Having discovered just how poor the range of the Volkswagen e-UP! is, I then set about using the car in a rather more typical fashion. An awful lot of my journeys are short ones, to neighbouring villages and towns. Here, the e-UP! was just fantastic. I like having so much torque in so small a car. Great for acceleration and for climbing the great many hills in these parts.
A City car, emphatically not in a city
Even better, the short range isn’t an issue so close to home, so I could drove the e-UP! in a much more spirited fashion – much more how I’d normally choose to drive.
In those circumstances, I was averaging around 3 to 3.2 miles per kilowatt hour, so about a mile less per kilowatt hour than when I was driving as gently as possible. I don’t feel that’s too bad at all, especially with lots of heater use and sub-zero temperatures at times.
But naturally, I got bored just testing the e-UP! on sealed surfaces, so I also indulged in a little light greenlaning. All this and more is contained within my latest video. Enjoy!
HubNut - celebrating the average! 
What I don’t like about EV’s is that every journey has to be planned. There is no allowance for going somewhere on impulse. I regularly visit my parents, a journey of some 75 miles. I park my small diesel car in their drive, spend a few hours with them and come home. Not possible with something like the VW e-UP. My best option would probably be something like the Prius. Yet really the Prius is too big for us. Then we come to the price. No amount of environmental friendliness is going to get me out of my present car into something costing £20,000 and only offering 60 or 70 miles between ‘charge-ups’. There is still a lot of work to be done by EV manufacturers to sway public opinion.
That is still a definite problem, and why I could never consider owning just an EV. Battery technology needs another leap. Or Hydrogen has potential. I’m still not sure of that one, but if generating the hydrogen is done by renewables, then it certainly has merit.