1599 – We go to London

Not to the city centre, a different part of the city to attend a special birthday party. We drove up a trip of roughly 70 miles. We left home with a full charge, and arrived at our destination after roughly two hours, and having consumed a third of the batteries capacity. More than enough to get home.

We had a lovely day, the party went very well, everybody enjoyed themselves and we all had a really good time. Then came time to go home.

Well, the way that’s written makes it sound like something bad is going to happen, but it doesn’t only what’s amounts to a minor inconvenience really, for us at least.

Just as we were leaving, we got told that the police had closed the Hindhead Tunnel on the A3, our main route home. That would certainly mean a diversion, but where would it take us?

The diversion kicked in just after Guildford, we were directed of the A3 onto the A31, heading towards Winchester, that was fine, we were ok with that, depending on which way it sent us we could follow a different route. Just before Alton, we were slightly confused as the instructions for the diversion were to follow the black triangle on the yellow background. At the point of confusion the diversion went in two different directions.

We ended going to different route than that expected. Getting near Four Marks and Medstead, we took a known road to Fareham. Why am I telling you this?

At the end of the journey, I looked at the stats that the car offered.. I noted on the journey up that we were averaging 2.9 miles per kilowatt hour, now admittedly, we were doing quite good speed wise but I’m not sure what the average for the journey was.

On the way back, we travelled about 77 miles. Actually, that surprised me, the diversion really did seem a lot longer, over the journey we had averaged 32 miles per hour, quite a bit slower. But we arrived home having used 24% of the battery, and hadn’t arrived that much later (half an hour) than if we had followed the un-diverted route.

I suggested to Elayne that we should travel everywhere at 30mph. The response was equivalent to lead balloons sinking – not popular at all, but that is effectively what we had done, and actually we had both quite enjoyed the journey.