Earlier this year we were surprised to spot an electric car charging point. It turns out it is the first public charging point in NSW and was a joint venture of The City of Canada Bay and the NRMA. It also had a car plugged in at the time. The same model electric car that our colleague, Matthew Parnell, test drove last year.
The second surprise was that we learnt that the recharge point was opened in late 2011, which is awhile ago now. It is true we don’t frequent the street in question all that often but we missed anything in the press from that time. Judging by a google search it didn’t get a wide coverage. Here’s what the NRMA had to say.
As you can see from the pictures, the Mitsubishi i-Miev is a nippy looking car. It has a theoretical range of about 160km but in practise this depends on how skilful you are in using the regeneration feature. This is a system that reverses the electric motor and turns it into a generator. This is used when going down hills to convert kinetic energy into electrical energy to replenish the batteries. It also adds braking effect in this mode. If you happen to be driving one of these cars it is important to remember that range is reduced if you have the electric heater on!
