“Electric Car Road Trip from Brno to Croatia: Our Adventures and Surprises Along the Way”

“My friends, this will not be a race. We just go at our own pace,” a smiling Pepa and his family greeted us at seven in the morning on Friday at the parking lot of a gas station near Brno. I don’t really understand how he can be in such a good mood when he obviously had to get up sometime after four in the morning like the rest of us. That is, except for Honza Staňek aka Electro Dada (pronounced stupidly, we used to call him Electro Děd, but only behind his back!), who lives in Brno and so he was a little bit here. But we thought it was unfair to start in Prague and, on the contrary, ask him to first drive to us at night, then recharge and then drive back again. So now you know why it started from Brno and not from the center of the known universe, i.e. Prague.

When Honza was charged (he really only needed a few kWh), we refueled and the family was packed, we could set off. We still counted on it not being a competition. Do you remember how Pepa laughed on TV that he had driven some 40 kilometers and had to get ready to pee? Well, Saab and I, accompanied by Martin Müller and head of cameras Honza Percl in the Jogger, stopped at the next gas station. Martin had to jump back. On to the big one!

Before the trip, I really wanted to keep to the fact that Michal and I would take turns in the Saab every two hours and we would continue driving. But in the end we decided to take it easy as if we were in no rush. And when we discovered in the common chat where Electro Dad will be charging, we decided to catch him there and make a little fun of him. We asked him what range he still had. And he drove a few tens of kilometers. “Well, we don’t have much either,” I smirked. “We only have about eight hundred left.” In the end, it did not make it into the final form of the piece. But an astute viewer might have noticed my red hoodie flashing in the shot when Martin was talking to Electro Dad at the charger.

Getting to Croatia on Friday was no problem after all. The only traffic jams we had were in Mikulov, a bit in Vienna and in Slovenia due to road reconstruction, but otherwise it was smooth sailing. We have a tip for you – don’t leave your lunch break for the only “Mekáč” on the way, which is somewhere in the north of Croatia. Even in the off-season, it was packed to bursting, and waiting for this quick stomach filling took away precious minutes.

After all, it wasn’t until a moment before the finish line that we said on the phone that we would decide who would be first. It was us, of course, because two guys in a Saab don’t solve this much. We estimate that we lost about an hour due to the break due to Martin and also our two bigger breaks. We were at the finish line about half an hour earlier than Tesla, but Electro Dad was eating only his diet and apparently managed to jump comfortably while recharging. If we drove as hard as he did, we’d be at the finish line an hour and a half earlier, and that’s a really solid difference.

In the following video, you can watch several shots that did not make it into the final form of the Autosalon: