From Silicon Valley to the Alps: 3,000 miles in a Lumina GT

I collected the Lumina GT from the Palo Alto showroom on a Tuesday and shipped it to Southampton eleven days later. The plan was to drive it to Zermatt. Several people I respect told me this was a bad idea, and their reasoning was always the same: the charging will ruin it.

The Lumina GT above Zermatt, at the end of the fourth day

The part everyone warns you about

Forty-one stops across nine days. The shortest was six minutes, at a 350 kW station outside Reims, because I only needed enough to reach the hotel. The longest was fifty minutes in a village near Besançon where the only working charger was a 22 kW unit behind a supermarket. That one was genuinely annoying.

What nobody mentions is that the average stop was nineteen minutes, and that nineteen minutes is roughly how long it takes to use a bathroom and drink a coffee. I stopped planning around charging somewhere in eastern France and simply drove until I wanted to stop.

The silence climbing out of Martigny was the thing I was not prepared for. You hear the tyres, the wind, and nothing else. I pulled over twice just to sit in it.

Where the car surprised me

Neural Drive adapts to how you take a corner, and on the Alpine passes that became obvious. By the third hairpin sequence the regenerative braking had shifted its bias and I stopped reaching for the pedal. It is a small thing and it changed the entire character of the descent.

Range held up better than the projection. ELECTRA quotes 450 miles and I saw 412 in mixed conditions with two passengers and a full boot, which is close enough that the difference never mattered. Cold morning starts cost about eight per cent until the pack warmed.

Where it did not

The route planner is confident to a fault. Twice it sent me to stations that were occupied with no queue estimate, and once to one that had been decommissioned. A car that knows this much about the road should know which chargers are free. ELECTRA tells me live availability is coming; it should have shipped first.

I expected the trip to be a test of the car and it turned into a test of my assumptions. Range anxiety, it turns out, is mostly a planning problem, and planning is the thing software is good at. Nine days, 3,000 miles, and the only real complaint I have is about a map layer.