Drive a Little, Drive a Lot: 100 miles on a KIA Soul EV

Yesterday I had to deliver a Hard Drive to a client just east of Livermore, CA. I decided this would be a good opportunity to do an actual "miles driven" test for my KIA Soul EV.

OK, to all you Engineers and Scientists out there that would tell me that my odometer isn't accurate and that I need to measure other variables to make this a repeatable and scientifically accurate average, I say - poppycock - this endeavor is just a way for me to get rid of my range anxiety once and for all. Trust me, I won't be driving to Livermore every day.

My wife and I drive our children back and forth to school and to all their daily activities in our EV. I do the occasional errand and do the shopping, but normally all within the city. We hardly ever leave San Francisco. I've often said, "...in a city seven miles by seven miles having an EV is a no-brainer."

I drive less than your average 55+ male. The national average for my age group is 15K miles a year. I'm guessing they are including vacation driving in that figure. We drove our Nissan Leaf EV for three years and only reached 26k miles. Do the math. That is lower than 15K a year and a little lower than the national average of 36.5 miles a day for US urban based cars, according to the US Department of Transportation's 2009 National Household Travel Survey.

http://nhts.ornl.gov/2009/pub/stt.pdf

Before taking off I calculated distance and I searched for the nearest charging station to Livermore. I used ChargePoint, Volta and PlugShare, which was recommended to me by my friend Jason Jungreis who is a member of www.ggeva.org

I thought I might find a charger near a grocery store, on the way back, so I could complete my food shopping for the week - kill two birds.

Alameda was a perfect mid-point for this, and they have a Trader Joe's and Safeway together with two FREE Volta charging stations - just in case I needed a boost to make it home.

Driving toward Livermore I used the cruise-control and set the speed at 63 mph with the occasional passing or slowing for traffic conditions. There were some slow spots due to commuters and one or two fender benders. Once I made it to Livermore I had enough range left to make it home, according to the KIA guess-o-meter.

I got to Alameda and visited with a good friend then headed for the South Shore Center to do my shopping. Both charging stations were busy, no problem, the KIA indicated plenty of miles left to make it to SF.

When I got back to SF I still had close to 18 miles left on the GOM so I drove around until I got tired of aimless driving and made it home with enough to drive back to Alameda, theoretically of course.

The warning message came up incessantly after hitting 20mi range - a bit annoying 

Guess-o-meter reads 15mi left with 100.3mi driven

Next week we are going to visit our daughter in Santa Cruz, CA. We'll see if I can get it closer to 115mi.

When I tell people I own an electric vehicle they normally ask - "What do you do if you want to drive to Los Angeles?" I always retort "...when was the last time YOU drove to L.A.?" Most people drive less than 50 miles a day during the week. The truth is that electric vehicles are feasible for most Americans. Now with the KIA EV you can rest assured you can drive at least 100 miles every day.

You want to drive to Los Angeles - rent a car, or like me, own a second vehicle for driving long distances.