Agent47 Posted July 31, 2022 Posted July 31, 2022 Drivers you meet at EV chargers are generally a friendly bunch and happy to spend time chatting – usually to bemoan the state of the UK’s charging infrastructure. Once that’s out of their system, such chats often break into an impromptu, good-natured game of Top Trumps. Drivers of Jaguar, Kia, Polestar and Tesla EVs will all happily compare ranges, charging times, dynamics and prices. It’s all good-natured fun, with drivers really keen to learn about other cars. But I would feel left out, because I never found another EV driver who particularly wanted to know more about my Citroën ë-Berlingo M. Sure, it would attract plenty of glances when I pulled up to a charger, but more of the incredulous than admiring kind. People might have wanted to know whether it really was electric, but they didn’t really care about its battery or range. Until it happened. It was at Membury services on the westbound M4, and the lovely couple were heading back to west Wales in their Nissan e-NV200 Combi. They needed the load space of a big MPV, and when they had decided to go electric a few years back, the Nissan, with a 40kWh battery and a 124- mile official range, was their only real option. They regularly visited family near London and knew a stop at Membury for a full charge would just get them home. But with their e-NV200 charging at 22kW (it’s now offered with an optional 50kW fast charger), it was a long fill. Still, they had a flask of coffee, a stash of biscuits and a relaxed attitude. When checking his charge level, the man glanced over at my ë-Berlingo. First he admired the size and load space. And then… “How big is the battery in that thing?” Boom. I gladly reeled off the Top Trump stats: a 50kWh battery, a 174-mile WLTP range and a 50kW charging rate. His jaw dropped a bit. My pride swelled a bit. And as he recalculated how quickly he could achieve his London to Wales trip in a van-based MPV, so I re-evaluated my perspective on the ë-Berlingo. I’ve been running the Citroën for the past few months as a long-termer for Move Electric, Autocar’s new sister brand (go and have a look, it’s really very good). And until that point, I had felt that for all its brilliant boxy practicality, the ë-Berlingo was fundamentally flawed, due to a real-world range of maybe 130 miles if you go anywhere near a motorway, dropping perilously close to 100 miles in cold weather. For anyone who has experienced the sheer practical joy of the ‘regular’ Berlingo (now axed, a victim of EU fleet emissions targets), that range was limiting. Every journey of 100- plus miles required a fair amount of planning, with multiple fallbacks to account for the vagaries of the UK’s charging network. That’s true of any EV, of course, but most modern ones give you far more leeway. But a different comparison provides a different context. Yes, the range is undoubtedly limiting and, given that I rarely lug much stuff around, I would happily surrender a chunk of the ë-Berlingo’s almost unfathomably large interior in return for a bigger battery. But flip it another way: the ë-Berlingo offers space, size and practicality unmatched by almost any other electric car of its footprint (aside from its badge-engineered Fiat, Peugeot, Toyota and Vauxhall siblings, of course). Sure, the Tesla Model X is huge, seats seven (like an ë-Berlingo XL) and has those cool gullwing doors. But I will take the ë-Berlingo’s simpler and more usable side-sliding rear passenger doors and its incredibly easy-to-fill square load area. Link : https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/move-electric/living-and-commuting-big-ev
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