After 10 days and more than 1200 kilometres on the MG ZS EV Electric car, Sushil Reddy's e-mobility awareness journey has reached Ranchi, Jharkhand.
As part of the SunPedal Ride, this time, he is travelling across 20+ cities, starting from Mumbai and going to Kaziranga, the northeasternmost point of the journey. Sharing his ongoing journey, Reddy writes:
The Samruddhi Mahamarg Expressway is a driver's paradise. Three lanes on each side have very well-marked signages and a maximum speed limit for cars at 120 mph. We tried the Adaptive Cruise Control feature of the MG ZS EV on this Expressway, which seemed to be the ideal location. After setting a cruise speed, the car can adapt to the movement of the surrounding vehicles and reduce/increase the cruise speed as needed, considering proximity, without any intervention from the driver. This does make the job of the driver much more accessible. It can be an interesting feature for drivers with more fatigue or lower reflexes.
There are no DC fast chargers installed yet on the Samruddhi Mahamarg Expressway. So, we had to take a 7-kilometre detour from the Expressway in Karanja Lad to access a DC fast charger.
In the first week of our journey on the MG ZS EV, we met a lot of students in universities such as IMT Nagpur, IIM Raipur, NIT Raipur, IIM Sambalpur, Sambalpur University, NIT Rourkela, RIMS Rourkela and BIT Mesra Ranchi. Today, there are a lot of questions about electric vehicles, and the idea is to break some myths about driving EVs for long distances. We even gave a demo of the electric car, charging port, cables, etc., as a part of awareness and outreach.
There is a lack of DC fast chargers on Intercity highways, which hinders longer-distance travel in shorter-range electric cars. For example, there are no DC fast chargers on the Raipur-Sambalpur highway today, which can be tricky for electric cars with less than 250 km of range to make this journey in a single day without stopping overnight.
There are franchise opportunities for setting up EV charging stations, enabling anyone to start their own EV charging station. For more details, the charge point operator, GLIDA, has this franchise opportunity.
More updates to follow from this journey. Click here for part 1.
