SO I’m back on apps again. My apologies. But it’s a big part of life with an electric car.
And the Volkswagen e-Golf is no different.
I have a Pod Point 7kWh charger at home. It connects to the home wifi system and lets you know the cost of the electricity consumed by your electric car.
Except at the time of its installation I was with a wifi provider that – while delivering superfast speeds to the router – was hopeless at delivering actual wifi to the house.
So out went Virgin Media and in came BT. Now I have wifi around the house again, but for some reason I couldn’t hook the Pod Point charger up to the wifi system.
I had followed the simple instructions but I got a blank when it came to a listing of wifi routers on the app. An email Pod Point and an engineer was booked to come round.
It appears the solo charger required a new circuit board. Once repaired that meant the Pod Point charger, our home router, and the Pod Point app on my phone were happily connected.
Why does this matter?
It means you can see how much electricity you have used. In December it was the grand total of £13.04; in January so far it’s just £3.03.
So if you want to get an idea of how cheap that is, for about a 100 miles of charge – one single charge in December – it cost me just £3.59.
If you want to consider how much that 100 miles would cost for a petrol car (average 35mpg) it would be:
- £15.86
And for a diesel car (average 55mpg) the cost would be:
- £10.87
It begins to provide an idea of how little you spend on ‘fuel’.
So how suitable would an e-Golf be for your business?
Leasing company Arval says that electric cars can be entirely suitable for higher mileage drivers.
Here’s what Shaun Sadlier, who is Arval’s Head of Consulting, had to say when I asked him about this
“If you look at a driver who covers 25,000 miles a year, towards the upper end of the typical fleet spectrum, then the suitability of an EV rests entirely on their daily mileage.
“If that driver covers 246 miles, twice a week, for 46 weeks of the year, then an EV is probably not for them,” Shaun said.
“That’s because they are close to the maximum range of even the best EVs now available on the market.
“However, if they drive 110 miles, five days a week, for 46 weeks of the year and this mileage pattern is very predictable, then an EV could absolutely be suitable. Because it is well within the range for most models and the car can be recharged overnight.”
It makes sense. I know the Volkswagen e-Golf has a usable range of up to 130 miles before I need to plug it in back at home. So that would be entirely feasible.
And at those ‘fuel’ rates, it makes electric driving for business users highly appealing.
Note: The fuel figures were based on AA Petrol and Diesel prices December 2018 – unleaded at 121.6 p/litre and diesel at 131.1 p/litre.
Volkswagen e-Golf 136PS 5dr
- Power – 136PS
- Torque – 214Nm
- Transmission – direct drive single -speed gearbox
- Battery – 35.8kWh lithium-ion
- Top speed – 93mph
- 0-62mph – 9.6s
- CO2 emissions – 0g/km
- Company car tax band 2017/18 – 13%
- Range – 124 miles
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