900km (560 mile) electric v petrol challenge! It was close…just $14 between them!
Good gu I’m Paul we’re doing something interesting today uh we did a road trip a little while back with a diesel and an EV and we wanted to see if you drive through a regional Australia what was cheaper and what is charging infrastructure like well today we’re
Going to do a different version of that we took your feedback on board last time about the cars being different the speeds being different well today’ got the same cars we’re going to replicate that test but on a main route between Melbourne and Sydney bring my mate in
Here at the moment Joe Achilles he is an absolute legend of blog and loves his BMWs Joe runs a YouTube channel you can Google him Joe ailles how are you mate very good thanks very good right I’m excited because we’ve got the new seven series um I know people are thinking
Well that’s not exactly a realistic option for most Australians to buy but what we wanted to do was take a vehicle with a big battery it’s got over 100 kwatt hours and we want to see in the future when cars are fitted with bigger batteries exactly what it’s going to be
Like for a road trip like a Melbourne to Sydney which a typical Australian family would have done 10 15 years ago so that’s about 900 km right y wouldn’t most people just fly look uh they would but uh when I was a kid we used to drive
Because we were poor and flying uh was very expensive now flying is much cheaper but it’s kind of the yard stick of road trips and I know 9900ks probably in Europe I do you do 9900ks from your home in the UK probably not so much in
The UK but I do go down to the Alps quite a lot which is a similar sort of distance so yeah have you heard of the Alps of Europe on our door set we literally go through a tunnel and there you go just like that yeah we go through
A tunnel and we end up in traffic I’ve experienced a lot of that I I bet um but yeah I I reckon it’s going to be interesting just to see exactly how these cars are going to go and and how expensive it is because people are
Saying EVS are you know coming are they going to be more affordable than an efficient car like that so um yeah let’s hit the road see how we go cool good luck mate thanks Mate I’m at 100 % Joe is brimmed as well I said in the intro that we wanted to have two cars that were the same with the only difference being that one is internal combustion and then one isn’t uh so obviously that is the the main difference between these two but in
Addition to that difference there is a massive weight difference so this vehicle the i7 M70 weighs uh just under 2.7 tons it is absolutely enormous uh it’s around 600 kilos heavier than the 740i that Joe’s in we actually did consider sticking 600 kilos worth of payload in Joe’s 7 Series to have them
Uh equal weight the problem is the payload is only 695 kilos so it meant that if we put 600 kilos worth of uh sandbags or something in um Joe who uh promises me he is um at her around 95 kilos would have us breaching gvm so tells you that they’ve actually had to
Increase the suspension and the handling capacity of the i7 because it is a significantly heavier vehicle which I find really Fascinating so the first part of our trip here is going to be I guess leaving Melbourne the ampo that we were at was in a suburb called Hawthorne which is kind of a sort of inner city suburb and then to get onto the freeway to get out
Of here we have to travel basically through the city and onto the freeway to to get to where we need to go so it is a little bit of a a maze to get out of here but it’ll give us a good indication of what economy is like in and around
The city here we’ve reset all of the trip computers uh and then obviously once we get to our destination we’ll fill the cars up to see exactly how much everything has cost us uh and I got to say it is so quiet in here the amount of
Like uh sort of glazing they have on this glass and insulation they have it is just absolutely dead Silent so Joe uh what we’ve got coming up here is what I think is one of the most dangerous pieces of uh I guess speed enforcement uh in Australia and the world in general it’s called an average speed camera Zone and great idea in theory the problem is that
Not everyone has calibrated uh speedometers and the end result of that is you can have variance of between 0 and 10 km an hour that is built into the Strand design rules that these cars come in on the secondary part of that is that because people are so paranoid about
Getting a fine they will sit in the blind spot of a truck doing what they think is 100ks an hour because they don’t want to exceed the speed limit and you end up with this dangerous scenario where it can be raining and then people are sitting in that exact spot because
They’re too scared to speed up so I just think on this stretch of road in particular where you do have a lot of um heavy Vehicles it is such a dangerous thing to have um what’s your experience with these uh back home yeah we have a similar thing back home um the majority
Of people don’t seem to understand average speed Camas either they speed up to them and then slow down when they get to the camera and then speed off again so either the UK ones don’t work or these people just get a lot of fines um but yeah like so many speed deterrent
