In the outside lane, you can be cornering at 33deg from the horizontal, at a ‘neutral’ steering speed (the one at which the car would steer itself around the bend) of 86mph.
Set the cruise control to 90mph, then, and just let about 30 to 45 minutes fly by the window: that will usually do it. What I tend to do, however, saves some time. It’s an abuse test, I suppose.
Sitting in lane four, I go through the heart of each bend at about 90mph, then accelerate hard up to 130mph along each straight (or as close to that as I can get), braking hard enough at each straight’s end to shed most of the car’s speed using the friction brakes.
This is not only a very efficient way of burning through charge but also must be about the most intensive thing you can do to a battery-electric powertrain, heating the battery up to such an extent as to sternly test its cooling. Nothing has caught fire yet.
The good thing about travelling at 100mph in a big circle is that cool air is never hard to come by.
In any case, most EVs will, at some point in the process, automatically cap motor output in order to bring the battery temperature down, and I’ve known one or two to enter a limp mode – or simply coast to a halt – until the heat subsides.
Weirdly, very few will actually tell you why they’re struggling. The Mk1 Nissan Leaf (and indeed the Mk2) had an instrument showing its battery temperature, which would inexorably climb if you covered longer motorway journeys punctuated by rapid-charging stops. Not many current EVs bother to, however.
