Road trip – Melb to Adelaide and return

Last week I took my 7X AWD from Melbourne to Adelaide and return. It is a trip that I’d done a few times before in my Kia EV6 and was curious to see any differences.

I have been a long-term fan of an app called ABRP (A Better Route Planner) and have a paid subscription. Previously I used an OBD dongle to get live data, I was delighted to see that the Zeekr does that natively through Android Auto. This meant that I could plan the trip and my stops.

My trip planning is simple, use ABRP so that I have a solid plan and then stop earlier if we see a good cafe, need a toilet break or get hungry. The journey was around 700km and on the way over we had 3 stops, on the way back, just two stops.

Here is a quick summary

A few comments

A couple of the slower legs included some fairly solid traffic
There was 3 adults and a fair bootful of luggage, plus my spare tyre (not wheel)
I generally sat on the speed limit at all times
I did not fiddle with air con at all to improve consumption. Heating / cooling / massaging were all used whenever we wanted
I have the AWD model and it was set on ‘standard’ mode
We stayed at Strath Motel as they have a 7kW charger for overnight top up.
We left with close to full charge and topped up when back home

Observations

The car had the timezone set to automatically update but it did not update – odd?
I used Radar cruise (ACC) most of the trip and Lane Centering (LCC) some of the time.
I still find the disabling of ACC not as easy as I’d like – especially when doing in a hurry. One lift worked most times but three were used occasionally when needed quickly (I guess one of the three was right)
LCC was solid but not great
I was curious with the suspension setting changes. At high speed it toggled between low and very low, maybe dependent on road quality?? As we entered towns (and slowed) it went back up to standard height.
I’m learning that short touch and long touch works in many areas. Power windows – short touch goes all the way up/down, long touch moves until you remove finger. Same with roof shade. Touching seat icon on centre screen is a little different. Full touch brings up full screen of seat controls, side swipe brings up mini-menu of seat controls.
ABRP consistently told me that I’d have less battery on arrival that reality – good error to have. Most times it was out by 7-8%, so quite a big error. Oddly, the last leg (almost 300km) it was within 1%
I have checked and my ABRP settings are default 7X AWD with no battery degredation assumed
The clever ABRP instruction was the last charge on the road at Horsham, it suggested that maybe I use the slower / cheaper charger. This suited us as we wanted a longer lunch stop – 35 minutes

Rough petrol comparison – about 50% more to use petrol