Mumbai to Delhi, Dec 2022
Mumbai to Delhi, Dec 2022
1400kms+, New route, New CPOs, Video content!
I always manage to get some experience of the Delhi winters : a) The bad air quality ensures that I get several calls from clients during these months. Read more about my work here. b) I love the winter season and sadly Mumbai has none.
So what better way to fulfil my love of the winters than an EV winter trip to Delhi.
I planned to run some experiments for this trip. I decided to visit as many new charging stations as possible. And I decided to test the limits of the car by pulling in with 6km range left. Of course the trip can be made without any of these additional expectations, but I enjoy the thrill of pushing the limits with my EV.
If you want to cut a long story (30 mins!) short and see the charging stops and time taken, click ExpWithEVs Roadtrips. I’ve also created a playlist of short videos on my YouTube channel! Check it out when you can and give me some feedback!
You can also follow the live twitter thread of my journey here!
Status update :
I crossed the 20,000 km mark on my MG ZS EV on this trip, all in under 8 months. For context, my average driving prior to getting this car was around 5000 kms annually. I’m loving it!
Let’s Go :
Having done this route earlier, I knew I didn’t need any specific planning. Quick reading of the previous report helped tremendously - with the elevation profile and the list of chargers on the route.
I looked at Plugshare and saw that some CPOs have already started putting up chargers between Vadodara and Udaipur. Sushil from SunPedal ride too had topped up at one of these chargers, so I knew I could skip the Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar leg to save some precious time and make the trip more adventurous.
My last long trip was with my parents in the middle of the summer. This time, the pleasant weather meant low HVAC consumption. It also allowed for the possibility to cover the entirety of 350 kms between Vadodara and Udaipur with a 650m incline on a single charge.
My cousin, Raunaq, decided to join in on the trip. He works at Upstox and if you have the app, you may be familiar with some of his work. Raunaq is also a passionate roadtripper like me and was eager to experience his first EV roadtrip. Since I almost always drive solo, his company was a very welcome addition to the trip.
Unlike most of my previous roadtrips, I started this trip in the afternoon. This also allowed me to break the journey at Vadodara and Jaipur instead of the usual break at Udaipur. A break in a different city also meant that I was seeing more of the country! Having 2 night’s rest is way better than driving for two full days and having only a night’s rest. So starting late actually turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
The Vadodara - Gandhinagar - Udaipur route is at least 50 kms more than the direct
Vadodara - Godhra - Udaipur route.
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Disclosure : I am the co-founder of ActiveBuildings
Mumbai to Vadodara :
Our first overnight stay was going to be at Vadodara, where Raunaq would join me for the onward journey to Udaipur and beyond. This route is well supplied with charging points, almost every 60 km, so I did not need a specific charging plan. So I decided to charge based on the range estimate I had.
Getting out of Mumbai city on a Saturday afternoon is quite the challenge. It took me over one hour to get past the city crowd, which left me pretty exhausted. The car promises a 420 km range without AC on. Summers and monsoons are tough weather conditions in Mumbai to drive without AC on. Winters are the best bet to drive comfortably, so I was hellbent on extracting as many kms as I could from the battery. But unfortunately the city heat made me switch on the AC (alas no winter respite for Mumbaikars) and I had to reserve this experiment for a later segment of the journey.
On my way to Vadodara, I realized that I had been too reliant on the usual top CPOs - like Tata PEZC, Statiq and ChargeZone - on this route. There were plenty of new CPOs around, and I decided to test out how reliable their infrastructure is.
I ended up interacting with 7 new CPOs’ chargers. This brings us to the first new CPO that I tried out: Pure Energy EV.
I pulled in for a stretching break at Hotel Jalaram Kathiyawadi (Ambivali) after a drive of about 1.5h. There are at least a thousand Jalaram Kathiyawadi on this route and it is easy to get confused. So it is advisable to just use the location pin provided on PlugShare.
These hotels on the highways usually have someone or the other waving at you, persuading you to pull in and take a break at their restaurant. At most places, when they see a green number plate (EVs in India have green number plates, unlike ICE counterparts), they know that you are most likely pulling in for a charging session.
