Yahoo Finance I Drove An Electric Car For The First Time. Here’s Why The Future Is Beyond Just Using Electricity To Charge A Car
It will take a brave man to deny that the future of cars is electric. To understand the hype around electric cars, I was able to drive one for the first time. It was a better and smoother drive than I expected.
I was given the Polestar 2 – a 100% electric vehicle manufactured by Swedish premium electric performance car brand – to drive for a weekend. From the moment I picked it up, I could tell it was going to be a good experience.
Immediately Having To “Re-Learn” To Drive A Car
Before I was handed the keys, I had to go for a test-drive to prove I could handle the car. Right of the bat, I had to decide whether I wanted to use “Regen Braking” (Regenerative Braking).
The product specialist immediately saw my dilemma – having never had to make this decision in my life – and advised that I could take it slow. He explained that Regen Braking was effectively a one-pedal drive that converted energy caused by braking to charge the battery. The idea that I could direct energy created from braking to gain more mileage off a single charge was great. But, I still had to drive with only one pedal.
New-to-EV drivers can turn this feature off completely or use a “Low” option, but I decided that I wanted the full experience of driving an EV car – and went for the “Standard” option.
I don’t typically use the phrase “like a duck to water”, but you could say I was the duck, and one-pedal braking was the water. It’s really simple to master.
The side mirrors was also another feature of the Polestar 2 that caught my eye. Besides looking sleek, it is frameless and maximises our field of view. There’s also a signal that tells us when vehicles are on our right or left – so we don’t change lanes during those moments.
There’s also a Lane Keeping Aid that gives you haptic feedback when you are too close to lane markers. It was quite indiscernible at first, but became part of the driving experience – keeping me if I get too close to lane dividers.
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Hey Google. Take Me Home.
Satisfied that I would unlikely wreck the car, I was left to find my way back home. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not super familiar with roads, especially ones that aren’t in the east (where I live) and CBD (where I work).
This is where the Polestar 2 doesn’t just use screens and technology simply to replace older dashboards. A lot of thought went into ensuring that drivers could use its functions in the most intuitive manner by building-in an android operating system. This gives us access to Play Store to download more apps if we want.
For me, this made it very intuitive to navigate the menu and even use voice control to call out to Google to take me home.
I also didn’t have to constantly glance at the screen in the centre. The dashboard in front of me seamlessly points me in the upcoming directions to my destination.
The thing about driving a new car is that you have to adjust to parking. The Polestar 2 reduces any doubt by giving you an aerial view of your surrounding, as well as buzzes when you get too close to any surfaces around the car.
Not that parking is difficult, but the Polestar 2 goes out of its way to make it easier.
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Journey To The West – And Back
As I live in the east, I took this opportunity to bring my two young children to the Jurong Bird Park for the first time. The kids were excited.
We also had to ensure that we packed everything. Good thing that the Polestar 2 had sufficient boot space – we packed up a large pram and two bags worth of stuff for the kids. I don’t really know exactly what is in them, but it certainly felt like we made use of everything we brought!
There’s also a foot-operated boot function that we can use to open the boot by making a kicking motion under the rear bumper. This allows you to open the boot even when your hands are full. I’m not sure how I looked to other people, but I had to kick a few times to figure out how it worked.
Because there’s no engine, electric cars also come with a handy bit of space in the front – that I learned is called a “frunk” – to store things separately from the boot. We almost had to keep the younger one in there, but we found some space for him in the car in the end.
When I started the car, my wife didn’t even realise it. While there’s obviously no engine to start, there’s also no feedback or whirring sounds.
Driving there was a smooth, albeit long, drive. One drawback of an intuitive Android-based operating system is that my 3-year-old was able to become part-time DJ – blasting nursery rhymes throughout the journey. The 13 Harmon Kardon speakers in the Polestar 2 accentuated every beat.
We spent the bulk of our day at Jurong Bird Park (I won’t bore you with details in this article). It was a fun family outing, until the kids became cranky and we had to abruptly leave one of the shows in the middle of it. In truth, the adults (my wife, mom and me) were very tired out as well.
Getting Around On A Single Charge
If you feel there’s something missing here, you’re not wrong. The car I was in, the Polestar 2 Standard Range Single Motor, has a 470 km range. This means I was able to drive around on a single charge throughout the weekend. I did ask Google where the nearest charging point was, and there were several nearby my place. At certain malls, I could have also charged it for free.
One thing I was quite surprised to learn is that while the number of electric cars in Singapore more than doubled in 2021, there are still less than 3,000 on the roads here (as of 2021).
In some ways, this may be a good thing. The infrastructure to charge electric vehicles can grow in tandem with the rise of the electric vehicle population.
Feels Like We’re At The Beginning Of The Future Of Cars
Personally, I couldn’t shake off one feeling I had after driving my first electric car. It was a similar feeling I had when I first held an iPhone in 2007 – it was the future.
For those who want to make the Polestar 2 your next ride, the version I was driving is the Standard Range Single Motor which the product specialists told me costs about $240,000. There are also two higher-tiered versions: the Long Range Single Motor and Long Range Dual Motor.
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