DS Automobiles No 8 - long-term review

Interesting commentary on just how much electric car batteries are affected by ambient temperatures, but just as we started to get a 400-mile reading on the guess-o-meter for the No.8’s range, it’s dropped back to 362 while temps have been in the high teens. But that’s probably more to do with single-digit temps overnight more than anything else.

Still, the DS manages 320-330 miles of absolute real-world no matter what the temperature or electronic load, and that’s been working very well for me. What’s not been working so well is my home charger, which has bricked itself - wonky workings followed by digital death. Inconvenient. And the DS doesn’t come with a granny charger, probably because charging a 97.2kWh battery from the ground up takes approximately a human lifetime on a three-pin (50+hours), so it’s only useful if you need topping off. A new charger is on the way.

But enough of my charger challenges and more about the DS. We’ve been really running though the miles, well past 13k now. This month we’ve been to several different far-away places like London, Leeds, Winchester, Oxford and Manchester, as well as Blackpool. None of which strictly required any kind of visit to a public charger. Don’t forget, that’s a real cost saving; public charging is currently set at levels which make your wallet shrivel.

According to price indexes for rapid charging, you’re looking at up to 92 pence per kWh. Filling up the No.8 from 10 to 80 per cent (68.04kWh) would cost £62.50. Considering home charging would be averagely 26.2p per kWh - a fill-up cost of £17.80 (without taking into account smart tariffs), that’s … bad.

Prices change whether or not you have a subscription and the type of charger, but top end it’s 92p for suppliers like Instavolt, with some as low as 59. Average is 77 pence, with the open-to-all Tesla Superchargers at 63p, but 43p for Tesla owners. So a little win for the SuperCharger network there. I actually used a SuperCharger at a Winchester location this week, and it was very good.

The trip to Blackpool was probably more amusing though. The No.8 and I were due at the Tractor Pulling Euro Finals, an event stuffed with machines running many thousands of horsepower, often via multiple turbos and massive engines. Diesel, methanol and high-octane are the fuel choices, sometimes running though multiple V8s, Griffon aero engines or turbo V12s. In one case, aviation fuel and four helicopter turbines.

Rolling into the paddock to meet up with ‘our’ team Just Smokey, the No.8 got some very judgy glances. And a fair bit of interest - mainly about the styling and whether it could be made to work in terms of range. Farmers may like their horsepower raw, but they aren’t daft, so the running costs of EV were definitely of interest - maybe not for tractors, but possibly for inter-farmland commuting.

Electric pickup that just spends it’s life checking fences and chucking bales about, then returns to the same shed every night for charging? It’s not as daft an idea as you might think.

But the DS just works for long drives. It’s very comfy, has massaging seats, does the miles without fuss. Ok, so since the great re-boot of Service Time, the Apple CarPlay now no longer works wirelessly and you have to use a cable, but as this test has gone on, I’ve actually started to really appreciate what the DS is good at. And the fact that it’s a conversation starter in every environment.