Small battery, respectable range on Desaru road trip

Volvo's detuned EX30 crossover with 51kWh battery packs a week's worth of driving

- Christopher Tan

DESARU, Johor - Some people jump off planes, some swim with sharks and others climb sheer cliffs without ropes. Me? I seek my thrills by seeing how far I can go in an electric car before it runs out of juice.

Volvo's detuned EX30 compact crossover — which qualifies for the slightly less punitive Category A certificate of entitlement (COE) — is the choice for my latest endeavour. I pick the Plus variant, which has one of the smallest batteries in town, rated at 51kWh.

I aim to drive it to Desaru and back without recharging. The beach resort on the east coast of Johor is around 100km away. So, a round trip would be 200km, plus 50km or so for meal expeditions while I am there.

I do not resort to hypermiling tactics, which involve silly things like driving without air-conditioning (with windows up), over-inflating the tyres, drafting (tailgating a vehicle to reduce wind resistance) or maintaining an unrealistically low speed of 60kmh to 80kmh.

Even so, it seems doable, since the EX30 Plus has a declared range of 337km. So, even after clocking 250km, it should still have 87km to spare.

Well, reality is never quite as straightforward. Experience tells me I need to discount declared range by around 20 per cent.

True enough. When I check the trip computer before I set off, it tells me that I have 276km of range with 97 per cent charge. It computes this range based on the short trips I make in Singapore before I set off.

So, with 276km, I should have wiggle room of 25km. Not huge, but comfortable enough. This, of course, does not factor in congestion at the Causeway, the additional weight of one passenger and luggage or, more significantly, highway speeds, which increase an electric vehicle's (EV's) appetite for electrons exponentially.