Electric vehicles are gaining popularity in India. Over the last two years government has been coming up with ideas to promote the use of EVs by offering incentives and also setting up charging infrastructure. Even then, one thing that is stopping many EV owners from going on long road trips is the range anxiety. We have seen several videos where people have taken EVs on road trips but, we bet you have not heard of an EV owner who has done a road trip from Kerala to Kashmir. Here we have a video where a Tata Nexon EV Max owner explains how he went on a family road trip from Kochi to Leh in his 3 day old EV.
The video has been uploaded by The car seller jayaraj on his YouTube channel. In this video vlogger talks to a Tata Nexon EV Max owner who recently drove from Kochi to Leh and back in his brand new EV. Mr. Abdul Nisar is a businessman from Kerala’s Ernakulam district. He bought the Tata Nexon EV Max recently and three days after buying the EV, he decided to go on a road trip to Leh in the EV. He was not alone. He was with his family and another friend was also driving with his family in a Maruti Ertiga MVPV.
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Mr. Abdul Nisar was carrying long extension cords to charge his vehicle, in case faces any issues on the road. He spoke to Tata Motors dealership near his place and they offered to help him. Abdul was still getting used to the EV driving style and after starting the road trip, he found that the charge in his vehicle was coming down drastically. After starting the trip from Kochi, they reached Kannur and plugged the vehicle for charging at a Tata dealership. Abdul asked one of the technician about the charge dropping issue and he got the vehicle inspected. Technician told him that the throttle input was too aggressive and asked him to turn the regen off while on highways. He gave the owner some tips on how to drive the EV and after that, he has been getting decent range.
From Kannur, they drove to Uduppi and from their to Goa. They stayed in Goa and explore the place for couple of days. It was quite difficult to find a charging spot in Goa, so the owner had to drive till Karwar to find one. Once the car was fully charged, the family resumed the trip and they reached Mumbai at night. They had difficulty in finding a working charging station near the place where they were staying and they only used the Ertiga for the local commute during their stay in Mumbai. From Mumbai, they went to Gujarat where the charging infrastructure was good but due to heavy rains, most of the stations were not operating.
They somehow found a charging station and continued there journey towards North. There next destination was Rajasthan and from there they entered Punjab and then from their drove towards Jammu and then towards Leh. It was a challenging route and on their way to Manali, the EV cahrge dropped and there was no charging station nearby. They plugged the car to a generator but, even that did not help them. The owner stayed with the car for two days while his family was transferred to a hotel in Manali. Finally, he had to load the car into a truck and just about 10 km away from Manali, he brought the SUV to the road and started driving again.
That was the only stretch where he faced an issue. After reaching Manali, he did not face any problems with the charging and he can be heard saying that people planning such trips should take, Kerala, Coimbatore, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Madhya Pradesh, Delhi route as charging infrastructure is better on this route compared to the Goa route.
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