E-car on the road: Can the caravan make it across the Alps?
If you're traveling with a caravan, you don't need a towing vehicle that can't keep up. The German Automobile Club (ADAC) now wanted to find out for sure and put it to the test: How safe is it to go on vacation with an e-car plus caravan trailer?
For the test, a caravan (Dethleffs Aero 470 FSK) was hitched behind a KIA passenger car and sent over the Alps and back. For three days, the car pulled the caravan from Landsberg am Lech in Bavaria through Austria to Trieste in Italy and back. The test drive took a total of 1280 kilometers through valleys and over mountains. Thanks to all-wheel drive and 239 kW (325 hp), a complete success, if the testers are to be believed. Overtaking maneuvers and mountain passes were mastered without a hitch. However, such a caravan trailer also consumes 80 percent more energy, which means you have to recharge much more often at the roadside. The caravan in question weighed over 1500 kg. The range also dropped accordingly: from just under 400 kilometers to 220 kilometers. It is therefore all the more advisable to keep an eye on the charging stations available.
With a trailer, the average driving speed remains below 80 km/h, namely 69 km/h on average. The testers were quite satisfied with this performance. There was then little criticism of the e-car itself and its performance. The biggest challenge along the entire route was the lack of charging stations.
On the one hand, not all of the charging stations along the route worked, so that the testers actually had to unhitch their caravans at one point in order to get to the next station by car. Also, it is often not known how much charging costs: Charging was free at some stations, while at others you had to pay 79 cents per kilowatt hour.
So whether you can actually make it on vacation with an e-car and caravan even over difficult terrain depends not necessarily on the performance of the car, but rather on the infrastructure with charging stations, which still leaves much to be desired in many places. To cushion the uncertainties of a vacation trip, it is therefore advisable to take along a power bank for the car. With such a ZipCharge, you can still manage up to 60 extra kilometers.
It's also a good idea to take along the free Green Zones app, which shows you which cities you can enter with which cars and trailers and where you might be fined.