Things cameras Etc they seem to cause in the long term a bit more problems than in the short term um and dangerous driving that surrounds them thought I quickly talk about efficiency and it’s an interesting time to be doing this road trip because uh like we found with our last road trip
When you are driving an EV and it is cold it is going to to just chew through your battery a little quicker than it would if it was at the optimal temperature you might be asking yourself what is the optimal temperature for an EV so uh based on a number of studies
That I’ve come across the optimal temperature is around 21 22° cels so that means that at that temperature the vehicle isn’t having to use a huge amount of energy to heat the cabin vehicle isn’t having to use a huge amount of energy to heat or cool the
Battery and that is your Optimum range and you will actually get more than your stated battery range driving at that temperature obviously you can’t control the temperature so that’s that’s something to think about but today where we’re going to expect to see sort of 28 30° on our road uh it’s now
23° outside that’s probably going to push it outside of its comfortable operating range because we’re going to be calling on the air conditioner to cool the cabin we’ll see how that sort of fares as we go and I am hoping to see a reduction here in our average uh
Energy economy what about the internal combustion car so I couldn’t find anything conclusive uh with regards to whether you should be driving an internal combustion car when it’s cold or when it’s hot for its uh Optimum efficiency there are a lot of factors involved in that so uh I’ll be ke to see
What Joe’s economy is like but typically with an internal combustion car it is significantly better on the freeway once it is moving and you don’t have that fluctuation in engine Revolutions so these new sevens have got electronic doors that open and close for you but apparently they sense if there’s something surrounding or close by so let’s just test this out with another seven series what could possibly go wrong okay it works thank God for That um so I was just just doing my Wii stop and I got a message from Jade back at the office um so this morning the Opus Network which is a cellular network here in Australia went completely down and she wrote you had no issues with amp charge this morning right question mark
EV networks is down because of Opus just checking re amp charge um now the charger we’re going to in tata is an EV network charger so um it’s going to be interesting ah I’ve still got 900 km range left in mine so M there’s plenty of room in the back seat
And you can jump in with me if you want well I’ve got a big screen in there I might just watch a movie or something but um you won’t be able to do that if it runs out of power entirely anyway aside from that the driver is going great at the
Moment 4 hours into our journey just under an hour to go until we get to our lunch stop thankfully the car doesn’t need any lunch because it has 7 193 km of range still remaining 139 km of range left at 123 km of driving left to go we’ve averaged
6.7 L per 100 so that average is continuing to drop which is a good thing so Joe um how are you traveling what’s your range looking like at the moment hey buddy uh 700 km of range left okay so uh it’s it’s just started raining uh
Which means I have to use my wipers which uses energy and I’ve got 35 km of range left and we have 32 km to travel and I have 7% battery so aside from that everything is great oh well I hope the rain doesn’t continue to pick up because
I wouldn’t want you getting stranded at the side of the road yes uh me too anyway uh my f fingers and toes are Crossed [Applause] We have just made it so it’s down to 2% uh okay so now is the moment of truth I need to see if this actually works it says there’s four charges available this is I don’t know which one this is okay here we go so that one you look quite nervous verifying payment
Details still saying starting session it’s saying it’s starting but nothing is happening oh here we go when I’ve just parked over there yes it’s going mate I have no more concerns left no okay cool my work here is done should I go to the fuel P oh no I don’t even know I
Don’t even need to go to the fuel pump no um so let’s have a quick look at how that has gone so far currently charging at7 KW so it is it is pumping along nicely but I want to see what our economy has been like so average economy
21.7 KW per 100ks not a bad figure and and like I said at the start I have not done anything here to give this car an easy time so I’ve just had the temperature set at 21 22° it’s currently 28° outside here had my cooled seats on
Been listening to music podcast all that sort of stuff so uh we’ve done 456 km on that first charge which isn’t too bad it’s not the figure that that it said we would have but I’ve I’ve never driven 456k on a highway in an EV in one hit so
From that point of view it’s actually pretty good we’ve been doing 110k an hour uh that’s GPS speed as well so uh we have been sort of pushing the car hard up against it I think Optimum uh speed for a vehicle like this is like 80k an hour so I think that’s when
You’re going to achieve over 500ks but uh I think if we were to run this to totally empty probably get 46470 out of it so it’ll be interesting because the trip from here to Sydney is about the same distance so I want to make sure that we actually make it uh it does
Start going downhill though so yeah hopefully we’ll get somewhere but uh it is moving along now nicely now at 175 KW which should see it charged it says here by 310 so I’m about an hour so we’ll go inside have a bite to eat and see how we
