A view of Taranaki from Whanganui s North Mole. Photo / Bevan Conley
Can an intrepid or at least impatient traveller in an electric vehicle survive the horrors of technology and enjoy a summer road trip? John Weekes reports.
Squeak? No. Squawk? Maybe. It might be a beep. Whatever it is, it’s aggravating my road trip.
Sartre reputedly said hell is other people. He was wrong. Hell is other drivers. The best thing to do is get away from them as fast as possible. And recent speed limit changes seem to show the Government agrees with that attitude. Unfortunately, I’m only half an hour into my trip and already in trouble.
The Mevo car hire app alleges I went too fast on the motorway, and could have my account suspended at any time. The fear of Techno-God is in me, so for the hours from here to Taranaki I must behave in the BYD Atto. And the car beeps frequently, at least on this trip. It beeps because either you’re a terrible driver or the car is overzealous. You are too close to the side of the road or the middle of the road or to other cars, or I just don’t like your face, your clothes, your attitude, the infernal beep seems to say.
Mevo and the AA launched a new partnership for AA members and approached a colleague with a Mevo credit offer but he didn’t feel like it so I picked up the BYD in the Mevo flex zone in central Auckland. The flex zone is where you can pick up and must drop off Mevo cars.
Mevo is to cars what Lime is to e-Scooters. You can hire cars by the hour or the day. Hopefully it’s not like Beam, which had the zippiest and most manoeuvrable scooters but was expelled after deceiving local councils. They had more machines on the road than they told Wayne Brown and whoever runs the cities outside of Auckland.
Could the EV ever take hold in the countryside? Could it make for a decent road trip?
After the speeding warning, still in Auckland’s sprawl which stretches south like the sciatic nerve extends from lower back to buttock to thigh to calf to ankle, I stop and see two guys and a dog enjoying a break from their road trip at a picnic bench. They enjoy it more when seeing me fumble with the nozzle and cord and digital infrastructure of the charging device.
But the guys at the picnic table weren’t judgemental bogans. They were bemused.
How the hell does this thing work?
We were all thinking that. I figured it out after 10 minutes of deciphering QR codes and app store demands.
I had picked the BYD because it was at 88% charge, much more than most other Mevo vehicles that day. It is comfortable, big. It’s an SUV. In this, I could be a suburban dad, or a soccer mom.
I don’t care if it’s electric or hybrid or running on fossilised plankton. I care about getting to Taranaki to see a guy with an interesting story, and not getting tailgated, and seeing how much I can rely on caffeine to get to my destination. Although travelling alone, I don’t resort to talking to myself. I don’t even listen to the radio. Who needs to when ... beep.
The He-Men of Rural New Zealand in their utes and Land Cruisers probably don’t like the BYD. At the Stratford Z station, some people, most in utes, love parking in bays deemed “EV only”. One family pull up in a converted housebus/motorhome.
A sticker on the passenger side window has an unspeakable four-letter word starting with our alphabet’s third letter and ending with “T”. A kid about 11 with a chunky necklace accompanies his dad or step-dad who tosses a piece of garbage in the general direction of the EV charger.
At another charging station a gormless old guy approaches the BYD as it mates with the lengthy rubber nozzle of the charging device.
In fairness and in lurching, back to the guys at the picnic table, they were curious. I tell the first guy about Mevo. I tell them owning a car in the inner city frequently sucks. No parking. Crackhead break-ins. Traffic heavy. Traffic lurching as you stop every 20 seconds for a light. He seems to sympathise. He seems to be pondering an unspeakable conversion. Apostasy.
“Did you work it out?” the second guy asks after I fumbled with apps and chargers.
“Eventually,” I answer.
He’s a friendly dude and you can see him thinking about an EV but he insists: “It’s not for me.”
At Hamilton the car gets a full charge. Traffic is light. The rebuke about speeding leaves me wanting an excuse to drive slow, and finally, I get stuck behind a truck. With 26 wheels, it moves around the hills like a primordial segmented creature, axles fragile, supporting head, thorax, abdomen.
Divine mountain Taranaki appears 80km away, vague and grey and big.
Later, heading back from a meeting with the guy I went to see, darkness has fallen and the map says we have 13km to the Stratford gas station and only 11km left on the battery.
