Fiat 500e Real World Electric Road Test - Is it any good in rural Wales? With bonus furniture...

that we don't get that big kick when you step on your foot, it's deliberately trying to maximize range because we have to get to our chest today, we should still get there with a

good

10 or 12 miles left in the tank, but I don't want to risk too much. I'm going to have to turn the climate control on. However, we are starting to get a little warm and it is probably better to turn on the climate control than to use it to open a window for ventilation, which would destroy the aerodynamics, so in this mode the Sherpa usually turns off the heat completely.

Just again to try to increase the range, but you

real

ly need a little bit of climate control and we've kept the temperature control at about 20 degrees so it's nice and comfortable. We've done it for eight hours of

test

ing on this car when, um. Just over a weekend for this

test

and we've covered somewhere in a region for just two weeks, unfortunately, okay, we're two weeks into this test and we've covered about 260 miles since they dropped the car off, uh. I think I quickly loaded it twice and we have a recipe for Marvin. I gave him a little trickle charge yesterday while he was on the unit, but that only accounted for a couple of percent.

We were going to do a separate video on all the different ones. charging cables and what they mean and what the rates are, that will come in a separate video, but yes, it is possible to charge with a 13 amp plug, but it is not recommended. One thing that bothers me, I will do it now is turn off the lane change control because, on

rural

road

s, it is inevitable that you will swerve to the other side of the line, sometimes it is you know how it happens around here and to the car He doesn't like it to issue a warning, but he will do that too.

It steers the car if it thinks you're going off course and that's fine on a motorway, but around here it just doesn't work, it's

real

ly irritating and you can't turn it off permanently, you have to turn it off every time you get on. the car by pressing the end of the indicator lever here that's annoying and collision detect avoidance whatever it will automatically slam on the brakes or at least give you a warning and then slam on the brakes if it detects that you're about to have a collision uh there's been a few times that there's been a ping and it's been said that it's not working so it must just be that the sensor has I don't know I don't know if it's fogged up there's a little camera on this unit up here and another time I have that beautiful silence when you stop.

I haven't touched the brake pedal at all and we pull away nice and smooth. It's like the best automatic transmission you'll ever drive because it's continuous power and you know when you step on it. If you put your foot down, this thing will move and it's worth saying, in Sherpa mode we are limited to 50 miles per hour, but if I really put my foot down, it will continue to go and accelerate beyond that, so if you security concerns. of your vehicle only does 50. um, I'm not sure how many scenarios you'd like to accelerate quickly to get out of the way or something, but you can actually do that and we'll demonstrate that once we get up to national speed. limit sign, we're getting closer and closer, so even though I'm in Sherpa mode we hit the national speed limit, so maybe we'll go around the bend first and they'll give you a lovely yes, don't tell me you're doing a driver. override, so it's like you override me trying to save your range, so we won't do it too often, especially since we already have 25 uh in the battery, so we'll leave it in chirp mode. staying at 50 miles per hour, it extends the range and ensures that it reaches our charger comfortably, but yes, I really like it in terms of overall consumption, as I mentioned, we are doing 3.8 miles per kilowatt hour at this time of year and, if that is. okay, I think for this time of year that heater uses a lot of energy.

Look, it's burning two kilowatts again right now, so you can reduce that consumption by lowering the temperature a little or only using the climate control when you really need it, but the main thing is that draining your batteries can always be the motor, so The smoother you drive, the more your range will expand. It's really

good

for smoothing out your driving. I think because it's so smooth to drive anyway, it makes you really want to drive. We kind of smooth everything out as much as possible and that benefits the economy, so that's good in terms of windshield wipers.

We better do a test of those. See there are a lot of jets, maybe too many jets, a little triangular Doom going this way. Although the passenger wiper blade does not meet the drivers wipe, but I have to say that the wipers work very well, the automatic wipers are a little slow, you can't adjust the sensitivity, what about the beer wiper? We can take a look at it. on the rear wiper if you want I'll wash it and listen to it yeah the kids find it absolutely hilarious they'll just walk away it's almost like a squished frog yeah that might be better but yeah the real work wife too .

It's just a small one because it's a pretty small rear window. I will say that the rear three quarter vision when you are trying to reverse, especially at night, is not brilliant, but the mirrors are huge and very useful, but yes, the steering has a good weight to it. Particularly like this faux leather steering wheel, it feels great in the hand and there are no other controls that you really have to touch very often, you touch the accelerator pedal and the steering wheel, and that's like having the row. From the gear positions down here on the dash, I think it's quite nice and with just one pedal you can stop without touching the brake pedal and select the opposite direction.

It works very well, but it was easy, right? I don't have to walk yeah yeah I mean a lot of our local trips a normal car doesn't even get up to oil temperature so yeah it's ideal and plus this time of year you know you get in it in most of our cars. cold, while this one heats up in a very short time, yes, and there is something that I will add if you have the benefit of charging it at home, which we don't, that is something that makes this test more interesting. I think you should precondition the car so that you heat it up while it's still plugged into the mates, so it used to be attractive because your home

electric

ity would be very cheap, but no, yeah, that's changing a little bit, so I mean that a lot of people say, oh you know, not

electric

vehicles. it works for cost reasons and that largely depends on where the electricity comes from and other people say it doesn't work for environmental reasons and to be honest neither of those are why I'm interested in electric cars.

