Fully electric
The quiet is the point. The rest is engineering.
Every operator in the Highlands will tell you their tour is peaceful. We are the one that turned the engine off.
The question everyone asks
“Will we have to stop and charge?”
No. Not on any day on this site.
The car has 300 mi of planned range and goes on charge overnight at the croft, so it starts every day full. The longest day we run — Skye, out to the Fairy Pools and Talisker and home by Achnasheen — is about 232 miles. Most are nearer half that.
You will not spend a minute of a day you have paid for sitting at a charger. The charging happens overnight while you are asleep and we are at home, and on the longest days the car is topped up in Inverness before you are collected.
What it changes
Three differences you notice, and one you do not.
You can hear the glen.
At rolling speed there is no engine, so what reaches you is water, wind, and whatever is on the hill. On a single-track road at twenty miles an hour the difference is not subtle. It is the reason the company is called what it is.
You can hear each other.
A guide shouting over a diesel is a guide you stop listening to by mid-afternoon. Nine hours in a quiet car is a conversation rather than a commentary, and it is the difference between arriving home tired and arriving home worn out.
Nothing idles at the viewpoint.
Stand at Suidhe or Loch Loyne behind a running coach and you smell it before you see the view. We arrive, we stop, and there is nothing left running. The place stays the way you came to find it.
The one you do not notice is the emissions, and that is the point of them. Zero at the tailpipe means nothing added to the air of the glen you are standing in — which is a better argument than a carbon figure, and one you can check with your own nose.
The car
One car, one party, charged at home.
It is a Tesla Model Y, and it is the only car in the business. There is no fleet, no second driver and no day where you are put in something else because the first one was already out.
- 3
- Guests, comfortably
- 0 g
- Tailpipe CO₂ per mile driven
- 300 mi
- Planned range, charged overnight
- 1
- Party booked per day
Being based at Dundreggan, in the middle of the Great Glen, is what makes the overnight charge work. Everywhere we collect from is inside an hour — Fort Augustus15 min, Drumnadrochit30 min, Inverness50 min, Fort William1 h — so the day starts and ends at a plug we own rather than one we have to queue for.
Honestly
What electric does not do.
It does not make the car bigger. Four of you fit — three across the back, one in front — and on a ten-hour day the back seat is honest work for three. Say how many you are when you enquire and we will tell you straight whether the day suits it.
It does not make the day cheaper. You are paying for a car and a guide for a whole day, one party at a time, and that costs what it costs whatever is under the bonnet.
And it does not make the weather behave. The days bend around it either way.
The tours