We take a look at the Nissan Leaf, Ford Focus Electric and Chevrolet Volt in Part one of our two-part series examining the electric vehicles on AJAC’s Brighton-to-London EcoRun.
The Ford Focus Electric gets charged up during one of EcoRun's pit stops (photos by Dan Heyman and Michelle Siu))
While I won’t say electric cars were what the AJAC EcoRun was all about, you aren’t going to have an eco-themed car rally without them these days.
Electric vehicles are looking like they have graduated beyond the “fad” phase—the sheer variety of the examples on our trip alone is enough to demonstrate that an electric power train can work with a number of platforms.
I’m not saying that in ten years’ time 30 per cent of the vehicles on the road are going to be of the electric variety, but there’s little question that the seed has been planted and there’s a very real possibility that nearly every major manufacturer will have an EV of some sort in their line-up, in an effort to, if nothing more, keep up with those manufacturers that do.
Of course, it’s not about just building the cars; it’s about whether or not drivers are prepared to learn to live with EVs, and whether communities are going to start taking the necessary steps to allow their infrastructures to support them.
We can’t speak fully to the latter, although we did speak with Lorne Hedges from Schneider Electric, whose company is already building EV chargers for sale to the public, and have already installed some in public places, like the Evergreen Brick Works in Toronto.
We can, however, speak to what it’s like to drive these vehicles, and how we learned to adjust our driving style to get the most out of them.
Click past the jump for part one of our two-part EV special, featuring our driving impressions of the Ford Focus Electric, Nissan Leaf, and Chevrolet Volt.
After each summary of our driving experiences, look for the stats compiled by Natural Resources Canada determining both the fuel economy (in the case of the Volt only) and power economy of each car. The numbers are presented in a similar way to those used to govern fuel economy (litres per 100 kilometers), with 8.9 kilowatt-hours representing one litre of gasoline. So, like gasoline-powered cars, the lower the figure, the better.
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