I am interested in electric cars. From the way they drive and I know it seems anti-petual to enjoy something that doesn't make noise there's nothing more than a little wine now and then there's very little to tell you something is driving this vehicle, it almost feels like you're in a tow rope behind another car. Still I love. I love the regeneration and I love how smooth everything feels and getting a little more regeneration as we start to descend into the air. Look, I mean The difficulty for us regarding money, is the network for us, yes, but if we had an electric car, we would plan our purchases, you know, yes, once a week we go to a major city, which is where we achieved it. down, yes, but yes, we would change that we would go to a Swift district or we would go to Carmar, so yes, because that's where the possibility is probably closest.

Yes, our scenario is not really typical for most EV owners, although there are plenty of EVs out there. this area so people are making it work but I think there are a lot of people with their own charges yeah yeah the lack of approximate charges around here is still a bit of a contention and the problem with um on is their charge. Partners, there is only one charger within 25 miles of our house and we are heading to it now that we were blocked last time someone was already charging it. We hope to have better luck today, but there is no guarantee that we will have better luck. but yes, the screen works well, the stereo is decent, the kids seem to enjoy the dark so I'm very happy to connect their devices and control what we listen to while driving, absolutely, there is a small drawback, although you have to try. a higher spec if you want rear speakers it looks like we only have speakers in the front and it's a good stereo and it sounds great you know the same feels in the car but yeah you have to go up the equipment levels a bit if you want a really good sound and then another thing is, um, in an electric car, especially having heated seats and steering wheel would make a big difference.

I know there is a winter package. I think for these cars it will probably be worth investing in something else. Forgot to mention the turning circle is really good, it actually starts to fight for grip, it's such a tight turning circle when you really get on it, so yeah it turns very well, in fact it's very impressive for front wheel drive and it makes a kind of humming noise while you're driving at these slower speeds so people can hear you coming. What did you do at about 10 miles per hour? People can hear the noise of the tires.

Well, the good news is that they didn't block us today. No. that was fine, we have a variety of cards here, we are currently on a BP pulse at upper Aberystwyth University. Interestingly, the charger is at the top of a hill, so if you're running out of a charging station, Hill said, yes, the penguin. hill, if you know aberus with thankless hill, it's very, very steep, but we arrived with 15 miles of range left, which is a little better than I thought, which meant our 24 mile trip to get here. I used only 19 19 miles of range, there's Ali, but there.

It was very slow behind the trucks and the traffic jam, so that only reduces energy consumption. It's going to take another 40 minutes to get to 80, but we'll probably leave it a little longer than that, technically we could continue. and have a coffee, a good coffee right over there, I think not, yes, so that is an option and especially because it is a bit lunchtime and, yes, we will return, no, you don't feel like it, the problem is others . We've had so many restaurants, so maybe we can do better. There are other positions at Arborist, but they are not on the network, so there are even Tesla positions.

Tesla chargers are now open to everyone and, thunderous, my father charges mgzev that he is. They are now situated in the city park if you are in the area where you are reading yes and the Tesco also has some charges which we used last time but we have to pay for them and obviously we would prefer not to because the is included the whole point of two finger loading but yeah we're at the top of a hill quite a distance from the shops unfortunately yeah this is the only one where you really struggle like when we load in Tesco and you know.

I could go and go up and it was the same as insta Vault was out of town, right? Yes, but fortunately, yes, next to a very delicious cafe or rather, the things they did were delicious to try to eat in the cafe itself, they were very busy so you probably shouldn't try to eat them, but yeah, I mean, this is a problem, as living in

rural

Wales, charging points are not as easy to find as in others places, so they are all much better served by people like insta. The vault is one of its charges. Partners add them open that they may change from time to time, but yes, we will sit here and wait for it to load and maybe consider lunch, so in terms of ra

fiat

, let's claim 199 miles, but those are extremely favorable conditions . uh driving through rural Wales in winter is definitely not that, but our average of 3.8 miles per kilowatt hour I think equates to 141 miles and I'd say that's probably pretty realistic, obviously we're not doing 140 miles between charges because that means taking all the way to absolute zero, but you don't want to do that, but yeah, we'll keep testing this car, we still have another two weeks and we'll give you more real-

world

mileage stats, so stay tuned. for that, here is an annoying feature involving windshield wipers so obviously we need to discuss it firstly automatic wipers are rubbish and take their time to do anything and secondly if you have wipers the front wipers on automatic but the rear wiper on intermittent, the rear wiper will only work when the front wipers are activated, but we are building up spray on the rear window, it's not raining, it just rained, so the

road

is quite wet, so I can spray all over the rear window but the rear wiper won't work until the front wipers work even though there is no moisture on the front window unless oncoming traffic is coming and throwing us off, that's a pretty poor design and if I turn off the automatic wipers in the front, then therear wiper comes to life with too short intermittent gap that can't be adjusted, that's too much, which is driving me crazy, so the computer is trying to help and yet somehow it doesn't, so here we go, It got pretty dark, but that Is the Fiat

500e

a very good little electric car with a lot to offer?

I think so, there are some drawbacks, but I find drawbacks with all modern cars. He's not too off the pace in that sense. I will say that I think the driver. The assists are actually quite annoying, aside from lane changing, so that's good. I've been in other modern cars where they constantly send me alerts. I don't think it got me into panic but I'm looking at it as a good thing but yeah a nice smooth ride the ride gets a little annoying at times but overall it's absolutely fine it's actually very happy for Potter a ship in and if you want to make a change, it won't be 69 seconds, not bad at all and that beautiful beautiful talk anyway, thank you very much for watching, there will be more things to come on this car with more details on the loading and that kind of things. but otherwise see you in a future farewell video