A long-weekend road trip in the new Nissan Leaf

The Driven

We acquired our new Nissan Leaf (40 kWh battery) about two months ago. Prior to that we’d had a first‑generation Nissan Leaf.

We loved our earlier Leaf and used it as our main family car for getting around Canberra for just over five and a half years – but it was only ever a ‘city car’. When we went further afield we used our petrol Hyundai i30.

The new Leaf offered us the opportunity to go EV on much longer trips and I was really excited to test out our new car on a weekend away.

Naturally, I was also very keen to challenge the Prime Minister’s assertion that you’ll lose your weekends if you get an EV.

For our first venture I opted for a relatively conservative trip: a loop from Canberra to Batemans Bay; to Berry (just north of Nowra); to Mittagong; and then back home.

The NRMA has installed rapid (DC) chargers at each of the three regional locations. We booked a hotel in Bombaderry for the Saturday night.

With our previous Leaf we had only really ever charged at home (about 90% of our EV energy use in 2018 came from our solar PV system) and I was particularly keen to see how charging on the road at the NRMA installations would work out.

We headed out from home on the Saturday morning of the Labour Day long weekend.

Canberra to Batemans Bay

As you can see from the table, we started out with a full battery and there were no range issues in getting to Batemans Bay.

To read the full story on RenewEconomy’s electric vehicle dedicated site, The Drive, click here…