In Australia, one company is celebrating an important electric vehicle milestone. “An Australian limousine service has become the first to clock up more than 1 million kilometers with a fleet of Tesla electric vehicles,” Joshua Dowling reports (via news.com.au). “Starting with just one Tesla sedan in 2015 the limousine start-up now has a fleet of eight vehicles that have traveled the equivalent of more than 25 laps around the earth.”
And over the course of three years and 40,000 passenger rides, “not one customer has been left stranded due to a flat battery.” Pia Peterson, the founder of Evoke, an Aussie limousine service that uses exclusively Tesla electric vehicles, explains that “a lot of people [have] had misconceptions about electric vehicles … they were worried about the range and if they could book a long distance trip with us. We’ve certainly broken down some of those barriers, and some of those customers have gone on to buy electric vehicles themselves.”
Evoke has grown from just one Tesla and now has “five Tesla sedans and three SUVs, and plans to boost the fleet in Sydney before expanding into the Melbourne and Brisbane markets.” According to Peterson, her limo company has the largest Australian fleet of Teslas — although, other limo services have followed Evoke’s lead and purchased Teslas as part of their limo fleet as well.
Peterson notes, “One of the great things about electric vehicles is they have so few moving parts, from a repairs and maintenance perspective it’s a lot lower than conventional vehicles on the road. And in terms of experience for the customer, it’s a quieter and smoother ride than a conventional vehicle.”
Furthermore, “Electric cars work well as limousines because they spend so much time waiting for passengers, either at the airport or in the city.” Peterson adds, “There is a lot of downtimes so we use those gaps in the day to charge the vehicles using Tesla superchargers or [chargers] back at our base.”
To that end, “It takes 40 minutes to recharge the battery to 90 percent capacity using a Tesla ‘supercharger’, and between three and eight hours on a special ‘three-phase’ charger.” And Tesla’s Superchargers deliver plenty of juice — “enough for the Teslas to make the 400km return journey from Sydney and over the Blue Mountains to the Emirates luxury retreat in Wolgan Valley on a single charge.”
Avots: Clean Technica
