Jag Diary 7: I-Pace Over 100

That’s over a hundred kilometers of course, which it took three days to achieve.

1. I’m enjoying learning how to deploy that electric-Jag power gracefully. Yeah, you can floor it, which is shocking if brutish fun and might damage your neck vertebrae. But you know what’s way sweeter? Coming out of a corner, or around a slower car, and easing the accelerator down, and then further and further down, smoothly. You can’t do this for more than a few seconds without being in seriously unlawful territory anywhere this side of the Autobahn, but oh my goodness those are really very pleasing seconds; the pool of acceleration is bottomless.

2. I’ve had two charging experiences so far (haven’t needed any, just trying to learn the ropes), both from ChargePoint, both perfectly smooth. You plug in the big heavy connector, fire up the app, hold your phone up to the machine, and away it goes.

   But I’m glad I’m going to have my own charger before the month is over, because the “fast” chargers like the one illustrated here are in demand and not well maintained; of the two in the picture, one is out of order and apparently has been for a couple of months


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Above, charging in progress; below, another angle. The black box at the right below is supporting infrastructure; the label on the side says 80A worth of 3-cycle power.

3. There’ve been stories of people having trouble getting their I-Paces to connect to one charger model or another, but I’ve had none on two out of two experiences. The “fast charger” took me from 86% to 96% full in a half-hour. (That’s 11.26 kWh, or almost exactly one Canadian dollar’s worth at residential rates.) This is not as lame as it sounds, because the charging speed declines as the battery fills up, notably slowing down past 80%. Thus, when on a road trip, it’s considered to be smart and courteous, at a roadside fast-charger, to unplug and go at 80%.

4. The turning radius is large, bigger than our old Honda van’s. Maybe something to do with the wheels being pushed out to the corners? This is particularly annoying because any fool can get into the rhythm of jamming a shift-stick back and forth between Drive/1st and R while three-pointing on a narrow street, but my fingers are nowhere near learning how to hit the Jag’s D and R buttons without looking.



5. I’m dealing with angst about the seat position; it’s a paradox-of-choice problem, there are just too many controls. I may have to go all engineer and take a systematic approach, making one change at a time on one lever at a time. I should be clear that it’s a fabulously comfortable seat, it’s just that I can’t prove it couldn’t be better.

6. The “Park Assist” feature, which has two dedicated buttons, doesn’t work. It’s not just me, I asked my peers and everyone agrees that yeah, it’s just broken. Shame on Jaguar, other modern cars get this right. I wonder if it can be fixed in software?

7. In fact, it’s a good thing that the I-Pace is so much fun to drive, because it’s generally a pain in the ass to park. The visibility through the tiny dim near-horizontal back window is laughable, the rear-view camera is a little laggy (great picture though), and the car is wide. I’m sure I’ll figure out a way to curve into place, reasonably close to and parallel to the curb, but I haven’t yet.

8. Driving my fossil car to work was dumb and this one being electric doesn’t change that. Parking is still expensive, as are the L2 chargers in Vancouver office-building basements.