It will be very embarrassing to run out of charge on a quiet road in South Taranaki. I am not right now a member or affiliate or attendee of any organisation named AA. Who’m I gonna call? Will the hazard lights work when the car shuts down? What will the locals think?
Previously I’ve used Mevo on short city trips, and to and from the airport. Only now, as the BYD rolls up and down the dark roads do I see how the battery regenerates when you take your foot off the pedal. I pray for salvation and guile. This feels like a less admirable version of MacGyver competing against a countdown. The numbers keep changing. I play a strange game, desperately attempting to extend this car’s lifespan. Foot on, foot off. Numbers are everywhere, and none are reassuring.
“The goal of medicine is not to extend life but to extend the quality of life,” heart transplant pioneer and playboy Dr Christiaan Barnard reputedly said. I heard he died of a heart attack while reading his own book, 50 Ways to a Healthy Heart. My own heart is racing. There must be 50 ways to lose your Mevo membership, or your pride, and only Broadway in Stratford can save me.
The odometer, or whatever you call its digital EV 21st century version, is saying 1km left on the battery. The map on my phone says 1.7km to salvation. Then Stratford Broadway appears, like a neon sciatic nerve. There is only 1% battery left, and who knows if that’s rounded down or up? Before the Z station, I see a Mobil and pull in, but there is no EV charger. Will I be punished for this dalliance?
I turn around as nimbly as possible and the Z station appears. Salvation. The car is near-dead.
The next day, a return to the Z in Stratford for another charge, from about 70% to full. They say Coke tastes the same whether you’re in Atlanta or Ouagadougou or Kabul, and I don’t know if that’s true. But I do know the food in every New Zealand service station has a remarkable consistency. I admire the Chicken Cordon Bleus or Cordons Bluex and the disgusting pies and highly processed beverages as the battery charges.
It turns out I paid $76.74, charging at four different Z stations. The fuel company’s app tells me I spent two hours, one minute and 12 seconds charging. Every time the rate was $0.79/kWh and the energy usage varied from 5.91 to 16.64 kWh. Some chargers were faster than others.
The journey was 865km, according to the Mevo app. I had a $257.40 account credit, paid $202.48 in excess km charges and $208.70 for the trip, so the net cost to me was $153.78, or $230 including the charging.
According to the AA, comparable fuel efficient SUVs of a similar size to the BYD would consume 4.8 to 5.4 litres of fuel for every 100km. So this journey would have used about 44 litres, or $117 at the prices unleaded 91 was going for at the time of writing. That’s about $40 more than this trip’s charging fees were.
A Mevo spokesman says the excess mileage charges are for when you travel more than 200km per day on a trip. It is 75c per kilometre for combustion-fuelled vehicles and 50c for electric vehicles.
Mevo says its vehicles are in use more than 40% of the time, compared to the average vehicle, which sits idle about 96% of the time, “costing the owner cash and wasting space in our cities”.
The Taranaki trip is probably longer than the average Mevo journey.
“Our members trust us to keep their data private, and we take that responsibility very seriously. We can share that we have members who have been with us for more than seven years and have driven more than the circumference of the Earth (40,075 km),” the Mevo spokesman added.
“Because they chose to do so in Mevo vehicles, this travel has been net carbon removed from the atmosphere and created a lot of positive climate-positive impacts along the way.”
Each time the pie displays and petrol customers got boring, instead of waiting for full charge, I figured: She’ll be right, and got out of there.
And it was all right. Most disasters happen when we overreach. Too many jobs. Too many romantic entanglements. Too many scams. Too many personas. Too much faith in the BYD’s ability to predict its own lifespan, too much faith in the idea New Zealand is peppered with accessible EV chargers. But I got there, and back. And last I checked, Mevo had not suspended my membership.
Better still, the brief road trip taught me to stop worrying and love the mundane and sometimes beautiful things only a summer New Zealand road trip can show you - silage bailed up in packages the colour of fake mint ice cream.
Signs for Fat Kiwi Lodge and Fat Pigeon Cafe and Stock Effluent Disposal. Psychos driving Rangers and Falcons. Tongapōrutu and the Three Sisters which might now be Two Sisters. Ungainly motorhomes. Punga caressing cliffs. Magnificent Mokau after long inland road, an oasis on the coast with sea so clean and beautiful, I had to open the window and gaze at the waves just long enough to hear ...
Beep.
For many workers, it's getting hard to know what's worse, a tech wreck or tech success.