ELECTRIC VEHICLES : A day in the LEAF
Picture the scene…it’s a cold, dark and frosty winter morning and your alarm clock wakes you up at 7.30am. As you make your morning coffee, you send a text to your LEAF to turn the heating on.
At 8am, you open the door of your fully-charged LEAF and get into a warm and cosy car to set off on your journey to work.
As usual, you pick up a colleague who lives nearby. She is going on holiday straight after work and has two large suitcases with her, which she puts in the boot of the LEAF.
On the way to work you have a good natter about your colleague’s holiday destination, with both of you speaking at a normal volume, as there’s no need to compete with a noisy petrol engine. The traffic is unusually heavy and you are stuck in a jam for almost 40 minutes, but you don’t waste any energy while you’re not moving and the regenerative braking gives energy back to the battery. You look around at all the other cars in the traffic and notice the fumes surging from their exhaust pipes into the crisp cold air.
The traffic starts to flow more freely and you make good progress. You notice another colleague, who is driving the car in front, and you follow them for several miles before they pull into a petrol station where several cars are jostling for position, trying to get next in line for the pumps.
At 9am you arrive at work and park for free in one of the dedicated bays and you take five seconds to plug your LEAF in to charge. Your colleague, who stopped for petrol earlier, doesn’t arrive until 9.15am and is complaining about the price of petrol and how busy it was at the petrol station.
It’s still cold outside, so at 5.20pm you text your LEAF to turn the heating on. You leave work 15 minutes later, once again in your pre-warmed electric car, and you drive into the centre of town to go to the cinema. In your LEAF, you are exempt from the congestion charge and instead of driving round hunting for somewhere to park, you head straight for the free of charge dedicated parking bays.
At 10pm, after the movie, you drive straight home without needing to stop to fill up with petrol. At home, you quickly plug your LEAF into charge overnight – the system automatically charges during hours when electricity is at its cheapest.