Q. Can I really do a long journey in an EV?
A. Yes, you absolutely can do. It’s all down to the capabilities of the car, some planning, and a little luck.
A couple of months back, we set ourselves the challenge of driving a new BMW i5 Touring electric estate back from the factory in Munich, all the way to Dublin via the ferry from Cherbourg. Leaving at lunchtime on a Wednesday, we had slightly more than 24hrs to cross the continent from the fringes of the Alps to the beaches of Normandy, including an overnight stop so that at least some sleep could be included in the schedule.
The BMW i5 Touring eDrive 40 has a theoretical range of 560km, and it was going to be a 1,200km journey from Munich to Cherbourg. Easy, right? Two stops would cover it.
Ah, not quite. There was the slight problem that when we collected the i5 Touring, it wasn’t quite fully charged up, so we needed a quick pit-stop on the outskirts of Munich at an Ionity fast charger to top it up, so as to be able to make our overnight halt just outside Strasbourg. Which we did, covering some 380km and arriving with 50km of battery range. Yes, that gives the i5 Touring a real-world range of only 430km, compared to the 560km official figure, but there were extenuating circumstances. First, it was a blisteringly hot day (temperatures in the high 20s) so power-sapping air conditioning was a necessity, not a luxury. Secondly, cruising speeds on French and German motorways are higher than they are on Irish roads – typically, you’ll be blasting along at 130km/h on the continent, although we steadfastly refused the temptation for a flat-chat run on the limit-free Autobahn in the interests of conserving range. Under Irish conditions, the i5 Touring should be able to do 500km between charges, depending on your usage and driving style.
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Back near Strasbourg, our plan was working though – the little guest house in which we stayed had a charger in the car park, and with the BMW topping up its electrons, we nabbed a few hours sleep. Well, we tried to – a massive thunder-and-lightning storm swept across the Vosges valley that night, which not only kept us awake for a good while, but it also tripped the switch on the charger, meaning that the i5 didn’t get much of a top-up at all.
In Ireland, with our still-sparse charging network, this would be tantamount to disaster but actually it was far less of a problem in France. Less than 10km away was a large motorway service station which served excellent fresh croissants and piping hot coffee, and had a rank of Total Energies charging points in the car park. There were eight chargers at this spot, three of them capable of delivering 300kW of power, which the BMW instantly lapped up at a rate of 205kW, its fastest charging speed.
Assuming a range of about 400km, we elected to play things slightly safe, planning quick top-ups at 250-300km intervals, and always setting aside a final charging session south of Cherbourg as there were (a) no charging facilities on the overnight ferry, and (b) the nearest decent charger on the Irish side would be in Gorey, Co Wexford.
The French motorway network soon set about showing up the Irish charging network to the point where it became rather embarrassing. At roughly 20km intervals along the Autoroute we drove, there were massive charging plazas, the smallest of which (near Reims, and yes, we used the opportunity to pick up a couple of bottles of nice champagne) had four individual chargers, while most had 10, 12, or even 16 connections. There was no queuing, no waiting, and every charger worked faultlessly.
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Equally, we probably under-estimated that of which the BMW was capable – by the time we reached Cherbourg, we had probably indulged in one charging session too many, arriving at the ferry with slightly more battery charge than we strictly needed to make it to Dublin once we were docked the next morning.
While it wasn’t quite easy-peasy, and while a proper overnight charge at the hotel and chargers on the ferry would have made things far simpler, the journey was entirely pleasant (helped by the overall brilliance of the i5 Touring as a car in and of itself) and likely would have been much easier had we been in “holiday mode”, working in a second overnight stop along the way to better experience what France has to offer.
In an Irish sense, you can literally drive from one end of the country to the other in an EV without stopping. Using a Mercedes-Benz EQE saloon (a car with a tantalising combo of sleek, low-slung body and big 90kWh battery) we were able to drive from the centre of Belfast, amble along the M1, the M50, the M7, and M8 motorways with the cruise control set to the legal 120km/h limit, and didn’t run out of charge until we reached the town of Leap in West Cork. That is, surely, sufficient range for most.
