| Over three days, we drove our EV Plus and EV1 from LA to Vegas, and back again. The trip went great, with no major
surprises or emergency stops required. The uphill, 280 mile trip over took all of Sunday, but the good weather
and the tailwind helped us out. We got many pictures of the cars in Vegas on Monday. The return trip took most
of Tuesday and included some very strong head winds. We used prearranged charging stops about every 50 miles (thank
you host sites!), which were within the EV1 range and easily covered in the EV plus. Most stops were a little lengthy at appx. 2 hours. Improved range and 10 KW chargers in both cars would have been great, making the trip much closer to practical. Almost every stop had 240 volts available; we carried the appropriate charge adapters. The faster charging sytem on the EV1 (6.6 kw vs. 4.2) was a big advantage, although the bigger NiMH battery in the EVplus (26.2 kwh) compared to the smaller conventional batteries in the EV1 (13 kwh) made up much of the slack. A full recharge on the EV1 takes about 3 hrs, vs. 8 hrs for the EV plus. The inductive charger was heavy and inconvenient to handle, while the conductive Honda system was much simpler to hook up. |