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I don’t charge often at public chargers so I’m not sure if this is normal - last couple of times the first charger I tried would not start charging and I had to use another one (luckily one was available). On both occasions I managed to get charged but it concerns me that if I’m in a more remote location and charging doesn’t work I’m stuffed. Is this a common issue? Or is it a car problem?
No, don't find needing to plug the phone in much of a hassle. Newest versions have wireless Android Auto anyway (mine is 2nd hand)
Is this a common issue?
Common IME, that why I always leave enough in the battery to get to another site (or two). The only network I've used that has been 100% reliable has been Tesla, even then like you we've occasionally had to move to another charger but when there are 24 to choose from it's not really an issue.
I don’t charge often at public chargers
We rarely use public chargers either but took the ID3 to Wales last summer (about 350 miles). The first stop at the motorway services we found the first charger we tried didn’t start, the second we tried did start but was slow (22kW I think, with nothing obvious saying it was slow) and third time lucky the car guzzled up electrons at 130kW.
On the way home another stop had two different suppliers and the first we tried didn’t work so moved over to the other brand which worked perfectly.
So in my limited experience yes it is common to have issues.
There were another couple of painless stops too, but it’s not a perfect system yet.
Also just to try it out I’ve tried a few times to use my local ones in town which I have failed to get started every time.
Tbh most of our longer journeys are done in our campervan and we have a petrol Golf which at some point will likely be swapped for an EV, I do hope the infrastructure improves though.
So, I drove about 150 mile in the new Y today. It's definitely a nice place to be, if your scoring a nice place to be on suspension comfort, noise, pedal feel, seat comfort, sounds system and quietness. It would get us from A-B with a minimum of fuss, and in comfort. A enjoyable car to drive, well, obviously no, but I haven't been in an electric car yet that I'd say that about - they all feel as heavy as they are.
Plugged in to a Supercharger, unremarkable as you all know already, but the first time I've done it for about three years since we got rid of the single worst car we ever had since my 1989 Orion (my wife's ID3). Given the comments on here, and from my mates, I did feel like a bit of a prick but it passed.
The lane keeping assist, and maybe the adaptive cruise too, isn't as good as what I've had on previous cars (Golf, BMW) and like all new cars now it's constantly binging some warning to you about speed, signs, lane departure and so on - but we're all stuck with that now. It definitely would benefit from a HUD or second small screen if for nothing other than the speed.
Ask that said, off to look at a Passat PHEV on Tuesday.
I'll be honest tho', if I see someone in a newly registered Tesla, it tells me something about that person.
You might want to read that last bit back again. I’m sure it’s not what you meant but it sounds as though you are saying that people who buy a Tesla are people who only care about themselves.
Does it? For clarity then, absolutely not the point I was trying to make.
There’s enough judgement in the world, without me adding to it
You’re not wrong there mate 😀
I just see somebody who doesn't like driving cars.
For absolute clarity, the first presumption I make about someone who's driving a newly registered Tesla is NOT that they don't like cars! That's what the Nissan qashqai is for.
I work with a guy who has a Tesla. Let's call him Iain (because that's his name). Iain bought doughnuts to work on the morning of 6th Nov 2024, which he served in a MAGA hat after decorating his desk in red, white and blue. Iain didn't have the covid vaccine. Iain attends the local Reform meetings and is hoping to stand at the next possible opportunity. But he really loves Musk......and oddly Paul Gadd (like really loves him; which is a strong move for a teacher).
Now clearly Iain is not normal (thank the non existent lord) and in no way typical of all Tesla drivers. But......you wanna be in Iain's gang, Iain's gang, Iain's gang?
It's a shame the CEO is an utter bellend, and I'd rather he wasn't involved, but I don't go so far as to project that on to the person who buys one. I just think they made an informed decision based on a whole load of personal financial and use variables and tried not to think about it much beyond that. Maybe I should.
if it’s 2025 or later registered - I’d be judging. Buying ONLY on what suits you and your finances without any considerations as to its provenance or impact is a dick move whether it’s a car or a piece of carry-on luggage.
A enjoyable car to drive, well, obviously no, but I haven't been in an electric car yet that I'd say that about
Somebody else made a similar point earlier and I meant to pick up on it then; but are EVs really always less enjoyable to drive than ICE cars? They are both just a box with a wheel at each corner. They go when you press the go pedal and stop when you press the stop pedal. EVs are heavier but have more torque that can be delivered almost instantly at any speed, which you might think would lead to a bit of fun. So is it just as simple as "lighter cars are more fun to drive than heavier ones" or is there something else going on here?
So is it just as simple as "lighter cars are more fun to drive than heavier ones" or is there something else going on here?