As soon as I pulled in, I realized that most of the charging spots were ICE’d. When charging parking spots are blocked by ICE cars, the charger is commonly referred to as being ICE’d. The hotel waveman was kind enough to cordon off a solitary parking spot for a total of 3 chargers that were installed here. The 3 charger setup is perfect as it has two separate DC FastChargers and one 7.4kW AC Charger. This allows for the third car to charge on AC even if two fast charging guns are occupied. But sadly here, the DC FC were CCS2 and ChaDeMo (which isn’t used by any car that is being sold in India). 2 CCS2 and 1 AC type 2 is all that is needed at not so heavily used charging locations.
No biggie, all three charging guns were accessible from where I had parked. The reviews on Plugshare were mixed, with PureEnergyEV team’s final review stating that the charger issue has been resolved and you can visit to charge the car. Great. Before reluctantly downloading another app on my phone, I asked the ‘waveman’ if he knew how to initiate charging without me having an app. I also asked him if he has a RFID key which I can use to initiate charging. He was, however, pretty clueless about the charger and it’s working.
Given that this was just a stretching break and not a charging stop, I didn’t bother to go in and enquire about this with multiple restaurants that are on site here. I downloaded the app on my iPhone. I was unable to sign up on the app. That was my cue to not waste any more time figuring out the charging situation here, so I quickly freshened up and made my way towards Vadodara.
(Update: As of writing this article, the iOS app now works and I am able to sign up. I haven’t had the chance to use it, so I can’t comment about the other aspects.)
Mumbai to Vadodara is around 420kms which is 100% range of the car, if driven with no AC and if there’s no significant incline. I was going to stay with a relative in Vadodara and their building didn’t have any 7.4kW slow charging options. I looked for nearby 7.4kW charging options and I couldn’t find any. Most slow chargers on PlugShare nearby were 3.3kW or a 15A socket. I would’ve loved to slow charge my car, given that I knew I had a bunch of fast charging sessions in store for me later during the trip. But I soon realized that fast charging was my only option: my car couldn’t charge fully with just 3.3kW overnight charging. PlugShare was needed again.
The charger right before (around 38 kms) Vadodara was at Kismat Kathiyawadi Karjan. Earlier it was an unbranded charger, but now it is operated by ChargeZone. And it was only 30kW. Didn’t make sense to go there because it would take a tleast 1h45m to get to 90%. I found a new CPO - MobiLane, which had a charger around 60kms from Vadodara city at Hotel Darshan, just after Bharuch. MobiLane had a 80kW dual gun CCS2 charger. It was highly unlikely that I may have to share the charging stall because the CPO is new and people prefer sticking to the chargers that they know work (I’d do the same!). The prospect of unleashing all the 80kW on my MoonLight was an exciting one. Also, Plugshare had 3-4 positive reviews and no negative reviews for this CPO, which is always a great sign.
Once I decided that I will charge here, I downloaded the app, signed up to figure out the payments / wallets system that they have. Turns out that the app had a booking system, which is great. A booking feature allows you to plan better. However, there’s a huge scope of improvement in the implementation of this feature. Drop in comments on how you feel booking slots should be handled! (My opinion: There should be a penalty for not showing up at the booked time. Incase someone else reaches the charger, then you should be allowed to charge till the time “booked” person shows up and pushes a button on the app that disconnects the charging session.)
I pulled in the station, which was clearly visible from afar. I had my slot booked, but I arrived a few minutes early. The UX was slightly confusing so it took me a while to initiate charging. I had to even call up the helpline number mentioned on the charger to ask them about the booking. They advised me to cancel the booking, do a fresh booking and initiate charging. But the issue with doing a fresh booking was that you could initiate charging only in 15 min slots. So, if you’ve arrived at 19:34h, you need to wait till 1945h to start charging. How pointless! I didn’t want to waste my time, so I decided to cancel the booking and initiate charging directly. I had to scan the QR code present on the charger and then proceed with the process. Funny thing, the charger had multiple QR codes - one each on the sides for the guns and one on the charging screen itself. I scanned the one on the screen, which was the incorrect one. The charger was provided by Anchor by Panasonic, which is a new Charger OEM that I’ve encountered. I had to scan the QR code on the gun and not the screen. The QR code sends a string of json code {"QRCode":"HDGJDC009_2","ConnectorSequenceId":2} basically identifying the location and the gun number. Fair enough, but I also don’t like to give camera permissions to every other app on my phone.
