Suddenly, we're all talking about electric vehicles

Friday, 24 August 2018

It's becoming an electric world. Let's visit the Nissan Electric Cafe in Paris, where you pay for coffee with power.

OPINION: In February last year when Hyundai New Zealand launched its first full EV, the Ioniq, it challenged the motoring media to drive the hatch from Queenstown to the top of Lake Whakatipu and back – a distance of about 170km.

The Ioniq's range is 200km, and the trip alongside the big lake gets hilly, so for the journalists involved it was heart-in-the-mouth stuff as they drove the route then crept back into Queenstown with precious little juice left in their car batteries.

But every one of the Ioniqs did it – just. In our case, our car had moved into some sort of limp-home mode aimed at conserving every little bit of battery power, and that let us finish the drive with just 5km of range remaining. Whew. Talk about range anxiety.

Fast-forward to now, and Hyundai NZ has launched its second full EV, an electric version of the Kona small SUV.

* Outlander PHEV almost the same price as a petrol one

Hyundai Kona Electric is a mainstream SUV with long-range EV power. Yes, it costs - but we're on the way to a plug-in future.

* We tag along on Tesla Supercharger Rally

* True confession: why I love with deeply uncool Prius Prime**

Just like with the Ioniq, the company once again challenged the motoring media to a driving assignment – this time a 332 km trip from Auckland to Raglan and back.

Electric vehicles are slowly starting to fit into everyday life in NZ.

This time around, was there any range anxiety? Nope. In my case I cruised south from HNZ headquarters to Raglan, took a 28km detour to look at the nearby Te Uku wind farm, then drove back to Auckland airport, arriving there with 52km of range remaining in the batteries. From there the Kona would have been driven onwards to Hyundai NZ, getting there with maybe 30km range left.

Piece of cake, and here's the reason. In contrast to the Ioniq's range of around 210km, the Kona can offer a range of more than 400km. In fact the model has been homologated with a range of 486km, but HNZ says it prefers a so-called 'real-world' figure because of New Zealand's hilly terrain and winding roads.

But it does add that it believes up to 450km is entirely possible, just as one Kiwi Ioniq owner has achieved a range of 260km. You just have to drive carefully and make full use of all power-saving technology aboard these vehicles such as a regenerative braking system that is operated by using paddles on the steering wheel.

Arrival of this 400km-plus range Kona EV just 17 months after the 200km-range Ioniq EV is a great illustration of just how quickly EV technology is advancing.

Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV now costs about the same as the conventional petrol equivalent.

The Kona's range is superior because the model we drove had a 64kWh battery pack (there will soon be another version with a 39.2kWh pack which will offer a range of more than 250km) while the Ioniq's pack is 28kWh.

That bigger pack has added 236kg to the Kona's weight when compared to the petrol-engined versions, but the batteries are located low down below the floor and I found this actually helped give the vehicle a nicely planted feel at pace.

Performance is fine, too. Despite its 1743kg kerb weight it'll silently scoot to 100kmh in a pretty good 7.6 seconds, and its 150kW of power and 395Nm of torque helps give it a flexible sort of drive.

It all added up to a new small SUV that I'd happily own, except for one thing – the Kona with the 64kWh battery enters the market priced at $73,990 for an entry model and $79,990 for the top-spec Elite model I drove.

Tesla people certainly like to show off. But the brand has been a real innovator in terms of EV ownership.

Ouch.

Put it this way: that front-wheel driven Kona EV Elite we drove at the launch event costs $43,000 more than the almost identically-specified Elite version of the conventional 2.0-litre petrol engined model. It's also $14,000 more expensive than the Elite version of the Ioniq EV.

So at this stage EVs remain expensive to buy new in NZ - or do they? And this brings us to a second helping of important EV news served up recently.

Mitsubishi NZ has knocked $8000 off the price of its plug-in hybrid the Outlander PHEV, taking the cost of the VRX version down to $55,990 which will put it right between the VRX versions of the petrol ($54,990) and diesel ($56,990) models.

Prius is generally loathed by both car enthusiasts and electric-vehicle obsessives. How quickly they forget.

Naturally this isn't a fully electric vehicle, but it does qualify for the EV ranks because it must be plugged in to be charged, and it does have a range of 54km on electricity alone before transforming to a full range of more than 600km when used as a petrol-electric hybrid.

How has the downwards price movement happened? Obviously it is because the Outlander PHEV has been on the market since 2014 and the development costs of its technology has been amortised.

This really is significant news, because it signals that exactly the same will (or should) happen with all electric vehicles. And when that happens, EVs will become truly affordable for a lot more New Zealanders, not just the corporates and well-heeled EV enthusiasts.

And now for the third serving in the triple treat of EV news: a group of 16 Telsa owners drove from Auckland to Taupo.

Whoop-de-do, you say. Other people do that in their normal cars for a day's trout fishing – and they don't have to refuel to get there and back; the Tesla owners recharged at Taupo.

But the point of the exercise was to showcase high-speed charging stations that Tesla is installing that are called Superchargers, which can fire 270km worth of charge into Tesla battery packs inside half an hour.

These Superchargers are Tesla only which might smack of eco-snobbery, but the fact is the early adopters of Tesla cars got that power for free. More to the point is that high-speed charging stations that are for public use are becoming increasingly commonplace. There are now dozens of them throughout NZ, with more being installed all the time.

In fact Mitsubishi NZ reckons that the charging infrastructure is already so comprehensive that hypothetically an Outlander PHEV owner could, if he or she wanted to, drive longer distances in pure EV mode simply by popping into fast-charge stations along the way and powering up to 80 per cent battery capacity in less than 20 minutes at a time.

The same argument could apply to Toyota's Prius Prime EV, which has an official EV range of 63km and costs just $48,490 thanks to Toyota NZ's new 'Drive Happy' no-discount pricing policy.

Personally I couldn't be bothered doing that, but I do see the point – that electric vehicles are improving in range. Hopefully they are also all improving in price, and the charging network is getting better all the time. It's all good news.