Charge Around The Globe – on the road with a Ford engineer

On every leg of Charge Around The Globe, Lexie Alford (@LexieLimitless) and our Ford Explorer are joined by one of our Ford engineers to ensure the smooth running of the vehicle. In Africa, that job fell to Daniel Kottner, the Cologne-based launch engineer for the new European electric vehicle.

While it’s some way out of his usual day-to-day job, Daniel clearly appreciated seeing the Explorer in such a tough, real-world environment, with numerous elephants and monkeys for company. Here are his thoughts on the road and weather conditions and how they dealt with charging the Explorer through South Africa and Zimbabwe. 

Road conditions

“Only two tyres were damaged over the entire trip, most likely on the same stretch of gravel road to our hotel in Kroonstad. Both were rears, and we were lucky to have enough spares with us. The car has 20-inch wheels with low profile tyres, so it is quite impressive how well it handled the offroad driving during the safari, as well as the gravel road detours in Zimbabwe. Everything else on the car was fine. No electrical faults were reported. Funnily enough, the support vehicles in Zimbabwe had more faults; we fixed the air-conditioning on a pickup where the connector was disconnected from the blower switch, the tail lamps on a truck as it had the wrong bulbs fitted and blew a fuse, and the truck for our luggage whose starter motor solenoid stuck and wouldn’t start after a short stop for filming.”

 

Weather

“The weather was about as warm as you would expect in a European summer (a maximum of around 30 degrees Celsius) and the car handled that very well. Range was pretty good too, especially as the car was driven like a normal customer would, so there was no hypermiling and we were travelling at the speed limit of 120 kph for most of the time. Also, many comfort systems were running like air-conditioning, heated seats, heated steering wheel and infotainment with Apple CarPlay.” 

 

Charging 

“Charging went well for the most part, however South Africa and Zimbabwe both do load shedding, during which parts of the grid will be deactivated. South Africa announces these power cuts in advance, Zimbabwe does them randomly. 

 

South Africa’s charging infrastructure was very good in general. On two occasions we were a bit disappointed with charging speed, as both were DC chargers at ‘only’ 15 KW. This is still ten times the speed of charging at a normal household outlet so would be able to recharge the battery in about five hours. 

During one charging stop at the end of the day in Beaufort West, the power was cut. After the power came back on, the charging station was broken, most likely due to the sudden loss of power. We had to charge at the hotel using our mobile wall box connected to a household outlet. Unfortunately, the connector was apparently not inserted properly -  or someone might have tripped over the wire - and as a result we had issues with the charge port lock not working properly, meaning it entered emergency charging mode with less than 1 KW. We quickly found a way to reset that but we still had to charge the car earlier than originally planned on the next day. 

 

We learned from this though and after that we always waited until after load shedding was done for future charging stops.  Charging at the game lodge in the middle of nowhere was also done using the mobile wall box, however even then there was a fast charger only 20 minutes and less than 20 kilometres away.

 

Charging in Zimbabwe was only done using the mobile wall box at 1.5-2.5 KW, depending on the fuse for the household outlet. This worked very well, although it took a lot of time. Everywhere, hotel staff was very accommodating and supportive, so charging the car at hotels was easy to do as well.

 

I personally enjoyed both travelling the country as well as working with the team. Due to the car running that well I think I had the easiest job there by far.”

 

Lexie and the Explorer are now heading to Australia, while Daniel is back home in Germany. Follow the epic #ChargeAroundTheGlobe adventure on Ford News Europe's Instagram, TikTok,  X, and YouTube as well as at Lexie’s Instagram and YouTube.

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