The car peaked at around 52kW. I assume some of the new MG ZS EVs are current limited to around 130A for the 400V architecture. The charger could theoretically supply upto 80kW ie around 200A at 400V. There are users in pan India ZS groups who have managed to get around 60kW with current peaking at around 150A.
The CPO was running a promotion, thus the charging was free of cost. Hence it didn’t prompt me to add any money at the time of booking the slot. Otherwise I would be expected to top up the wallet while booking the slot.
The charger was newly installed. But its setup and layout were all so similar to the ChargeZone charger at Chikhli that I used in my last Delhi trip in 2022, that I had to ask the hotel manager if they had abandoned the ChargeZone charger and shifted to MobiLane! They laughed me off and assured me that this was the first time a charger was installed here and in fact it was made operational just a few days ago. Like Chikhli, the food here was great, priced very reasonably and had clean bathrooms. Didn’t need anything more!
I had no idea if I would be able to slow charge my car overnight at the relative’s place, with or without my 30m extension cable. So I decided to charge as high as possible at the fast charger. I would have to fast charge it anyway because I wanted to leave with as much charge as possible the next day towards Udaipur. I eventually left at 98% SoC.
After reaching Vadodara, I went to pick up Raunaq from the railway station. In the building where I was staying, we eventually managed to find a 15A socket in the meter room and I slow charged my car overnight. I was glad that I could leave with a full charge for Udaipur.
Vadodara - Udaipur :
Vadodara-Udaipur is around 340 kms with a 500m incline. Until a few months ago, there were no chargers on this route. As of today, there are at least 4 chargers, of which 2 are definitely working. I knew that today was the day when I could extract the maximum out of the battery. But there was another issue on hand: I had an inexperienced EV driver in Raunaq with me. Given the scarcity of the chargers on this route, it was possible that we could’ve been stranded here if we drove suboptimally. But there are chargers which are just outside and to the south of Udaipur, which could also probably save the day for us.
The route that I took this time was Vadodara - Halol - Godhra - Modasa - Shamalji - Bhiwali - Gurman - Udaipur. The drive from Vadodara to Shamalji is on state highways (yay, no toll!) and you get back on the Golden Quadrilateral near Shamalji. The GQ route takes you all the way to Delhi.
Halol is the birthplace of MoonLight. It has a pretty big MG’s manufacturing plant and the highway runs through these huge manufacturing setups on both sides of the road. It is a pity that MG doesn’t have a charging station at their factory. We stopped at the factory and took a photo!
We passed by Godhra and crossed the Mahi river. It was calming to just sit and watch the water flow. Also the north and south approach roads towards Udaipur are pretty scenic and the Aravalli hills definitely have a huge role to play.
Several chargers have come up on this route in the past couple of months. There was a slow charging option at Modasa, two fast chargers just before Shamalji and then two more just after you cross into Rajasthan from Shamalji. To get to the slow charger at Modasa, we would have to get off the State Highway 145 and enter the city, which we were not at all inclined to do. But if you are low on charge, you atleast have an option to slow charge your car. To get to MobiLane / Yo Charge’s chargers just before Shamalji, you need to get off SH145 and get on SH57. And then you have HPCL’s fast chargers as soon as you cross into Rajasthan on the Golden Quadrilateral route.
The first 100 kms were a smooth drive with our mileage hovering above 8km/kwh. From my past trip and multiple Mumbai-Pune trips, I had realized that a ~500m incline usually costs 10%-12% of the battery pack in an MG ZS EV 2022. So from 420 kms, we were already working with a lower estimated range of around 370-375 kms. Now the actual elevation difference was around 650m, which is 30% more. Thus the estimated range drop would be around 15%,, which meant that the actual range is around 352 kms. The Google maps distance between Vadodara and Udaipur is roughly 337 kms. So, if I was able to extract around 350 kms from the battery, it would mean that we drove the car efficiently.