Go okay so charging is complete I was actually surprised by that so 99% it’s 3 P.M it’s taking about an hour to put over 100 kwatt hours into the battery so this is 105 .7 KW battery but we’ve put in 107 or 108 KW hours so little surprising I think typically what
Happens is auxiliary systems like the cooling for the for the battery the fan that runs the internal sort of air conditioning and stuff is powered by the charger until you disconnect so it could be where that sort of extra has come from but um time to put in our next stop
Which is Sydney we may have to stop once on the way we’ll see how we go but um this should be should be good Okay Joe time for a status update uh it says we have 263 K left and I have 300K of range I’m loving these downhill stretches what are you looking like oh mate well I’ve uh I’ve got 525 K of range um although yeah as we approach an uphill it does seem to
Disappear pretty quickly um but I think I’m pretty confident that I’m going to get there with some uh Petrol in the tank and what’s your average economy like at the moment so I’m currently sitting at 6.8 L per 100 actually went down to 6.6 just
After our lunch stop uh should I say our charging stop um but yeah with these undulations it’s creeping back up again yeah that’s interesting so uh with these undulations I’m actually getting a really good return on economy here so obviously on the uphill stretches it’s it’s not great but on the downhill it’s
Really sort of uh Plumbing that energy back into the battery which is good um I was curious as well so you’ve owned seven series before how do you reckon this Compares in terms of comfort levels and then I’ll I’ll share what I sort of think about the one that I’m in yeah
It’s interesting I think uh the rear part of the cabin has come on again so I think compared to the old f02 which was like a 2012 2013 model uh the rear of the cabin really was nowhere near S-Class levels then in the outgoing model which was I think the G11 and
G12 um rear cabin came up a long way and was as good as the S-Class I think in this very latest g70 um it’s fantastic back there I was playing around in the back of it yesterday and it really is night and day um and better than sross undoubtedly you
Yeah look I I totally agree I’m Blown Away with how much luxury is inside this cabin like these sort of Marino whatever the seats are that we’re sitting on uh is so nice and this whole thing just looks so luxurious and like if you do compare it to anything else else on the
Market like a Rolls-Royce has old school style whereas this is like a modern luxury designer interior and I think it is um yeah it is one of the nicest Interiors I’ve seen in a car before especially one that is tailored for this kind of thing so I think they’ve done a
Bloody awesome job with it I was about to say don’t use too much energy with your radio but then remember that the radio is thankfully independent to your battery source so uh you should be all right like radio’s free a that’s why I’m using and Abusing you only allowed to park here for 5 minutes you know that that is the dumbest sign I’ve ever seen what the hell they come up with that 5 minutes I’ve just read the sign properly electric vehicles accepted so you could park here so Joe
I’ll need you to move your car within 5 even so I got some great news at this the Legends at McDonald’s did my coffee right this time if you don’t know what I’m talking about go to our other road trip video in the GT3 RS where I had a
Karen moment where they didn’t get the order right uh and then also didn’t really bother fixing it um but anyway I now have a decent healthy and unhappy man um I’m also happy with the temperature it’s 20° so really good EV driving temps uh sto for a quick charge
There while I waited for the coffee up to 388 K A Range didn’t need it probably would have made it perfectly fine and then distance remaining of 131 K hour and 22 minutes so um yeah I’m excited to see the results cuz I think it is going to be very close Indeed almost 9 hours behind the wheel we’re only half an hour away from our stop in Sydney thankfully I have just over 380 km of range left and I’ve been averaging 6.6 L per 100 km so it’s been very very efficient in fact this last stretch although it’s been undulated there’s
Definitely been less wind which when you’re doing an efficiency run makes a huge huge Difference hi everyone so it is 2 weeks later you’ll notice there is no Joe uh we ended up going go- carting when we got to Sydney he lost quite badly and he rushed off overseas cuz he couldn’t bear to be around I’m just kidding his trip
Was over so he disappeared and we’ve now come back to Crunch the numbers and have a look at the results so these numbers are surprising I’m going to run you through uh all of this in just a sec just as a reminder we started our road trip at anole in Hawthorne in Victoria
The plan was to drive to Sydney which is almost 900 km away both of them left at exactly 100% the whole idea was we didn’t want to cut down on energy use so we both drove the exact same we really just wanted to stick to the the speed
Limits uh GPS speed limits we wanted to keep air conditioners running we didn’t want to make it any easier for these cars than we absolutely had to knowing that they are both the same Vehicles beneath the skin one is electric one is internal combustion so as a reminder we
