I think your first car is similar to a first love. You never ever forget it. I will never forget the feeling of finally passing my driving test. I had been having lessons for over a year and taken my test twice already. My driving instructor was confident I would pass each time but my nerves always got the better of me. Finally I had cracked it and it was time to find myself a car. I decided to Second Hand Cars Canterbury visit my local car dealer and see what they had to offer. I had a limited budget, a very limited budget. 500 to be precise. I did not expect anything spectacular but wanted something safe and not too bashed up. I found "her". A wonderfully old Volkswagen Polo. She was white. I don't know why I called her "she" but I always did. In fact sometimes I called her Annie, derived from the letters on the registration plate.
Inside she had a red carpet with grey interior seats. The car had been used by a young girl, who had travelled in it to clean her horses at the nearby farm and consequently there was a faint smell of horse muck in the car. It was nothing that an air-freshener could not fix and to be honest it did not really matter as this car was the one thing I had craved for a long time - freedom. I drove far and wide in this car and she served me well. We drove south to visit friends on Hayling Island. We even went on the car ferry over to the Isle of Wight on a day trip. We had a journey to Edinburgh and I even navigated the city centre of London in her. When I finally decided to part exchange my car for a new one, I was indeed very sad. I presumed that they would simply scrap the car as it was of no significant value. However only a short time ago a friend called me to say that she had seen the very same car being driven by an old man in our village.
More noticeable is the regenerative braking in “B” mode: then, the e-Golf is aggressive in shedding speed when you lift off the accelerator, to the point where you can feasibly one-pedal drive without tapping the brake most of the time. In regular “D” mode there’s far less regenerative braking, unlike in the Nissan. You need a certain mindset to get into the swing of electric car ownership. Personally, when I’m driving a gasoline or diesel powered car, I tend to start thinking about refueling when the dashboard range estimate dips into double-digits. Thing is, it doesn’t take much driving of the Leaf before you get to that point, while the e-Golf starts out under 100 miles anyway. Both companies provide a regular charger in the trunk from which you can rejuice each car from a standard 120V outlet. You have to factor in a long time off the road if you’re relying on that, however. Even with those convenience features, I found I was constantly aware of how much power I had left while out in both cars.
The specter of running out of charge at the side of the road - further away from an outlet than any extension cord could reach - was enough to leave me obsessive about watching the power gages. On the plus side, it does make you aware of how you drive and whether that’s economically or otherwise. Stepping back into gasoline cars, I couldn’t help but think about all that energy squandered during braking, which the e-Golf or Leaf would be eagerly gobbling up. Fluctuations in estimated range, though, did cause a few cold sweats. Part of the problem is that there’s no taking into account changes in elevation, which can have a huge impact on how much power is used. I’m a fairly extreme example, since I live at the top of a relatively high hill: the Leaf, for instance, could end up gaining 20-30 miles of estimated range simply during my mostly-coasting trip down the hill. However, taking the same roughly four miles of twisting road back up to the top could easily knock 30 miles from the Leaf’s estimate.
