• last month
Transcript
00:00The track day is over. Everyone went home well over an hour ago. If you look, this place
00:15is deserted. My car is still here in the pit garage, on charge. Now, like I said earlier,
00:26I've got to travel 50 miles to go to someone's house. So, let's see. After two and a half
00:33hours charging, what the range is saying. There we are, come on, come on, focus. There,
00:40ah, 34 miles. And really, that means I'm probably going to have to hang around here for another
00:48two hours really. Oh, I'm lonely!
00:56I've left the car charging for well over two hours now, so let's see what state the battery
01:07is in. Come on, be good to me. Ah, look at that, three quarters full. Let's check the
01:17range out. That just focuses, 60 miles. Now, like I said at the beginning, I've got 50
01:25miles to my destination, so it should be okay. There might be a little bit of range
01:30anxiety towards the end, but quite frankly, I cannot be arsed to wait here anymore, so
01:35let's pack this stuff up. There we go, and I'm going to get on my way.
01:55I have a bit of a confession to make. When I first programmed the sat-nav, it said 50
02:00miles, but I was in the centre of Silverstone circuit, and when I actually got to the gate,
02:05the sat-nav went up to 55 miles to my destination, and as you remember, I only had 60 miles range,
02:11so that means just five miles grace. Now, I've done, well, halfway to my destination
02:16now, and I've unlocked the trip computer. I've got 27 miles to go on the sat-nav, so
02:23let's see what my range is. Come on, please, please be kind to me. Remember, actually,
02:30if you look outside, it's now dark, so I've had my lights on. Hopefully, that hasn't affected
02:34things too much, so let's see. 31 miles. I should just be about to make it without having
02:44to recharge, although personally, I've actually eaten all day, which means I need to recharge
02:49myself because I'm feeling a little bit crappy. Let's see if I can find some place to stop
02:57and have a bite. Right, I've had to pull over to get something to eat. Now, one of
03:08the problems is that I haven't been able to take a detour to go to anywhere nice because
03:14my range is so limited, so I've had to basically stop at what I've come across, and well, look
03:19what I've found. That's right, the Golden Arches, so I'm going to have a McDonald's
03:30at 10 o'clock at night. Great. Blimmin' heck, I almost broke my phone there. Well, I have
03:54to say, that was pretty vile. In fact, I feel kind of disgusted with myself. Let's head
04:00back to the car. I don't just feel bad about eating at McDonald's, I also feel a little
04:12bit bad about how I treated one of the members of staff. See, I sat down at the table with
04:18food and he asked me to move so he could clean the area, and I just swore at him. It
04:23was completely out of order, but I'm just so frustrated and tired and hungry that I
04:30just snapped. Blimmin' tough work trying to be eco-friendly. I haven't got far to go.
04:40Let's just have a look what the car's saying. Right, beep, beep, beep, yeah, yeah, yeah,
04:47come on sat-nav. I have to say, this sat-nav does take a while to boot up. One thing I've
04:56noticed, though, is driving at night, yep, there we go, might not be good for your battery,
05:01but it does mean that I don't get any reflection from this dash so I don't have to use that
05:09silly little pad that I put across it so I can see where I'm going. Anyway, come on sat-nav.
05:15Right, I have got, yes I agree, of course I agree, just you map, come on. Calculating.
05:26Right, there we go, 10 miles to go. Oh no, look, look, look, look! My battery meter,
05:36it's flashing which means I've got to recharge it and I haven't checked the range recently
05:40so I just need more than 10 miles showing, come on, please show more than 10 miles,
05:45please, please, please, please, please show more than 10 miles, 12. Thank God, thank
05:55God. If I run out of charge I'm going to go absolutely bloody mental.
06:02There's been a bit of a worrying development. The sat-nav was just reading 6 miles to go
06:13and I've checked the range and it was saying 6 miles. It's been leaving me a little bit
06:20stressed that I'm not actually going to get there, however I've been very, very gentle
06:24with the throttle, I've been so, so slow and it's now saying 4.6 miles to my destination
06:33and the range is saying 7 miles so I've clawed some back, I've just about clawed some back.
06:39If there's any hills, I'm basically screwed. Well, not if they're downhill, that'd be
06:45fine because I can recharge the battery with a regenerative brake, I can't even say it
06:49now, I'm so tired. Regenerative braking, but if they're uphill, I'm going to probably
06:54have to walk the last mile.
07:03I've come to a halt. The question is though, where am I? I'm at my destination, look, yay!
07:11There's actually a charging socket just over there so I can refuel the car, but you know
07:16what, I only just made it, check this out. Look, look at that. The battery is completely
07:26empty. So then how has my journey been? Well, if I'm honest, massively stressful and it's
07:34taken so long, it's 11 o'clock, I'm shattered. I reckon when you factor in the actual journey
07:41time and the bit when I was hanging around charging the car, it's taken about 7 hours
07:45round trip and I think I could cycle to Silverstone and back in that amount of time and that would
07:51have been truly green, truly eco-friendly because don't forget the electricity for this
07:56car has actually been produced by burning fossil fuels. So yeah, while this is good
08:02around town, it's not particularly good for long journeys. You can do it if you can put
08:06it with the hassle. Anyway, I'm going to turn the phone off now, I've got to stop recording
08:11because rather ironically, it's about to run out of charge. Maybe Apple should have fitted
08:17it with a little internal petrol generator and you wouldn't have to worry about it running
08:24out of battery. That would be a good idea, wouldn't it?

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