This article was first published in The Driven in March 2024.
EV buyers today are accustomed to looking at new vehicles with at least 300 km and sometimes as much as 600 km of range. When I talk to them, new owners are often surprised to learn that the second EV in my household is a 2012 Nissan LEAF with a maximum range of about 110 km. I explain that this car has never left Canberra (until now) and always charged at a rate of 3.6 kW in my garage. For what it’s used for, it’s brilliant. We should have more EVs like it available today.
Late last year, the NRMA installed a pair of DC fast chargers in Braidwood, a town halfway between Canberra and Batemans Bay on the NSW south coast. This fact, combined with Bjorn Nyland’s recent Youtube videos of him doing 500 km trips in older, short range EVs, got me thinking about the possibility of driving my LEAF to the coast. The NRMA chargers at Braidwood suddenly made this a possibility. So, last weekend, my son and I tried it!
I had no intention of being the EV stranded on the side of the road, snapped by the anti-EV brigade, so I carefully prepared for the trip with A Better Route Planner (ABRP). The ABRP told me I could travel in both directions if I charged at Canberra Airport on the eastern edge of Canberra (a very short top-up) and Braidwood.
After planning a trip, ABRP has a driving mode that shows distance to your destination, current state of charge and estimated state of charge on your arrival. This gets updated as you drive giving a lot more confidence. ABRP can get additional data from the car via a Bluetooth dongle that plugs into the OBD2 port.
In this way, ABRP can use live data rather than estimating state of charge over the trip (and arrival) based on the terrain and speed limits. Another app, LeafSpy, gave us access to all kinds of internal data from the car including the battery temperature, kilowatt hours remaining, state of charge, and so on.
In our previous experience, ABRP is quite conservative, and that’s probably a useful characteristic. We left Canberra Airport for Braidwood and as we went, the arrival state of charge started climbing. That was a good start! We arrived in Braidwood with 19% charge.
Using quite conservative settings in ABRP we found we could very easily make it to Batemans Bay (of course, it’s downhill!). The big question was, could we get back? There was no point driving down if we couldn’t get back up!
The Kings Highway on the Clyde Mountain is not a great place to run into trouble at the best of times. There’s not many places to safely pull over and poor mobile phone coverage. Based on the drive so far, and the plan shown by ABRP, we were sufficiently confident that we decided to proceed to drive down the Clyde Mountain to Batemans Bay.
In Batemans Bay, we drove straight to a CHAdeMO fast charger to re-charge. The leg back to Braidwood was, of course, the one that bothered me the most. It’s a 700 metre climb over 45 km followed by another 20 km to Braidwood.
We charged on the fast charger to 90% and then moved to a nearby AC station to charge all the way up to 100%. This is one of the few instances where charging to 100% is justified!
We set off home from Batemans Bay with ABRP and LeafSpy running. My son was closely monitoring both apps for me while we drove up the Clyde. ABRP initially showed an estimated state of charge on arrival into Braidwood of 18%.
It’s worth noting that the range estimate that is provided on the LEAF instrument cluster, known colloquially as the “guess-o-meter”, is really unhelpful (hence the name). It is overly pessimistic and the estimated range bounces around a lot. I trained myself to not look at. Watching state of charge and estimated arrival state of charge in ABRP was much more helpful.
By the time we had reached about halfway up the Clyde Mountain, our arrival state of charge had climbed up to 29%. Near the top of the mountain, at the famous Pooh’s Corner, we realised we were going to comfortably make it to Braidwood. We rolled into Braidwood with 33% charge remaining. See how hard it is to run out of juice with proper planning?
Once back in Braidwood, we triumphantly charged to 90% and then drove back to Canberra. We stopped at Canberra Airport for about five minutes to add a small amount of additional charge to safely get home.
In retrospect, the outbound stop at Canberra Airport was probably unnecessary as we left from home with a 100% charge, and should that not be enough to reach Braidwood, and there is ample AC charging in Bungendore (between Canberra and Braidwood) to add any top-up.
Likewise, on the way home, it would be possible to omit the Canberra Airport fast charging stop and divert to one of any number of charging stations around Canberra if required.
This means that the only charging stops required for us to get from Canberra to the coast and back is a pair of fast charges (about 20 minutes each) at Braidwood.
I have no doubt that I could do the trip again more quickly and effortlessly. You really have to have done it once to appreciate how much safety margin you tend to instinctively build in. In fact, we see this with new EV owners all the time – charging their long range EVs to 100% “just in case”. With experience on any given route, a driver quickly learns the charging requirement based on their vehicle and the terrain.
While this might seem like a bit of an EV extreme sport pioneered by Bjorn Nyland, it was a useful exercise to demonstrate that people with cheaper, shorter range cars can now do longer distance trips if they really want to.
When I first bought my LEAF, I assumed I would never be able to take it out of Canberra. With enough charging stations in enough places, it’s actually quite possible and a bit of an adventure! The small battery of the Nissan LEAF combined with its 50 kW DC charging makes each charging stop, while more numerous, short.