Bengaluru to Agumbe - Seethanadi nature camp

Day 12 with the new car, 1K kms completed and first service was already done. We had planned a trip to Mantralaya. That would have been a continued temple run and couple of cousins wanted to go there with family. But that plan had to be changed due to ekadashi. The new destination was Seethanadi nature camp by JLR which is on the other side of Agumbe ghat. This trip was with 4 other cousins who are all ICE owners. So this was kind of an Agni pariksha for my EV on viability.

Route

Route to Agumbe from Bangalore goes via Sringeri, so this trip route turned out highly overlapping with the previous one. Infact we stopped at Sringeri in the morning for breakfast at holla's before continuing to Seethanadi. So, planning charging stops was not difficult as i had already done it last week. The changes from last week was that there was a new Relux charger at Shantigrama and i negotiated slow charging while staying at the JLR.

Onward journey : 

A stop at Relux Shantigrama right after Paakashala was not necessary. But we met another MG at paakashala who were returning from Mangalore, they said the new Relux at Shantigrama was not working. So we stopped to test out and report if there were issues. It was delivering only 20kW. 

Until here the journey was great and at par with a journey in any ICE car. May be a tad bit better on comfort, silence and pickup. The next charging stop brought in the impact to journey time due to EV. 

We had to do the critical stop at Gateway Chikmagalur. At the 24kW charger, going from 45% SOC to 100% took 1 hour and 21 minutes. We chose to take a nap in the car.

The drive through Agumbe ghat was fun and we gained 2% soc. (A seperate post coming up on the ghat topic.) We reached Seethanadi nature camp with 63% soc left.

They were accommodating enough at JLR to let me charge the car. The socket was far (~20ft) but my newly brought extension proved helpful. 63% to 100% SOC on granny charger took from 2pm to 11pm.

Return journey:

After starting from the camp at 100% , we drove through the rugged roads of Kudlu theertha falls and then reached Hariharapura for lunch at 67% SOC. We continued with the destination as Gateway Chikmagalur, but a reassessment during a coffee stop at Khandya cafe showed we could comfortably make it to Shantigrama. That would be a better choice for food.

We reached Sky bird Shantigrama at 12% SOC. But there was some issue with the charger. It would shut off immediately after charging starts and we had to move ahead after a couple of tries. Imagine if Relux wasn't there within a couple of kms distance, Phew!

The thankfulness to Relux soon turned into complaints! Isn't it human nature after all? Food is not great there, smell of grilling meat from Empire was pretty strong plus the charger was only delivering 20kW.

So we plugged out at 35% soc and decided to head to paakashala for dinner. It was 9:15 when we started from Relux and had to reach paakashala within an hour, since it closes at 10:30pm. So that meant a mad rush drive plus banian mode at stretches. We managed to reach Mayura at 2%soc and plugged in there since the 50kW at paakashala was occupied. We walked to paakashala for dinner while the car got charged and then after some negotiations, had the Nexon move to Mayura and we came to paakashala. Nexons can only take a maximum of 29kW, so the 50kW was being under utilised at paakashala until the swap.

We were able to pull in 49kW speed, charged until 95% and headed home. There were 2 Nexons waiting while we were charging at paakashala.