rjhfandclf
Established Member
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- Nov 16, 2023
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- Location
- Wilds of E Essex & SW France
- Driving
- MG4 Trophy ER
We recently returned from our first six-weeks longer-distance trip from Essex to SW France – 750 miles, excluding the channel tunnel, each way – for which we particularly chose the MG4 Trophy Extended Range (late ’23) version. Both of us are now of an age that calls for a gentler drive spanning two nights/three days, and have made the journey over many years in some comfort in our old Mercedes C220 125 Sport diesel estate. This generally averaged around 50 m.p.g. overall and called for only one regular refill halfway in each direction; thus we felt the new MG EV had something to prove. We believe it certainly succeeded well enough – albeit with some adjustments on our part, plus the inevitable niggles and some extreme annoyances.
Having relied heavily on pedantic planning (my ‘failing’!) and a lot of informative assistance from others before me on this forum, I thought it might be of interest to one or two of a similar mind if I shared some results and general observations from this, our first longish EV trip – so here goes:
PART 2 to follow ...
Having relied heavily on pedantic planning (my ‘failing’!) and a lot of informative assistance from others before me on this forum, I thought it might be of interest to one or two of a similar mind if I shared some results and general observations from this, our first longish EV trip – so here goes:
1. Evidently, our model of MG4 certainly does NOT have an athermic windscreen (something I failed to ascertain for certain from MG in advance) so the essential motorway TAG worked perfectly – thankfully.
2. Equally evidently, the LKA system is, quite simply, one of the most dangerous so-called ‘safety’ inventions ever – and particularly so on smaller French roads where it is literally impossible to drive between the often plethora of narrow dotted lines neatly painted all over the roads. It would have you in the ditch or into an opposite car (or both) in a trice. I have been driving for well over 60 years, without a major mishap since I was 18, so I don’t need an insane AI robot to hasten my ultimate demise. It needs to be able to be defaulted to ‘off’.
3. We used the Auto-Android/Google route mapping pre-loaded with guiding way-points on phone via Wi-Fi link, but as usual, as soon as it was set to go, it immediately re-programmed the route I had carefully stipulated I wanted to go, to whatever it thought was better – usually along every motorway it could find and adding tens of miles to the journey. I know exactly what mixed route I want to follow, so this meant ignoring directions and simply driving the route I knew and wanted. I would just like to have the back-up of live traffic/incident updates, etc. I don’t need any more route planners; I just wish I could find a programme that would accept and stick to my already carefully-planned route, but tell me what is happening up-to-date en-route and to which I might need to respond, but I don’t think one exists.
Another issue I found is that far too often AA/Google loses GPS contact and has no idea where you are on the map. I had thought that this was just in France (which I’ve previously found often has poor GPS blackspots), but recently at home it leapt off the middle of the QE2 Bridge at Dartford into the Thames and headed off swimming frantically towards London, before eventually blanking-out and rejoining us ‘live’ in Kent!
I am currently experimenting with the in-built sat-nav – which appears to be Garmin-based (but I am happy to be corrected here) which I quite like, to see if I can get it to work better for/with me. It has a good interface and screen layout. We shall see.
4. One of the most striking things discovered about the car is its very impressive hill-climbing ability. The local terrain to us in SW France largely comprises steep ‘finger’ ridges that run down to the foothills of the Pyrénées, accessed via very steep and sharply winding narrow lanes, often with a loose surface. With maximum instant torque at minimum revs, the car quite simply glided up the steepest winding slopes, with no gravel-induced wheel-spin, and of course no clunky gear-shifting round the hairpin bends – simply wonderful! (And I now better understand the video-clip I saw of an X-Power on a hill climb somewhere.)
5. The French charging infrastructure is already in wide abundance and still developing rapidly everywhere – including most small towns/large villages, although many of these tend to be 22kW AC, so max 7kW charging rate only, for the Phase 2 Trophy ER. They were also often charging per minute so become very expensive – although Electroverse seems to be changing this now to /kWh pricing – particularly MObiVE. In March the stations everywhere were often virtually empty viz this 28-stall Tesla one south of Poitiers!
... and still charging reasonably well with 61kW at 80%
6. After much research, we had intended to use several of the expanding cheap Tesla ‘open-to-all’ chargers, that were well-spaced for us; but with the first of these letting us down due to no app signal (in the midst of an industrial estate?!), we experienced our first anxiously long leg of 175 motorway miles. We had filled to 96% over lunch in northern France and arrived at our first hotel in southern Normandy with just 12%. The hotel had arranged to let us charge overnight on their basic 16A sockets – where I had hoped to top-up to 100%, but only managed 50% in 15 hours at 1.8 kW; so we very shortly had to stop again ...
... at TotalEnergy, Alençon (empty again!)
7. The trip down was very much a research exercise into performance and various charging points, etc., plus how much power and range were affected by low ambient temperature and driving speeds; so we stopped far more often than was necessary, and sometimes only to ‘test-charge’ from perhaps 50 or 70%, but often up to 95%. This enabled us to note the points at which the fast chargers slowed down. Throughout, I have used a slightly high but convenient figure of 75 ‘usable’ kWh from the 77 kWh battery.
8. Each way, approx. 500 miles were on motorways, when we drove mainly at between 65 and 75 mph, but occasionally higher. The remaining 250 miles were on more enjoyable cross-country roads at the heavily-controlled speeds of between 30 and 90 kph (19 to 56 mph).
Driving down in mid-March, the temperature was generally between 10°C and 15°C. Locally in France, we have a n’ICE old Megane runaround (called ‘Meg the Smeg’ – in homage to Red Dwarf!), so only covered 168 local miles (268 km in the MG) whilst there, when the temp. varied from 13°C to 30°C - sometimes within a couple of days!
'Beetlejuice' (it's the numberplate!) basking in the sunshine with her French great-aunt, the n'ICE 'Meg-the-Smeg'. The Pyrénées backdrop still smothered in snow.
But coming home six weeks later, it was in yet another cold spell, so still only 13°C to 17°C; thus:
- Driving down, we averaged 19.4 kWh/100 km (3.2 mi/kWh)
- Local runaround, we averaged 15.8 kWh/100 km (3.9 mi/kWh)
- Returning home, we averaged 19.2 kWh/100 km (3.3 mi/kWh)
[NB our best local trip performance recorded was 14.6 kWh/100 km (= 4.25 mi/kWh)]
PART 2 to follow ...
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