Leroy's cost us. It was free! Can't be bad. Unfortunately, we worked out that lingering in the shop over a coffee, say, so the car could charge up a bit more, would result in spending more money than the value of the electricity. Still, I'm not complaining.
Result!
ReplyDeletePlanet saved.
Yes! You noticed that the car is green so it must be OK. And it goes like a freaking rocket if you thrash it! I must do more of this planet saving thing by driving it more.
ReplyDeleteGreat that there are fossil fuels powering these chargers at the end of the chain. Makes it all worthwhile.
ReplyDeleteHi James, I'm sure you will have caught the sarcasm in this post. The advantage of a hybrid, in my view, is that when there is no petrol, I can run on electricity, and during a power cut I can run on petrol. When they're both out, of course, there's a problem.....
ReplyDeleteRotors? Hope it goes well.
ReplyDeleteThinking of solely electric which is where we are supposed to be going.
ReplyDeleteWhat happens when stuck in a traffic queue that exceeds the amount of electric charge in a vehicle? I don't think the technology is currently available to sustain the idea of fully electric vehicles.