Chilled Mobile Office.
The new 76 registration plate is just weeks away. Those looking to purchase, lease or PCP a new vehicle in September will be finalising their options very soon. More on the new plates in next month’s news brief.
Meanwhile, we sweat in yet another heatwave. Must places in the UK are now officially in a drought. The coolest place for many of use at present may actually be the car! Those journeys and commutes with working air conditioning (AC) are probably more pleasant than being at home unless you’re fortunate to have an fitted or free standing air con unit or two chilling your residence. If your set of wheels is an EV, its AC can also be operational whilst parked stationary and there are no exhaust emissions from a running engine.
Many EV’s offer vehicle-to-load (V2L) capabilities, meaning you can operate and charge your battery powered items using the high capacity vehicle’s batteries. A regular 3-pin domestic electrical socket is either available in the cabin or boot, or via the use of an adaptor plugged into the car’s charging port can supply the 230v alternating current by way of an inverter.
Someone has done the sums here. It’s actually cheaper to run the AC and other electrical appliances in the car during the day than using these items at home. The vehicle’s batteries can be charged overnight at your abode using an off peak tariff. There are extra savings for employees of a company who have subsidised or reimbursed charging costs for their company cars.
Other advantages the EV’s have over combustion engined vehicles, is that the cabin can be pre chilled via the owner’s phone app some minutes before getting into the car. Certainly different from experiencing the furnace of heat that leaps out of a conventional car on a hot day! Then there’s the high risk factor of being burned by the seats or steering wheel. Vehicles such as some Ford Mustangs have a chilled seat system – handy if you are wearing shorts that hot day.
So you can now sit in your car’s chilled environment, working on your laptop, watching the latest film and brew your coffee on your portable electric espresso machine. Even get the toaster out of the boot and have a couple of buttered crumpets (if you’ve remembered the butter for the portable fridge). For the rest of us that do not drive a EV or even have working AC, the chilled mobile office is not an option. For those commutes then, it’s a case of open the windows, hydrate often or grab an ice-cream if you see a van en route.