Stopped at tarata we were there in total for an hour and 7 minutes that’s how long it took the vehicle to get from 2% you remember I arrived at 2% with massive range anxiety and got it all the way up to 100% took an hour and 7 minutes that cost $69
85 uh at 65 cents per kilowatt hour and that was 107.5 KW hours worth of energy Joe stayed there for the same time that I did realistically we finished eating about sort of 20 30 minutes in we had to film a couple of things but he could
Have in theory just left whenever he wanted to and next stop was Sutton Forest uh this is a stop that we didn’t need to make we would have actually made it all the way to Sydney um with the electric vehicle without too many dramas
But I did want a coffee so we did stop there in total for 19 minutes that was enough time to plug up go inside grab a coffee come back out and leave that cost $28.58 and that was again at 65 per kilowatt hour we added 44 kwatt hours
Into that then we drive to Sydney and the cool thing here with the electric vehicle is it actually added almost 20 kW hours of energy back into the battery because it was predominantly downhill from Sutton Forest so it meant that energy that would otherwise have been lost as heat through the braking system
Which is what would have happened with uh Joe’s internal combustion car was actually plumbed back into the battery and then we arrived at our final destination in Alexandria where we added uh 48.5 3 KW hours at a cost of $33.49 that took 42 minutes it is quite
Slow when it gets to that last 20% of charge but that was to brim the vehicle so our total cost for the electric was $131.2 drum roll please so what about Joe’s internal combustion car so he ended up spending $17.88 adding 56.1 16 L of uh 98 Ron uh
We ended up doing a total of just under 875 kilomet he ended up spending 6 minutes uh filling his vehicle whereas in total for me I ended up spending uh 2 hours and 8 minutes stopped charging uh obviously some of that time was grabbing a coffee grabbing some lunch but in
Theory if Joe didn’t stop he would have only spent that 6 minutes fueling his vehicle uh it’s obviously not recommended that you drive almost 900 km and don’t stop in theory you’d be making like 20 20 minutes stops every couple of hours just to stretch your legs so does
Show you that uh here in this scenario the electric vehicle was more expensive few the things to take into account we obviously use the same Vehicles here both seven series but these are at the larger end of the scale not only is the internal combustion car quite heavy the
Electric version of this is quite heavy as well so while Joe averaged around 6 L per 100ks if you used a more efficient diesel or uh more efficient internal combustion vehicle you could push that down a little bit more and reduce your fueling cost as well with the electric
Vehicle too we ended up averaging just over 20 kW per 100ks which is on the higher side it’s not outrageous but it is on the higher side because we didn’t cut back at any point if you use something like a model 3 long range or something that is more efficient at
Doing the same thing obviously a smaller vehicle not as practical as a big seven series but does show you that you would end up using less electricity which would cost less as well now I thought this was a really interesting test because it does show you with electricity prices going up they are
Going to become more and more expensive to to charge on a road trip it may be cheap at home you might run solar at home but if you are doing a longdistance drive it is going to become more and more expensive to charge an electric vehicle when we did this same trip with
A diesel and an EV recently we ended up doing uh almost 1,500 km it only cost slightly more in the electric vehicle because we did have a free charge along the way and it was cheaper to fill the vehicle as well as we went so clearly the costs have gone up much like
Everything in this world at the moment so let us know your thoughts in the comments section below I mentioned at the start of the video that while this is an extreme example it is a vehicle with 105 kwh battery if you are driving a smaller vehicle with a 50 or 60 KW
Battery you’re going to have to stop more often the charging is likely to be slower but in the future where these batteries have better energy density and better charging it is likely to be as convenient as it is in an internal combustion car but will it be more cost
Effective that is the big question let us know what you reckon in the comments section below do we screw up any part of this testing is there something we should have done better or differently I’m really keing for you feedback and if you did enjoy this video please make
Sure you like it and you share it with your mates and if you haven’t done so already subscribe to our Channel and press the Bell icon Buton until next time see you lat up
Everybody says electric vehicles are cheap to run. If you have solar at home they’re also free to charge. But, what happens if you don’t have solar at home or you want to go on a road trip and have to rely on public charging infrastructure, how much does an EV stack up then? Paul Maric and @JoeAchilles1 hit the road to find out!
Skip Ahead:
Intro: 00:00
Hitting the road: 01:58
Stop 1 (Tarcutta): 10:15
Stop 2 (Sutton Forest): 16:44
Final result/Verdict: 18:48
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