How to drive an electrified vehicle

TYPES OF ELECTRIFIED CARS

There are two main types of electrified cars: fully electric and hybrid.

In a fully electric vehicle like the Honda e, the wheels are driven by an electric motor (more than one in some cars). The electricity powering the motor usually comes from a battery, and these cars are also known as battery electric vehicles or BEVs.

The battery is charged by plugging into a mains electricity supply when the car is parked, and the car can also recapture energy as it slows down, sending that energy back to the battery for use later. This improves the energy efficiency of the car and reduces running costs.

Hybrids like the Honda Jazz and CR-V have an electric motor and a battery too...

...but there’s also a conventional combustion engine to add extra power and to recharge the battery on the move.

DRIVING AN ELECTRIFIED VEHICLE

You don’t need a different type of driving licence, and you won’t need to learn anything new. Most of the driving experience will be familiar; if you’ve driven a combustion engine car with an automatic gearbox, then an electric or hybrid vehicle will feel very similar. 

You’ll notice the biggest difference when you start the car, because you won’t hear the sounds of the starter motor and the engine kicking in as you would in a conventional car. In fact, you probably won’t hear anything at all – but you’ll see the dashboard instruments come alive.

A simple selector lever, like that in a conventional automatic car, selects Drive and then when you squeeze the accelerator pedal the car moves away on electric power, almost silently. They’re so quiet at low speeds that new electrified cars make artificial noises up to 12mph to alert pedestrians.

You don’t need to do any gear changing because an electric car has no gears, so you just experience smooth, seamless acceleration. In a hybrid, the petrol engine will automatically start up when it’s needed, and the gearbox is automatic.

In a battery electric vehicle, driving is made even easier with what’s called single-pedal control. When you reduce the pressure on the accelerator pedal, electricity stops flowing to the motor. As the momentum of the car takes over, the wheels begin to turn the motor, which now becomes a generator and sends electricity back to the battery for use later. This produces a resistance at the wheels, slowing the car down.

With careful use of the accelerator pedal, you can control the speed of the car without needing to use the brakes at all. So in city driving, for example, instead of constantly moving back and forth between accelerator and brake as road and traffic conditions change, you can just vary the pressure on the accelerator pedal and the car’s speed will follow suit. The brake is still there, of course, just in case you need it.

CHARGING ELECTRIFIED VEHICLES

You can charge a battery electric vehicle at home if you have off-street parking, by connecting to your domestic power supply. It takes around 16 hours for a full charge, or just six hours if you install a charging station at home – you can get a government grant of up to £350 to help with the cost.

Alternatively, an increasing number of companies are installing charging facilities for employees, so you can charge while you work. It’s best to think of charging an electric car the way you would charge your phone. Usually you put it on charge when it’s not needed – overnight, for instance – so it’s topped up when you go out the next day. A full charge will typically cost around £3.64, so you don’t have to worry too much about the effect on your electricity bill.

For the majority of journeys, that’s all you’ll ever need to do, making electric car ownership easy and convenient. For a really long trip, you might need to charge up during your journey. There are more than 35,000 charging points across the UK at locations ranging from supermarkets and services to National Trust attractions, which you can find using a map of charging points.

Charging points at supermarkets and car parks are often free.

Rapid chargers found at places like motorway services offer payment by phone apps or special cards, and it’s increasingly common to be able to pay using a normal contactless credit or debit card.

The Honda e can fast-charge to 80% in 31 minutes, and that typically costs around £6.50.

Hybrid vehicles are convenient to use because they self-charge, using a generator driven by the combustion engine. As long as there’s fuel in the tank, the car can charge its battery. The assistance of the electric motor and battery improves the efficiency of a hybrid, which means low running costs – the Honda Jazz hybrid returns 62.8mpg in official tests, for instance. That means less time spent in petrol stations and more time doing what you want to do.

RELIABILITY OF ELECTRIFIED CARS

Fully electric cars have far fewer moving parts than conventional cars and have low servicing costs.

Because there’s no combustion engine, they never need oil changes. Electric motors are reliable and need little attention.

The regenerative braking system, where waste energy is captured for re-use as the car slows down, means the brakes can last longer. 

A regular service of a hybrid car costs much the same as that of a normal combustion engine car, and hybrids have been around long enough that mechanics are used to working on them.

To minimise fire risk, lithium-ion batteries have air-cooling systems to prevent overheating and collision detectors that send signals to fuses and circuit breakers, allowing them to disconnect from the battery in a crash.

For peace of mind, the Honda e battery comes with an eight-year/100,000-mile warranty.

All Honda dealers in the UK are equipped to service and maintain electric and hybrid cars. They can offer five-year service plans to make maintenance simple.

GETTING THE BEST OUT OF AN ELECTRIFIED CAR