It's a windsurfers (kite board, wing foil - take your modern pick) vs jet ski thing. Jet skis are very fast and you squeeze the throttle and it accelerates like ****. But to everyone but those with zero imagination the 'fun' soon wanes. Windsurfers take lots of skill to go similar speeds and there's a real challenge to the experience. (Some) EV's are delivered to the consumer able to accelerate at faster than supercar numbers but a light little hot hatch that with the right skill you can learn and develop whilst owning is hugely enjoyable around corners in a way a heavy car never will be. Partly just because it's heavy and 'physics' and partly because of the weight the suspension can't easily be set up to be 'fun'.
Or something like that.
are EVs really always less enjoyable to drive than ICE cars?
Depends on your definition of enjoyment
I enjoy driving an EV much more than all the ICE cars I’ve previously owned.
I like smooth, quiet and relaxing over “making progress “
Talking of fun, I went to see one of these the other day. I was supposed to go for a test drive on Saturday but managed to food poison myself and spend 2 days in bed, so need to rearrange later this week. Arnold Clark were happy for me to take it out despite telling them if I do get one it will be through work and not from them.
On the fun vs weight thing my ID3 weighs nearly 2 tons, I don't find it at all fun to drive as you can feel every kilo of its weight on a B road. Yes it's comfortable, quiet, quick enough and all those other things but not fun. My previous i3S was fun. It wasn't as comfortable on the motorway, probably not as quiet and was a bit quicker but it was a much more engaging (if slightly twitchy at times) drive, it used to make me smile. I think it weighed around 1300kg?
Again the R5 I drove the other day was definitely a lot more fun than the ID3, the R5 is 1400kg. It made me smile.
My Golf GTI is around 1400kg too and that is more fun than anything else mentioned. It's not fast compared to Teslas or many other EVs but there's only so fast you can sensibly use and as a daily car on my commute it's ideal. It can be more "fun" to get around a twisty bit of road legally at the speed limit than have to slow as a 2ton tank wallows around the corner and then accelerate the other side. I also still like changing gear sometimes 🙂 YMMV.
It's not just weight, it's also how the suspension and power work with / to hide the weight but undeniably EVs are heavy and it is more difficult to make heavy fun.
Also lugging around 600 - 700kg of extra weight I don't need 90% of the time isn't great for efficiency.
Some people won't care, some people only drive on the motorway or sit in queues of traffic and for them comfort & toys / tech is probably a higher priority.
Depends on your definition of enjoyment
I enjoy driving an EV much more than all the ICE cars I’ve
This.
But I appreciate everyone is different and I am relatively old and the opposite might be true for you.
I haven't 'gone for a drive' for decades but the EV takes the chore out of 'dads taxi' or the 70 mile motorway round trip to care for elderly parents. Crawling through traffic jams / stop start traffic is now relaxed.
Looking forwards to changing the other petrol car for an EV
You're not comparing like for like, really. There is no lightweight agile EV, no-one has tried to make one (except perhaps MG). You should be comparing most current EVs with something like one of those modestly fast Audi estates, and there isn't a huge difference in weight. When you are talking about normal cars (for example Leaf vs normal Golf), EVs do pretty well IME. You get more power, good weight distribution and the instant on/off torque is a hoot on very twisty roads - you can zip around in a way that is not possible in any ICE. My Hyundai is completely underwhelming in any spec, but it's much more fun than a normal boring cheap car on windy roads because of the weight balance and zip.
I really like ev and very happy with my choice. However, I've gone from 700 miles a tank to 200 miles, so I'm very conscious of the battery draining due to the range dropping far quicker than the previous car.
However, that isn't really the bit that makes driving boring for me now...it is the constant changing speed limits and how the slower speeds is making journey times longer.
Aware that sounds very lame, but driving for me now is just getting me to a destination so I can do something. The driving is a means to an end and the longer the drive takes, the more annoying it is.
I'm all for the lower speeds from a safety point of view, just the longer journey times wind me up.
My childish reasoning is why I find driving boring now (as I no longer enjoy driving for driving, it just lets me do stuff I want to do).
I think I'll go down a size for next ev...they seem to be type approved for towballs now so I don't need the bigger vehicle. That should increase the range a bit, but won't fix the longer drive times.
I want a great big button in my next EV that makes the car automatically respects speed limits. Constantly changing limits don't bore me they drive me nuts and I find myself asking Madame "we've been out of the village for kms now, it can't possibly still be 50kmh but there hasn't been a sign, can you turn Google maps on please".
I went to look at the Cupra Born today. Crewe dealership, who didn't seem that interested when I told them it would be a company car. Anyway, interior is nice, better than in the photos. I thought the bronze Cupra colour would be too much, but it's subtle enough. Would like to test drive one at some point.