I drove for the first 100 kms and then Raunaq took over to get us to the GQ. The efficiency in the first 100 kms was hovering at around 8.5 km / kwh, which was slightly better than expected, translating into a real world range of around 425 kms. Then Raunaq took over and it took some time to get used to the EV driving style.
We were constantly checking the difference between the distance to Udaipur and the estimated range left in the car. By the time we were close to the 4 chargers near Shamalji, our delta (car’s estimated range - destination distance on google) had shrunk to around 15 kms. This meant that we would have to bail out before reaching the city and do a quick top up to reach Udaipur.
By the time we navigated to Yo Charge’s charger on the maps, we realized we had taken the other route and would be joining the Golden Quadrilateral leaving the charger behind, towards Ahmedabad. Thus we couldn’t go to that charger. No biggie, we knew that there were two more HPCL chargers, one on each side of the road, to stop and charge the car. We reached the one on our side and it was switched off. There was absolutely no one around, nor was there any signage on how to use the chargers. The company put little to no effort in allowing consumers to use those chargers. I was saddened by this, so I put a review on PlugShare and as of writing this blogpost the status of the charger is “Under Repairs”.
We had two options. We could either soldier on towards Udaipur, or find a u-turn, get to Yo Charge’s charger, juice up a bit and then head to Udaipur. We decided to head to Udaipur directly because we had a decent buffer and we could bail out before we got to the city at Czar Palace, Udaipur or HPCL Kamal Tata Power chargers.
When we got on the GQ, we faced our first toll for the day. Usually, before trips, I recharge my IDBI bank issued Park+ Fastag (comes with MG via their partnership) with at least INR 1000, depending on the distance I would be travelling. I had forgotten to do so before starting the trip, but luckily I had enough balance in the fasttag to get to Vadodara. Before leaving from Vadodara, I topped up my fasttag via BHIM UPI app, which is my preferred way to top up because PhonePe has started charging fees on fasttag top-ups. Almost all the time, I get an SMS within an hour or so saying that the money has been deducted and the fasttag wallet has been recharged. I didn’t get it this time. I figured that it wasn’t a big deal and I would get it sooner or later. I forgot about the recharge situation till we hit the toll in Rajasthan because Gujarat state highways don’t have any toll. My fasttag was shown as blacklisted.
I showed the operator that I had tried putting in money in the morning and it hadn’t reflected in the account. The operator didn’t budge. Fair point. I tried recharging infront of him, but no result. He advised us to drive the wrong way for under a few hundred meters to a “fasttag guy” and he would help us resolve the issue. The guy checked the status of our fasttag on the website and it showed that the card was blacklisted. He asked me to download the Park+ app to check the status there. Same result. He asked me to recharge the app via Park+ and that somehow worked. The rest of the money also got credited to my Fasttag account over 2-3 days.
In June 2022, Udaipur only had Tata PEZC fast chargers. But this time around, there were two fast chargers by Statiq in Celebrations Mall, Udaipur. Each fast charger was capable of outputting around 60-80kW. Perfect. We needed a stop of around 1h to charge the car at max possible speed. We could freshen up in the mall washroom, plus eat at the foodcourt. There was one positive review and one negative review on PlugShare. On the Statiq app, the charger was shown as “Available”. We decided to take our chances. We pulled in at the charger, asked the mall parking folks about the location of the charger. We were asked to go to the basement B2. The mall security told us that the charger is not working and no one has been able to successfully charge there yet. That was kind of a bummer. We had 2% SoC with a range of 6kms. We were definitely not getting out of the mall before we could get some charge.
We started trying to get the charger to work. Given that it was the basement, our network was spotty. But between the two of us, we had all three networks. Airtel worked best there. (insert video from the drive) One of the two chargers was faulted. So we connected the other one and tried to initiate charging.
Side quib - If there are multiple chargers from the same vendor / if there are multiple charging guns from the same charger, please, please, label which gun is which on your app. Otherwise, the usual protocol that I follow is, if there’s a gun to the left, then that’s number 1 and to the right is number 2.
We tried to initiate charging a couple of times but it didn’t work. So back to basics debugging. We pulled the emergency button on both the chargers, pushed it back and let it restart. The charger only had three LED indicators on the side and no other screen. Almost all chargers have some sort of screen showing what is happening. There is one LED for power, one LED to show that it is connected to the internet and one LED for any kinds of faults.
