The blog describes our trips and experiences towing a Goldstream Crown camper around with our Mitsubishi Outlander Plug in Hybrid Electric Vehicle (PHEV).

Tuesday, April 18, 2017

Nine days touring

We took the van away for nine days just before Easter - touring up the east coast from Melbourne as far as Batemans Bay. We only stayed for two nights at two places, otherwise moving every day.
I'll fill out some details in the next few days but in the meantime here is the summary. Essentially the trip was largely uneventful PHEV wise.

Our site for two nights at Buchan on the outward journey.

We charged the car nine times including the night before leaving home. All charging was done using the EVSE (brick) with the 10A plug (it draws about 6 Amps) plugged into the side of the van
Total distance traveled was 1817 km. Fuel used was 228 litres. Fuel economy for the trip was 12.5 l/100 km.

The "largely uneventful" event was what we thought was a near miss running out of fuel coming back down the coast into Bega. With 26 km to go into Bega, the remaining distance estimate on the dash suddenly went from 50 km to "---". So there we were with battery distance at "---" and combined distance estimate at "---", counting the kilometers. I swapped driving style to "EV efficiency  mode" using what little skills I have gleaned driving my EV over the past four years to get the most distance for the least energy expended.

I kept reassuring my other half that we wouldn't just stop - that we would get more warnings and the car would have a couple of km under it's sleeve. We became less stressed when we only had about 6 km to go - figuring that at least we could now walk into Bega. As we pulled into the first petrol station in Bega, the dashboard beeped and suggested we "refuel". We put 37 liters in the tank - which I later verified as holding 45 liters. So it wasn't that close after all.

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