I had joked about driving from Switzerland to Denmark and back in this car. We looked into "Car Trains”, but it was way too expensive to make sense for us, and it would only cut the journey of 1200 km down to about 500 km. So we gave up on that
We wanted to go and visit my parents in Denmark, at a time where the conditions during the pandemic were relatively good. We had a window of just over a week, where it suited us, and then looked at flights, as I get discounted tickets from work. But the few flights that were scheduled, were quite full. So on a Saturday evening, after having done a day trip of about 2 x 100 km to Germany and back, I asked my wife … do you want to drive to Denmark … tonight? She immediately agreed. I explained her she should expect the trip to take up to 24 hours maybe even more. The car was plugged in with our Juice Booster 2, charging at 7.5kW, right next to our apartment. While the car finished charging, we started packing. I gathered a few apps, including A Better Route Planner and a Swiss payment app which included roaming. Food, drink, and what else we thought we needed for the long journey. My wife could only drive in Switzerland at the time, pending her driving test to convert from Hong Kong to a Swiss license. So she would do the first sector to the border, and then I would take over for the rest.
On this trip, we finally hit this cars limitations: Keeping the battery cool on longer trips. More about that in a later post. At the time, I didn't know to what extent a hot cabin would dissipate heat down into the battery pack. Since it was 35 C on the return journey, we improvised some shading for the car (see the picture above!). Later, we realised that the two main things that affect the battery temperature (in the short term), is
1) CCS high speed charging and
2) High consumption or recuperation.
In other words, the worst you can offer this car is highway AND steep hills AND high temperatures. The "Kassel Hills" in Southern Germany, especially on the return journey, was all these things combined. The slowest CCS charging I saw was 8kW @ 56% SoC (!!!). Quite far away from the nominal 40kW it says in the brochure.
(Charging just before the Ferry Rødby-Puttgarten)
(Lots of space on the ferry)
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