By Marie-Louise Arnfast
While range anxiety and charging stress may still be putting a damper on the desire to replace the internal combustion engine with a battery, Kristian Breitenbauch set out to prove that it’s easily possible to achieve long and comfortable drives on electricity. Even in the Arctic cold.
“It takes a bit more planning but, except for that, you get the same amount of comfort on long rides in an EV that you would be used to in cars running on petrol and diesel,” says Kristian Breitenbauch.
As managing director of Advansor, which makes sustainable cooling and heating systems, he is squarely focused on climate-friendly solutions. That’s also why he drives an electric car. And in January 2022 he set out to put a brand new one – a BMW iX – to the test. His aim was to get to the outer reaches of Finnmark in Norway and back down again to Denmark in 4 days. A quick zip of 3,600 kilometres with temperatures dipping to minus 26 degrees Celsius.
“The trip went smoothly. There’s an extensive network of charging stations across both Denmark, Sweden and Norway, and with the help of a route planning app it’s easy to plan your trip. The only challenge is that the payment systems haven’t yet been standardised, so you need to have several different RFID cards. But the EU is introducing regulation that would make it possible to pay across operators and platforms, just as with mobile phones,” he says.
Despite freezing temperatures in Lapland, at no point did he have to turn down the heating in the cabin, driving wheel or seats of the car. Only the windscreen washer fluid froze up at the northernmost latitudes and had to be replaced with a different type.
More time and less smell
The environmental benefits of switching to an electric car are obvious. But Kristian Breitenbauch sees other plusses too.
“I always have a fully charged car when I get up in the morning and spend far less time at service stations compared to what I did driving a diesel car. And I am never arriving with fingers smelling of diesel,” he chuckles.
Published May 2022 in Nordic Business Magazine