Range: achieved 380km (79pc) of its advertised 483km range on a mixed road, cross-country trip
Cons: electric/entertainment/screen controls not the best
Can you rely on an electric car to drive from one side of the country to the other? This month, I decided to find out.
The benefits of electric vehicles (EVs) are, by now, clear. They’re cheaper to run, are more environmentally friendly and are generally more powerful than petrol and diesel cars. What’s more, they’re fun and attractive – anyone who drives one usually ends up loving it.
But there’s one thing that has consistently nagged at potential buyers: their cut-down range.
Even those with the extra cash needed for one sometimes have to pause to consider what a significantly reduced travel range – often no more than around 200km per charge, compared to over 500km for even the smallest petrol or diesel cars – might mean.
This is especially so with such a poor public charging network in Ireland and little sign of any radical improvement any time soon.
This has been a personal predicament for years. I’ve always hankered after the benefits and eco-credentials of a fully electric car ever since I was an early tester of the first Nissan Leaf a decade ago.
But the range factor has always stopped me pulling the trigger. This is partly because I travel cross-country about once a month, usually over 300km per trip.
Over the last 10 years, hardly any electric family-sized car could reliably do that range. Those that could generally cost over €50,000, beyond the budget of the vast majority of car buyers in Ireland.
But things may now be starting to change. An increased choice of EV models, together with slightly larger, more efficient batteries, is starting to see distance ranges creep up and prices become relatively cheaper.
A few weeks ago, I decided to test one of the best-selling family-sized electric cars, Volkswagen’s ID4. It’s basically a crossover SUV that has around the same amount of space inside as a Skoda Octavia.
So it’s spacious enough for a family, without being huge. From an advertised range perspective, it comes in two options: 340km (52kwh battery, from €40,000) and 510km (77kwh battery, from €48,000).
I wanted to see if I could get from Dublin to Belmullet, Co Mayo – a 305km trip – on a single charge, as public chargers on that road are few and far between. So I took the longer-range 77kwh model to be sure.
Volkswagen gave me the fanciest version of that 77kwh car, the GTX model. It costs about €20,000 more than the standard ID4, because it has things like four-wheel drive and 50pc higher brake horse power (300BHP).
But the fundamentals of what I wanted to test it for, battery and range, were almost the same. So could it get me across country without having to worry at any point?
The short answer is yes, it could. And it did, albeit with a notably shorter actual range than the one advertised (483km).
I did the 305km trip on 80pc of battery (and 82pc on the way back, with my foot a little heavier on the pedal), giving the car a real world range of around 380km.
That’s not enough to get me to friends and family who live in Cork’s Beara Peninsula (394km from Dublin), but it’s enough for almost any other trip I even occasionally need to make. And it was comfortably enough to get me to Belmullet, where I was able to park it for several hours at one of the (slow) public charging points.
Did I drive it the same way I would a regular diesel car? Yes. That meant 120km per hour on the 70km or so of motorway I encountered, and at 100km per hour wherever I could on national roads after that.
This is important to note, as driving at these speeds will run your electric car’s battery down faster than if you stayed at, say, 80km per hour.
But driving at 80km per hour on a motorway is not the way that people (safely) drive, so it would be a completely unrepresentative test to confine it to that, especially when VW pointedly gives you so much engine power under the bonnet.
It’s also important to add that I didn’t use the car’s heater much – if it was a cold winter’s day, I would have, and the trip would have consumed more battery life.
Finally, I drive it almost constantly on its regenerative braking mode to help battery range. This meant that I used the brakes a lot less, letting the car slow naturally when I approached traffic lights or corners.
Had I chosen the normal driving mode, I might have used up a little more battery.
From driving the ID4, I was able to make a few fairly secure range calculations as a prospective buyer.
Firstly, it’s very unlikely that the smaller-battery (52kwh with a 340km advertised range) version would have gotten me from Dublin to Belmullet on one charge. Assuming it performed in a similar way to the 77kwh model I drove (which achieved 79pc of the advertised range), the smaller-battery 52kwh ID4 would clock a ‘real’ range of around 270km on the same drive.
But there was a more positive note, too. The data from the trip has convinced me that the lower-battery, cheaper 58kwh version of the smaller VW electric car, the ID3, would reliably make that 305km distance on a single charge.
As a family vehicle, this would be a compromise as it’s considerably smaller than an ID4 with a much smaller hatch boot that would make things tricky for a large-dog owner like me.
But for someone without those particular issues, it should be comforting to know that it could get you across most of the country in most circumstances without any hassle.
And it’s far cheaper, starting at just under €34,000 — a whopping €13,000 less than the €47,000 I’d need to make it from Dublin to Belmullet on a single charge in an ID4. (If you don’t need a medium-to-large family-sized car, there are others with similarly decent range in this price category, too, such as Hyundai’s Kona.)
A few other points of note about the ID4’s actual driving performance are worth mentioning.
Overall, it felt very solid. Its handling at times, especially on things like corners, was fairly spectacular. But that might be because I had the GTX all-wheel-drive model.
I rarely took full advantage of the 300 brake horsepower, but I did overtake a few times on the way back to Dublin. Typical of many electric cars, it was a mini-rocket at accelerating past the vehicles I overtook.
It also looks great, being arguably the most attractively-styled mainstream EV on the road.
Charging was pretty simple and seamless. I had the regular charging cable and a backup one with a three-pin plug, which came in handy at home for overnight charges (roughly a third of a battery in 12 hours).
On the negative side, the digital displays and controls are only passably good. I got used to their quirks, but things like Apple Carplay or Android Auto didn’t always connect quickly or automatically. The controls for things like the heat or volume are also a little fiddly and awkward, as are the electric window controls.
The ID4 answered two questions I had. First, it’s a good car that performs very well. Second, if you need to go on long journeys and don’t want to have to depend on the scattered handful of public chargers out there, you’ll need the bigger battery model.
