Want to see amazing 260 Indigenous pictographs? Paddle along a beautiful lake with a towering cliff? Ever wanted to see the site of the Bon Echo Inn, a former hotel from the Gilded age? Then lets go to Bon Echo provincial park, and try out my new Roof rack. We did find that the roof box lowered our efficiency numbers by about 10 %, but on this trip, we felt it was a worthwhile tradeoff for the added cargo volume.
We took this trip in our 2018 Nissan Leaf. Despite the cavernous trunk which usually fits all my camping gear, somehow my wife wanted to bring along unusually fluffy sleeping bags. Never fear, a small car can become quite a bit bigger by adding a roof box, in fact our Thule cargo box almost doubles overall cargo volume, and works great for those fluffy sleeping bags, blankets, life jackets, basically anything that has a large volume but is not particularly heavy. After all, there is a limit to how much weight can be safely placed on a vehicles roof. In Europe, a roof rack is offered as an official Nissan Leaf accessory, albeit with a roof load limit of 35 Kg (see this document). While my Thule documentation states 75 Kg as the load limit. Whichever one you believe, best stash those light fluffy items up there, and leave the heavy stuff for the Leaf’s trunk.
Bon echo is about 270 km from Toronto, and we did leave right after school so traffic became somewhat painful. Granted, slow traffic speeds did great things to our efficiency numbers and in the end, we probably could have skipped our planned charging stop (At either the Flo station at the Landsdown Mall in Peterborough, or in Norwood). But alas, once we got to Peterbourough the kids were too hungry to continue so we stopped and charged at the L3 Flo station at the Landsdown Mall. After a short 30 min dinner stop, we had ample charge to make it to Bon echo.
Once we got to Bon echo, we setup camp and plugged the car into the TT-30 connector provided at Ontario parks Electrical sites. Which allows us to fully charge the car at camp, nice.
We spent the weekend exploring Mazinaw lake, and the provincial park. At the park, you can rent canoe’s and kayaks, which we did to take a closer look at amazing pictographs in the park. Granted there were quite a few campers that had the same idea, so it took an hour or two to get everyone checked out. After a fun weekend paddling and hiking around Bon echo it was time to head back. We stopped in Norwood this time, but sadly we found no lunch, so we stopped again at Landsdown to fuel the kids.
We did notice about a 10 % lower efficiency numbers on this trip (6.7 km/kWh vs the usual 7.5 km/kWh), which we are attributing to the roof box. Since we did have ample charge we were not really being overly careful, and as with all things aerodynamic, slowing down would have really helped our efficiency numbers. The 10% efficiency hit is slightly less than the 20%-35% reported in this article. Nevertheless, on some trips, the 10 % efficiency hit which translates into a 10 % range loss, is not going to be acceptable. Thankfully my Thule roof racks are removable, so they can come off for those trips where I am really going to need every bit of efficiency I can finagle.
Electric car adventures 