Monthly Archives: Jul 2021

Giant Halfway Folding Bike Review

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I’ve been doing my cycling on a old steel frame road bike – putting it in the boot of the car, driving the kids to school, cycling home, then cycling back in the afternoon and driving the kids home. This saved money on the car and meant I got exercise built into the day. It was also lots of fun.

However, now we’ve got a Tesla Model 3 and the road bike doesn’t fit into the boot any more. We’ve got some big hills round here so I needed a folding bike that would cope – both up the hills and down. I bought the first decent local folder that appeared on eBay, and it turned out to be a Giant Halfway.

Giant Halfway

I then found out that the Halfway was designed by Mike Burrows, a hero of mine. So I’ve got an actual Mike Burrows bike which is very cool 🙂

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Tesla Model 3 Towing Dinghy

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I wanted to get an idea of energy usage involved in towing Custard – a 14′ Wanderer sailing dinghy – so I could work out our range when towing the dinghy.

Update: I’ve now got the actual figures.

A Better Route Planner provides an easy way to work out how to get somewhere with charging stops along the way. You can also tweak your car’s energy usage. Their base figure is nominal usage at 65mph.

Custard’s trailer has higher drag that I would expect – in my Mazda 6 it looks like petrol consumption goes up by 25%. This doesn’t appear great for something that is fairly aerodynamic (boat shaped) and not particularly heavy (I guess around 340kg). When I used to tow a Jaguar 21 – 1100kg plus trailer – it seemed to double petrol consumption so for something much smaller 25% seems high.

Anyway, first guess was that the energy consumption in the Tesla would go up by 25 – 33%. The nominal energy consumption per mile is around 255Wh/mile at 65mph according to A Better Route Planner. This seems close to what we get on a normal local journey. So this would mean consumption of around 320 – 340 Wh/mile.

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