Get Your Whip: Plug-In Rally At Horse And Buggy Speeds

by Bertel Schmitt

August 12th, 2011 2:29 PM

get your whip plug in rally at horse and buggy speeds

Munich, Germany, to St. Moritz, Switzerland. It can be a scenic afternoon ride. The nicest route, shown here would take you very leisurely four hours these days. Before the car was invented, it would have taken a few days and a lot of real horses. How about with pure plug-ins? 31 participants embarked on a plug-in rally from Munich to St. Moritz. It started on August 1. It ended on August 5th. Yep, five days. When I was young, I did that in two easy days on a bicycle. The electric cars took the better part of the week.

To their credit, the battery-powered rally-cars mastered a course of 780 kilometers (484 miles), says AUTO BILD. They must have taken some scenic detours. Or had a hard time finding out-of-the-way hotels that offered enough sockets for 31 cars to suck from over night. Straight line ( and quite beautiful, I tell you) would be 279 km, or just 173 miles. It also has some wicked mountain passes …

Even with a carefully planned route and four overnight stays, each driver had to follow a careful strategy “to not get stranded: Step on the ‘gas’ only if absolutely necessary, re-gen as much as possible: scoot downhill and happily watch the green bar grow,” says AUTO BILD. The rally was called e-miglia. It was a few hundred km short of 1,000 km, but who’s counting.

Only the “€100,000 Teslas with 7,500 laptop batteries in the back could do 300 kilometers and more” says the paper. And it continues:

“A band of dedicated idealists is fighting for the great cause of electric mobility. One would think this should be the job of the automakers. Those keep their lordly (or embarrassed) distance and leave the pioneering to the man of independent means.”

#BertelSchmitt #ElectricVehicles #EV #Germany #Green #Switzerland

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3 comments

Herb on Aug 12, 2011

This is indeed a fantastic route! If you feel inclined, you can go ahead from St. Moritz to Lake Como, offering even more scenic views. So far, the slowest vehicles I have encountered on this route were Dutch cars with trailers. But progress never stops... (BTW: I would not recommend this tour by bicycle. The hills might turn out really nasty without proper propulsion. Oh, yes and avoid the autobahn when on bicycle.)

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- Bertel Schmitt on Aug 12, 2011
  
  That's why I budgeted 2 days for the bicycle. Behind Garmisch, it gets a bit hilly. I grew up near the letter A and did most of that route by bicycle. Not all the way to St. Moritz - too expensive. The route can be done completely Autobahn-free, Google just won't draw it. No problem at all. I could still do it without looking at the map even once.
  
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Niky on Aug 12, 2011

Looks fantastic. It's always nice to get out and do some scenic driving at a slow pace. What wouldn't be nice is finding an extension cord that will reach from your hotel room to your car...

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