While we were advised that our Atto 3 would be ready by Friday September 9, commitments in Gayndah meant that we were unable to travel to Brisbane until Thursday 15 for delivery on Friday 16. So we did that.
The plan was to drive our ICE car to Gympie on Thursday morning, catch the mid-day Tilt Train to Brisbane arriving at Roma St at around 3pm. We left home at 8.30am because we had a couple of things to do in Gympie. First we dropped Noah’s guitar off to Michael Palm for repair and then went out to Lee Turner’s place of business to pick up some equipment we had left for repair a month or two earlier.
We were back at the station by 11.30 to catch the mid-day train. But as is often the case, it was not a mid-day train. It was forty-five minutes late. No worries, made it to Brisbane, still forty-five minutes late.
QLD Rail very generously gives passengers with a ticket on the Tilt Train one free ticket on the suburban trains so we were able to take a train out to Indooroopilly where our accommodation was “within 700m of the train station”. It didn’t turn out to be exactly true but after much walking and gnashing of teeth we found the motel (3 star if we were lucky – it didn’t even have power points in the bedroom) and deposited of luggage.
The Shopping centre was a “short 700m walk” from our motel and made it back to the Shopping Centre to make contact with the BYD people.
Not sure whether they were expecting us as we had arranged with the “Customer Care” people more that a week earlier, but things settled down and I was able to speak with the BYD manager to explain the poor service I felt we had received from the company in Sydney. He was very good about it all and asked me to put my complaints in writing so he could pass that on to other managers. So I did that.
We walked back to the motel after some Chinese in the food court and worked out that, all in all, we had walked 6.6Ks that day much of it trying to find out motel.
We had planned to walk back to the shopping centre on Friday morning and break our fast, probably at McDonalds. However it was raining so we decided to get an UBER. So did everybody else in Brisbane and we waited almost 30 minutes for a car to pick us up.
We arrived in time to have breakfast at McDonalds and make it to the AutoMall which is on the third floor of the shopping centre. What a place, a shopping centre no less, to buy all sorts of motor vehicles, including BYD.
After a bit of form filling and talking, William (they don’t call them salesmen any more I think) took us up to the fifth floor parking lot where our car was waiting for us. In the mean time, they had managed to get our personalised number plates attached to the car. However, no red bow on the bonnet of our car, which suited me. The car in the next spot had one though, but it was much more expensive than ours. I guess that explains it.
William placed the blue “EV” stickers on the number plates and then went on to explain about the car. We asked him to tell us just enough so that we could drive out of Brisbane and get home to Gayndah. I drove to Gympie (2.5 hours from Indooroopilly) where we went out to the Railway station to pick up the ICE car. We were pleased that no one had wanted to damage the vehicle overnight. Lorraine drove that one back into town where we bought some lunch and prepared to do out first charging.
We had to line up behind a Tesla Model 3 and an Ioniq 5 which was a bit of a disappointment but it was good to talk to the owners of the vehicles and they explained the intricacies of plugging in and charging. We had 50% state of charge and we were not sure if we could get back to Gayndah on that much so we decided to stay and charge to 70%. That only took fifteen minutes and we were on our way. I drove to Kilkivan while Lorraine drove the Territory and we changed there for the hour and a bit drive to Gayndah.
We made it home by 4pm very pleased with the way the car drove and with lots to learn about it all. It turns out that we could have made it home without charging at Gympie but looking back, having only 7% battery left on the first trip may have been a bit hair raising.
We were both quite pleased with the way the car did its job. We found it difficult to keep that car at a constant 100kph but that probably won’t be a problem once we work out how to use the cruise control. We plugged the car in with the granny lead when we got home and it went from 27% to 75% SOC overnight.
