Sharing Our Road Trip Playlist with Kia!

 **AD - This post is written in collaboration with Kia, however all opinions are my own. **

As a family we love a road trip, in fact there isn't much that gets us all running for the car than the sheer mention of a road trip and another family adventure! We love exploring new places, finding new hidden gems to explore and seeing different parts of the country that we have never seen before, and all of that excitement starts before we even arrive, it starts on the drive. 

And it turns out we aren't alone in that either, as Kia's recent research reveals how different music can affect how your journey unfolds. Kia put their electric cars to the test and used the award winning, all electric Kia EV6 for their trials to see how playing music through the audio system of your electric vehicle can actually impact real-world driving range. The study indicates that playlists featuring ambient classical pieces and famous symphonic-form compositions from the likes of Beethoven can help drivers sustain battery power far better over other types of music genres and artists, including The Weekend, Kanye West and Adele.

Dr Williams who oversaw the experiment said " What we found from only two days of testing was that music really can have a dramatic influence on the real-world driving range of Electric Vehicles. Different songs resulted in varying electrodermal activity and blood volume increase for each of the participants. This had a knock-on effect on driving style and ultimately influenced the real-world driving range of the EV6."

So, who knew what we listen to might actually be influencing the way we drive! 

For us as a family a road trip playlist is a must have and we try to pick songs that we all love and can sing along too. We often choose upbeat songs for the beginning of our journey such as Taylor Swift - shake it off and George Ezra - Green, Green Grass. This is for a number of reasons, one being to wake us all up as road trips for us usually start pretty early so a sing along gets us all in the road trip spirit. Secondly because we are all so excited and you can almost feel the kid's energy bursting in the back so a good sing along and dance (seatbelts safely on of course), in the back of the car is a great way to use up some of that energy. 

Once we are well into our journey (usually on a motorway on a long winding country road), the kids tend to settle into a book or their tablet and so we choose some slightly calmer music such as Adele, Michael Buble (an absolute must if it's a Christmas road trip too!) and Coldplay. Something that is easy to listen too, tap along too and keep time moving on as there are only so many conversation you can have about what you forgot to pack or whether you definitely locked the back door right? Jokes aside whether it's me or my husband driving, this part of the drive is often the toughest, especially if it is a long drive so we like to have music on that is easy to listen to for everyone in the car as it just seems to make the drive a little easier and passes the time a bit quicker too. 

As we approach the end of our road trip, we tend to ramp up the music again. Usually by this point the chorus of "are we nearly there yet has started" and the kids are getting fed up with sitting in the car for so long with only the promise of an exciting adventure keeping us all going. But turning up the volume a little and putting on some upbeat songs on we can all sing along too such as The Killers and Pharrell Williams - Happy, soon lifts the mood again and before we know it the journey is over, and we all have a new wave of energy to unpack the car and continue our adventure. 

Here is a snippet of some of our "must have" road trip playlist songs that we always include - 

Do you create playlists for your journey's and if so, what playlists do you have and what is on them? Perhaps you have one to make your work commute a little more bearable? Or a road trip playlist like us? Let us know what playlists you have and what is on them in the comments below. 

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