“I drove 600 miles for my first trip in an EV… here’s how it went!”

I recently had the opportunity to borrow a BYD Dolphin, and as a first-time EV driver, I thought it would be nice to share my experience for those who, like me, love the idea of an EV for day-to-day driving but aren’t sure about the practicalities of those every so often longer trip.

I’m sheepish to admit that my own car is an ICE car - I love it to bits but I’m considering taking advantage of Octopus EV’s salary sacrifice scheme to get myself an EV, especially since I work for a company that’s so keen to convert everyone to green transport.

I recently drove a round trip between Brighton and Newcastle (about 600 miles) in my 1.6L petrol car, and while my fuel consumption was pretty great, I still spent about £180 on petrol (and £20 on engine oil because I didn’t check my levels before I left… whoops!) - which is more expensive than if I’d caught the train, not to mention the emissions involved, which is probably around 300kg in CO2!

When I started planning a camping trip to Cornwall, I knew I wouldn't want to spend this much again, so when the opportunity came to borrow a BYD Dolphin for the week, it was a no-brainer!

I found it easy to prep for this trip; making lots of contingencies, as I knew things like a fully loaded car and windy roads, would impact my range. Using the Electroverse app, I bookmarked a few fast charging stations along my route so that I would know where to stop for a quick reset if my range started depleting along the way. In the end, I only had to stop once in each direction at the M5 services in Exeter - but I’m getting ahead of myself - here’s an overview of my trip.

I picked up the car from Weybridge and drove home to Brighton, which took the battery from 100% to about 70%. I will admit I made a rookie error not charging all the way to 100% when I got home - I topped up to 80% on a nearby 3.5kW charger in the evening while getting ready to pack. In my defence, the lamppost charger by my house was in use while I was packing and I was feeling a bit too lazy to walk 5 minutes down the road to the nearest 7kW charge point.

Because of this, I started my trip with 79% charge, which doesn’t feel like how you should get started when reviewing a car… but as I said earlier, I have so little range anxiety that maybe I might have been too relaxed. My first leg was from home to the New Forest to stop for lunch (and steal charge from my parents’ home charger!). I plugged in on 7kW for a couple of hours there while we did lunch and a dog walk, turning my 43% into a reasonable 68%. This translated to 176mi in range on the dash and this was the point where I kicked myself a bit for not leaving the house on 100% that morning. My second leg of the trip was 203mi, which if I’d had that extra 20% I might have managed to achieve without stopping to charge (but hindsight is a wonderful thing).

As we drove down the A30 I asked my partner to look at the Electroverse to find a place to stop and charge to top up for the last stretch, and we settled on the M5 services in Exeter, where I charged up using the GridServe point there. It was really easy to sign up and pay, and I got sent an email receipt too. I ended up spending £20 to top up from 30 to 70%, which only took about 20 minutes (enough time for a wee and a mini food shop). I was really impressed with this for the first time using a CCS charger.

The final leg here was to our campsite near St Ives, and as I’d predicted the range performance did start to suffer as we got onto the wiggly roads past Devon - this being said we had more than enough juice to get where we needed to go, driving past several other charging points I’d bookmarked just in case.

We got to the campsite with about 50 miles to spare, and this is where I felt like a genius: I’d paid for a pitch with electric hookup, and I had a 3-pin charger in the boot of the Dolphin - so for the low low price of a £5 mains to campsite plug adaptor, I had free charging for my holiday (work smart, not hard, as they say). I’d say I averaged around 30% charge overnight, and I managed to get a little extra by leaving the car plugged in when we went to St Ives for the day by bus.

We did spend the week driving around Cornwall, visiting some lovely scenic places, and it was lovely to see some other Octopus-leased EVs in the National Trust car parks while I was there (most of which have EV hook-ups now).

The car was lovely and smooth on all the bumpy roads, and I felt very confident driving through some extremely tricky places. But, thanks to the 360-degree cameras and parking sensors helping me find out just how much space there was between my new beloved EV and the very scary-looking brick walls.

When we eventually packed up to go, I set off with a good 90% charge to get me to Falmouth to meet a friend and then onwards home. Out of convenience, I decided to stop to charge up in the same place as on the way down, and again I charged for 10 minutes and about £10 - bringing my total public charging cost for this trip to a grand total of £35!!

My journey home was a little less demanding range-wise, as I stopped again at my parents’ house for a couple of days and used their lovely, lovely free-to-me electricity to charge back up, as well as their water to clean the dust off of the car to get it ready to return.

After dropping the car back to its home office, I made my way home and reflected on my first experience of being an EV driver.

I definitely saw the cost impact straight away - as a driver of a petrol car, I’m used to spending £90 per tank and generally having to budget for any long trips. While high-speed public charging has a reputation for being expensive, when you’re combining this with home charging, trickle charging, or other options it’s immediately clear how incredibly cheap an EV is to run.

I didn’t get the full range performance out of this car, which was as I’d expected when I’d fully loaded it and rushed around the country. I definitely saw much better range performance on the motorways home when I wasn’t in a rush to get to a campsite on time. Setting the cruise control to 60-65 instead of 70 mph for most of the way made a noticeable improvement to my predicted range. This being said, even without perfect performance, this car was more than up for the job at hand - so for my day-to-day driving I know it will be an absolute dream.

The driver experience of the BYD Dolphin was also brilliant, I really enjoyed first of all having an automatic (!) but mostly that the user interface does a great job of being modern without feeling like a spaceship or a toy. By this, I mean that I’m a strong advocate for real physical buttons so that I can stay focused on my driving without having to try not to miss a section of a touch screen. BYD has done a great job of making sure that with steering wheel buttons and a few helpful essentials under the touch screen, all the things I will need to adjust while driving are easy to find. I could talk a lot longer about this car - and I have - head over to my BYD Dolphin review.