The first charger took 3-4 mins to connect to the internet and glow the blue LED which meant that it was successfully connected to the internet. The other charger immediately went on a faulty state after being switched on for a few mins. So we had no hope from the second one. We connected the charging gun to the car again and tried to initiate charging. It failed and the charger faulted to red. After this failed attempt at basic debugging, I dialled the helpline numbers for Statiq.
Statiq also has a whatsapp support helpline, but they are rarely responsive on that. Best support one can get is by calling them. The company could see that the charger is online on the backend and it had faulted due to some reason which wasn’t shared with me. They asked me to try the above steps again, which I told them that I already did. After that, I was told to open the electrical panel and trip the 3 phases of the charger. I did that, tripped it back up, which restarted the chargers. On the instruction of the Statiq team, I connected the gun when they asked me to, I initiated charging from the app when they asked me to, and the car finally started charging.
This entire thing took about 15 mins to resolve, but I was happy to hear the fans blowing in the charger. Now we could head up to the mall and finally get some well deserved late lunch. None of the other chargers (read Tata PEZC) in Udaipur are at a mall. Having a charger at a mall allows one to freshen up easily. The chargers are located either near the railway station or in the market area, which is good for everyday use, but in my book as a long distance driver, mall charging is a tad bit better.
After a good 1h30m break at the mall and with our car and tummies full, we proceeded to the next destination. We had started at around 9 am from Vadodara and it was already dusk by the time we left Udaipur. We preferred to not do a lot of night driving, but we also had enough energy to continue driving for a few more hours. We wanted our morning drive from wherever we stopped to Delhi to not be more than 5h the next day, giving us enough time to chill in Delhi.
Udaipur - Kishangarh :
We started evaluating our options. Neither of us had visited Pushkar, so that was high on the list. We checked on PlugShare and couldn’t find a solid / definite charging option there. We tried calling a bunch of hostels and asked them if they would be open to us slow charging our car with our 30m extension cable. None of the responses were really promising. Most of them would either say no or say that they’d figure it out once we got there. There is a clear lack of education among the hospitality industry, but hopefully in the coming years, they’d offer charging points as an amenity in hotels.
We relooked at the map and saw that going to both Ajmer and Pushkar meant that we’d have to take a slight detour, further away from Delhi, relative to where we were. We decided to not take any detours and rely on whatever the highways had to offer. Based on these calculations, an AC slow charger by Xobolt at Dudu would be great. We called up the hotel where the charger was installed and were told that the charger is no longer on site and asked us to fast charge at nearby fast chargers instead. Fail.
We’d have gotten to Dudu with a sub 15% SoC and we didn’t have enough juice to stretch it to Jaipur. Plus we were hungry. We decided to charge at Hotel Royal Amar in Kishangarh. I already had the Xobolt app but was getting an opportunity to use it for the first time.
I checked out the app and it had a booking feature. Great. I decided to book a charging slot based on my estimated time of arrival. Before booking the slot, it asked me to top up the wallet. Cringe, but fine. I added INR 500 to the wallet. I decided to book for ~45 mins, which would have given me more than enough charge to get to Jaipur. Get this, the app charged me for booking a slot. INR 1 per min and deducted INR 45 from my wallet. Weird. The founder of Xobolt, Mr. Yogesh is active in the EV communities, so I texted him about this. He said that this is a feature that they are doing away with and he will process the refund for my INR 45. No refund as of writing this article, but good to know that they are doing away with this system. Charging upfront to book a slot is alright, as long as you get it back as credits while charging. That wasn’t the case here.
Now that the charging slot was booked, we decided to look for food. Given that the charger was at a hotel, we were confident that we should be able to get food. Our estimated time of arrival was 22:49. We called the hotel. The hotel was pretty adamant that the last order will be placed only by 22:45 and not any further. We pleaded with them to wait for 4 mins, but they wanted to stick to their rules. Luckily for us, the maps had estimated a longer u turn than what was needed and we ended up reaching the charger at 22:43. Raunaq rushed in to place the food order and I began initiating charging. Another family came in to order some coffee, while we were finishing up our dinner. The hotel didn’t serve them.
