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.”
Bertel Schmitt comes back to journalism after taking a 35 year break in advertising and marketing. He ran and owned advertising agencies in Duesseldorf, Germany, and New York City. Volkswagen A.G. was Bertel's most important corporate account. Schmitt's advertising and marketing career touched many corners of the industry with a special focus on automotive products and services. Since 2004, he lives in Japan and China with his wife <a href="http://www.tomokoandbertel.com"> Tomoko </a>. Bertel Schmitt is a founding board member of the <a href="http://www.offshoresuperseries.com"> Offshore Super Series </a>, an American offshore powerboat racing organization. He is co-owner of the racing team Typhoon.
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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.)
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...