Yesterday we drove the BYD to visit children and grandchildren in the south eastern suburbs.
It was a there and back trip of about 440 kms.
Nominally, the BYD range of 420 kms means its quick charge short, but recent experience suggests that it would be significantly less than that, probably closer to 300 to 320 kms travelling with two on board at the 110km speed limit on the Hume freeway.
So while the rest of the family partied on, I made a quick 3 km detour to a local council parking area that had four charging slots, two with a cable, and two without cable. Only one was available for use, the other three all being occupied by Teslas. One was a Tesla Y model, and the owner gave me an enthusiastic tour of it. He did not seem at all interested in me returning the favour and showing him the BYD.
So, after about an hour, I had added about 10% of charge which i thought wold give me about a 40kms buffer up my sleeve for the return home.
My original thoughts were to drop into the Cooper street BP station, which nominally has 4 charging stations, but when I checked the Evie Ap, only one was working, and that one seemed to be frequently full, as it was when I drove past it on the way down , and the way back.
The fall back position was to detour about 15 kms to the maxi chargers in Avenel.
As we approached the decision point where I had to either detour to Avenel or continue the 70 odd kms to home, we still showed 34 kms of buffer, so i decided to just keep going - it was dark, raining, and two of the passengers wanted to watch the tennis on TV. Well that came back to bite me.
Around 12 kms from home , I got the " you need to charge right now" message, and we still had about 15 kms of range showing.
At the 6 km mark from home, the range suddenly plummeted to zero from the 10 kms that was showing.
In a couple of the test reviews from America for the Rivian and F250 Lightning, both of them had a reserve when it gets to 0 that gives another 12 to 15 kms of emergency, so I thought all would be well. Not so with the BYD.
It shifted itself to Neutral, and just stopped the engine and we coasted to a halt with the lights of the outskirts of town almost within spitting distance. A quick phone call, and a mate came to rescue us and bought a petrol driven generator with him.
Unfortunately, the 1.7 KVA genny kept cutting out as the load on the granny charger was too high.
So we got a lift back home, I grabbed the diesel ute, struggled to get it loaded it up with my 5kva diesel genny, and retraced our steps.
The bigger genny took about about 45 mins to get us enough to limp home, but only just.
Lesson learnt, highway driving decimates range. When in doubt, recharge.
As a secondary observation, a lot of the charging stations shown in plugshare are painfully slow, and the ones I have attended so far , do not charge at the max rate if all the stations are occupied.
So much to learn with running an EV , especially if you live in a regional area.
Mick