The charging started in one go. The charger stops as soon as your wallet balance goes negative. Thus ensure that you have enough wallet balance before you initiate charge here. P.S. : The food was too oily, but it was definitely tasty.
Jaipur - Shahpura :
We were staying in Mansoravar area of Jaipur. We had a nice pyaaz kachori breakfast and made our way to Delhi. Jaipur to Delhi also has plenty of chargers. I started looking for CPOs that I had not used earlier and had a minimum of 50kW charging facility. StartEV stood out at Shahpur. Previously, on this route, I had stopped at another Highway King at Behror. This one was at Shahpur. I guess what Kismat Kathiyawadi is to Gujarat, Highway King is to Rajasthan. Just too many of them. I decided to download the app and sign up before we got there. I had to check and figure out if there was any booking system plus understand what the current state of the charger was. I was neither able to load money into the wallet nor see the chargers on my iPhone app. Sigh.
We pulled in at the charger and saw that there was also a single gun Statiq charger here. Always good to have options at the chargers. Someone’s new Nexon was being charged there. Luckily there was no car at the StartEV charger. I tried doing the same thing again. Someone saw me struggle and came to help. He said he represented StartEV Charging company. This is the first time I was meeting someone from the CPO on site to help passengers. His name was Mr. Vinod.
I told him that I am unable to add money or charge my car using the app on my iPhone. He acknowledged and said that the iPhone has an issue and would hopefully be resolved in a few days. He loaded up the app on his phone and asked me to sign in. I reluctantly signed in and I could see the charger location on the app. He asked me to load money into the wallet so that he could initiate charging. Once the charging was initiated, he promptly logged me out from his phone and asked me to check the status on my phone. I could see that the car was charging.
I was glad that Mr. Vinod was there to help us out. I was very surprised that a CPO could afford to keep someone at the charger to help people out. I probed him a bit and understood that the CPO has a big solar panel setup at the charger. His main job was to take care of the panels and ensure that they are cleaned weekly. He was kind enough to show us around the solar charging setup that StartEV has. Of the 4 sets of panels, one panel had produced over 100 GWh over the lifetime! He may have other jobs that he is doing for the CPO, but taking care of the solar panels was his primary job. This shows that solar panel installers can now have a separate line of business that they can enter, especially if their installations are all along the highways.
I also got an opportunity to check out the ventilated seats in the Nexon that was being charged at the Statiq charger. Because of switching on the ventilated seats, the charging session was interrupted. I am sorry about that, fellow EV traveller! But honestly, Tata needs to fix such issues.
The rest of the drive was uneventful except for the traffic in Delhi. I was being put up at my friend’s house in Sarita Vihar area, in a RWA (Resident’s Welfare Association) / housing colony with no fixed parking. This proved to be a challenge because my hopes of overnight slow charging the car didn’t materialize. But more on that in the next post!
I’ll continue my Delhi adventures and the trip back to Mumbai in the next post. It was an eventful one!
Summary and learnings :
Try new CPOs at your own risk. Go deep at your own risk.
Only 1 out of the 6 new CPOs I visited had a hassle free experience. I was unable to charge at 2 locations. 6 visited, 4 working, needed help to get started at 3.
Vadodara to Udaipur in one stretch is a risky option. Don’t miss the State highway exit for YoCharge / MobiLane charger on the Gujarat side. You definitely don’t need to go to Udaipur via Ahmedabad anymore.
Trips are difficult without Tata PEZC. Tata still rules the charging infra space.
Read PlugShare reviews and submit PlugShare reviews so that everyone can benefit from it.
Having a person to help out with the charger is a boon, even for experienced travellers like myself.
Here are the final numbers from the trip :
The total cost of charging was lower than my June trip. It is because of free charging at MobiLane’s charger and lower number of charging sessions. Total kWh consumed is also 23% lower.
Article written by : Priyans Murarka
Data collected by : Priyans Murarka
Edited by : Ankita Barthwal
Map Visualization by : Siddharth Agarwal
This piece can be re-published (CC BY-NC-SA) with a line mentioning ‘This was originally published on ExpWithEVs Substack’ and a link back to this page. In case of re-publishing, please alert priyansevs@gmail.com.