A Test Road Trip In The Nissan Leaf

I have not taken the Leaf very far from home. The best way to test the waters is take a mini road trip. The trip is my preparation to get to my parents house in Toronto. The start point was Hamilton Ontario and I challenged my Leaf to make it to Oakville about half an hour away. In Oakville there are a few public charge stations that I could use which makes charging easy to gain at least another 20 KM if I was to go into Toronto. This is also my half way point when I do make the trip to Toronto. The car had 154 KM when I left home when I arrived at the Tim Horton's where the ChargePoint station is located I had about 110 KM which was mostly city driving at about 50 KM. Once at the Tim Horton's a few people gathered around the car started to ask me questions. I was more than happy to answer and spread the word about driving an electric car. I waited at the Tim Horton's for about 45 minutes which I figured would be more than enough to top up the battery. If this was my trip to Toronto it would assure me that I could make the rest of the drive. As this was a test run I also checked out a few other locations in case I need a charge on my trip back from Toronto. The Eaton charger is just of the highway in Burlington and makes a great stop to get a quick charge. I spent about half an hour at this charger and kept myself busy writing this blog post. At least I am trying to multi-task when I am at a charger. This is one thing new EV drivers need to accept is that there will be a lot of waiting and you need to find something to when your car is a charger. As far as my test trip goes at least I know I can make part of the trip and will need to plan out the second half which going into Toronto should not be that bad as there are a few car dealers that have the chargers installed and allow electric car owners to use regardless of the brand of the car.

I hope to make the full road trip when the weather gets a little warmer as I do not want to use the heater to get more range at least on the first trip to Toronto. I will update the blog when I make the full road trip.