"Annyeonghaseyo"! That's Korean for "hello", so they tell me, but for all I know, it could mean "thanks for your money, prick" - like those cheap Chinese tattoos that look cool and are meant to say "love", but the tattoist isn't Chinese, and the brush strokes are subtly different, so it actually says "hairy arsewipe" or something similar.
Where was I? Oh, Korean, yes. I've been thinking about replacing the Range Rover for a while, but especially since I retired in October. Now that I don't need to cart survey stuff etc around on a fairly regular basis, and very rarely carry passengers in the back, 2.5 tonnes of Range Rover is a bit over the top. It's still comfy etc, but I thought it was maybe time for a change for this new leisure lifestyle.
Then I was watching the Winter Olympics, and decided to take up ski-ing - but the sport where "SKI" stands for "Spending the Kids Inheritance". I've finished the "career" (defined in my dictionary as "a long downhill slide, barely in control" - so why not eh?
During my perusal of suitable motors, we found a Skoda Elroq - fully electric, very good reviews, reasonable deal - and that got me thinking about taking the step of going fully electric.
The Range Rover has an app that keeps a record of all journeys, and that showed that there's only been about 5 days in the last year where I've driven further than 250 miles in a single day, and only one trip (around 420 miles each way) with 4 adults plus luggage.
So last week I had a test drive in a Kia EV3, did a bit more thinking, and yesterday, I went back and bought one!
And this is it! Well, not the exact car, but it's an EV3 GT-Line in Sunset Orange. It's supposed to have 350 miles or so of range, but that's
obviously affected by how cold it is, how dark it is, how much you boot it, and also by the fact that you don't want to fully charge it too often,
or let the battery get too low. Usable range is probably around 220-250 miles - enough for at least 350 days of the year! It includes 7 years of
warranty, 8 years on the battery, 4 years of servicing, and super-cheap road tax.
There are two main obstacles, I think, when thinking about buying an EV. The first is range anxiety. Well, for me, that is only likely to be an issue on a few occasions in each year. The car has an app that works out where all the chargers are along your longer routes, and then when the battery gets down to a pre-set level (say 20%) it tells you that you need to charge, and it also tells you where to go to get charged. 200 miles of charge takes around 30 minutes - enough time for a pee and a sandwich eh? At my age, 2 hours of driving is around maximum bladder tolerance anyway, so hopefully no great time lost!
The second concern might be (and I have voiced this before) that mining the materials for the battery isn't exactly environmentally-friendly. That may be true, but neither is extracting and processing dinosaur juice.
So that's it - somebody has to take the step, so it might as well be me.
In other news, I've had another message from the "are you not dead yet" brigade, because I haven't updated this for a week. Aside from the car purchase, we've had a few other things on our minds, that I won't go into here, but there's been no time for TVR-tinkering.
