On 26th December 2020, I started a road trip from Mumbai to Goa and returned a few days later. I drove a Kona EV, which worked flawlessly and it was absolutely joyful trip.
Charging
We charged the car at Pune and Kolhapur. In the onward journey, we fast charged using TATA power network charger at Tata Motors Cars Service Centre – Bafna Motors, Tathawade. When we arrived, we had to wait for thirty minutes for another car to finish charging. Afterwards, we could not activate the charger via Tata App. The security staff at the service center overrode the charger controls and activated the charger. Our Kona was charged at the rate of 20Kw. We had to stop for one hour to charge up to 94%. Meanwhile, we had lunch at a near by Subway. We drove to Kolhapur immediately afterwards. We arrived at the next fast charger at 6pm with 30% charge. It is located in MG showroom in, Shiroli. We plugged our car for 1 hour and brought the car at 80% SOC. Here, TATA app worked flawlessly.
We camped in Kolhapur for overnight in a hotel, which happily allowed me to charge for the next 20% using Kona portable charger. I managed to charge to 100%. We started again in the morning and arrived at Goa Grand Hyatt by 1pm. Again the resort allowed me to charge. They had electric buggies. So they had parking places to charge vehicles. During my whole stay, their security kept interrupting me for going to the charging spot, since guests are not allowed to see the underbelly of the resort. We did tourism for a couple of days. We had comfortable time in Goa without thinking about the range anxiety.
In our return trip, we started with 100% SOC in the afternoon. We arrived at Kolhapur by dinner time and decided to charge slowly at the hotel. While we slept, the car was charged to 95% in thirteen hours. We launched towards Pune and reached there at noon with 26% SOC. We charged at Croma, Aundh charger of TATA. The parking next to the charger was nicely reserved. The app and charger worked flawlessly.
Charging spot at Croma, Aundh, Pune 
Car being charged
We charged up to 93% SOC and left for Mumbai.
Range
Our drive segments were as follows
- Mumbai-Pune 140Kms (1+ hour break before next segment)
- Pune-Kolhapur 245Kms (overnight stay)
- Kolhapur-Goa via Amboli 210Kms
Kona gave mileage of about 9.0-9.5km/kwh on the highway. I only overtake slow moving trucks and keep my speed around 80km/h. If one does aggressive driving the mileage can fall below 8km/kwh. Since the car has 39.2kwh battery, the above distances could be covered comfortably. Additionally, one needs to worry about the ghats in Mumbai-Goa trip, since Mumbai and Goa are at sea level, and Kolhapur and Pune are at elevated position. We had ghat climb/descent in Mumbai-Pune and Kolhapur-Goa segments. The ghats have about 700m elevation difference, which is gained in about 20km drive distance. We observed that on the ghats the car mileage dropped to 3km/kwh. If we calculate, we find that in climbing ghat we loose about 40-50kms of extra range, which is significant in planning a trip. On the other hand descent on the ghat is free and we gain charge of 6kms. On descent, we gain boost of 20-25kms of range. We observed similar numbers in both the ghats in Mumbai-Pune and Kolhapur-Goa. Cars such as Nexon EV, which has shorter range, needs to be extra careful before planning such trips. It would be great to see the equivalent numbers for Nexon.
BMS update
There had been Battery software update recall in Kona, which was applied to our car on 2nd December. There had been reports of Konas being bricked after the update. There was no issue in my car. It has been working without any error message. We fast charged three times during the trip without any issues.
Charging networks
The thing to notice is that Hyundai is not supporting charging infrastructure. I had called Hyundai before the trip and asked for charging at Hyundai dealerships as backups for the above plan. Hyundai ignored my requests and I never received positive callbacks. It is clear that TATA and MG motors are collaborating in building the charging network. It appears that Hyundai is unfortunately missing from this effort.
I am very thankful to TATA for setting up the charging network and allowing all cars to be charged there. They are currently running the charging for free, which I think it is a bad idea. They should charge appropriately for their services. (Update March 2021: now TATA chargers are paid!) I would prefer paid reliable service than free “bhagwan bharose” service. TATA app has some issues for example it showed a free charger busy, and estimated wrong charging time in the app while the charger showed the correct value.
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