We hired a car over Christmas because Fiat are taking months to get parts to fix ours (after an accident—nobody was hurt). We specified "electric" but didn't have a choice and ended up with a Polestar 2. I knew nothing about Polestar. It's way too big for us, so daunting, but it was great to try something different for...

 For the two people on the planet who need to know this, the trick is:enable decimal latitude & longitude display in the w3w native app (settings > display, screen grab below — I’ve not found a way to do this in the web app);enter the “what three words” into their app, and now the copy icon will copy the location name...

This is what EV car charging looks like: When we had a petrol Fiat 500, on a long drive we’d stop at a motorway service station to fill up and then have some mediocre coffee. With the EV version of the same car, we find somewhere slightly weird, plug in, go for a walk, and then have the mediocre coffee while the...

I’ve never had to reboot a car before, but it is software, and turning it off and on again is a thing. The media system and navigation can be reset by holding the centre console button. There’s a more complicated dance for rebooting the rest of the car. We needed it as the car was in a state where it wouldn’t shutdown...

This is our air source heat pump install week. More on that another time, but one of the choices we have to make is what energy tariff to switch to. This is problematic as we have an EV tariff called “Go” that gives us 8.5p kWh at night and we have trained ourselves to shift energy into that time slot. Moving away from...

The Fiat website is a nightmare. I’ve gone to the trouble of listing out what car/remote features are included in what package. Here it is: It’s also available as a Google doc. 

We’ve logged our longer EV journeys for a year now. We wanted to get a feel for what a realistic range is like as the days grow warmer, and cooler.When we started out, the measure that made sense to us was: how many miles do we travel per 1% of car battery?  You can picture the spreadsheet: start mileage, start charge;...

We completed a 1,623 mile electric vehicle trip where we were dependent on public charging infrastructure. Here are the stats. Energy and cost The total energy use was 375 kWh, which averages out to 4.3 miles per kWh in the Fiat 500e. Before this trip, miles/kWh was not a metric we’ve used. We preferred “miles per...