I want a great big button in my next EV that makes the car automatically respects speed limits. Constantly changing limits don't bore me they drive me nuts and I find myself asking Madame "we've been out of the village for kms now, it can't possibly still be 50kmh but there hasn't been a sign, can you turn Google maps on please".
my Cupra Born does this, it has some sort of intelligent speed assist that reads the road signs and slows the car automatically to the correct speed when you lift off the accelerator as you go from 60 to 40 etc and also displays the current speed limit on the dash and when using the cruise control it reads the road ahead and adjusts the speed for bends, very handy.
I dont see that the Tesla network is all that, at least not any more.
The 47p / kWh when charging from 20 to 100 % was quite welcome the other night when I was recharging the Buzz . The cars opposite on gridserve were probably paying almost double that 😮
How does the Tesla chargers work? Do you need an account? Need to preload money on it?
How does the Tesla chargers work? Do you need an account? Need to preload money on it?
I’ve got a Tesla app on my phone . Credit card is linked to it. You get invoices etc , which are useful for accounts etc
It will indicate if the charger sites are opened up for use by other vehicles , then you just plug in , tell it which stall you are using and press start. It even tells you the cost per kWh which changes dependant on time .
really simple , and handily quite a few are opened up on the longer journeys I take for work.
Download the app, create an account, enter a credit card, select charge station on the app and navigate to it, plug in car, select the charger on the app (3d etc.), launch charge from the app, when the car is charged stop the charge from the app and unplug. The app shows charge rate and cost, and replicates the car's charge info. There's a historic of your use. Works perfectly. You many need Google maps to find some of the chargers as I've found the Tesla blue dot less than accurate.
The app also tells you how many chargers at a site are in use/free and a graph of use over the day so you can plan your charges to avoid peak times at busy sites.
Ta, will take a look. Before I do, how much is a Tesla charge per kWh?
Variable depending on the site and time of day, it'll only take you a minute or two to download the app to find out. I have been paying 39-49cents in France, about the same in Holland, a bit more in Germany and my last charge in the UK was 49p.
How does the Tesla chargers work? Do you need an account? Need to preload money on it?
Its worth bearing in mind that many of the older Tesla chargers have VERY short cables, so at busy times (when you can't park at an odd angle or in the adjacent bay) and if your car has the charging port on a location other than the left rear, they may not reach. I had this with my I3 at the Trafford centre ones.
Now I've followed Fully Charged for a long time as I bought my Leaf about the same time Robert Lewellyn bought his. It used to be the only EV channel worth watching but has had more competition of late. However they just posted a vid of the Shanghai Auto show...just wow. If anyone doubts that A. EVs are the future and B. The Chinese are coming.....just watch this:
I wonder if China’s EVs will get better at the non-drivetrain and manufacturing stuff. I’ve now had 3 different MGs as hire cars for a total of 7 weeks and in all of them, the sensors, systems and OS controlling the car were ruddy awful.
Two examples spring to mind. South of France in an MG SUV - the entire dash and instrument system just switched off whilst driving at 90kph. Radio and nav were still sending audio, but the latter had defaulted to Chinese. A restart of the car fixed it…for 15km but no matter how many times I altered the languages after this, it spoke in German with maps in English with a Chinese menu. Sooo confusing!
Driving on a Spanish motorway from Bilbao to San Sebastián in an MG4 at 120kph and the motorway is bending to the left. The car in the outside lane goes past on the right and the sensors on my car pickup the overtaking car, slam on the brake and drag the wheel to the right almost causing me to hit the truck to my right. It did this several times in low light conditions.
at no point was I ever out of position in my lane.
I spent almost 2 years in an MG5. I learned to carry a 10mm in the glove box so that every time it shat the bed I could reset the car by disconnecting the negative terminal in the 12V battery.
However, the fact that the 12V reset the issue just proves that the problem was poorly designed electronics and not the high(er) voltage traction system.
It's also the car where I learned the importance of charging speed over range.
The Kia EV6 is a much nicer placed to be and earlier this week, happily added 40% to the battery in the ten minutes it took to go for a wee.
Well the EV6 costs in excess of twice the MG5 and is more modern so I’d expect it to be a better car. I don’t think that’s a very fair comparison. Both the posts above are also talking about the last generation of Chinese EVs. I think the takeaway from the Shanghai show is the sheer speed and size of the Chinese Automotive sector in just a decade. I have no doubt that the latest generation of their vehicles will be just as good if not better than the competitors but also cheaper. They are going to flood the zone (which is not necessarily a good thing btw)
The only reason for comparing the MG5 to the EV6 is that these are the two cars I've done thousands of miles in and therefore, able to comment on
The other point is that the MG5 is a bad car, but not because it's an EV.
@winston thanks for posting and that was a real eye opener. Interesting that sodium-ion batteries in cars will be coming out later this year and the energy density of them is getting much better.
Does anybody know of a site that will give you historical data on the occupancy rates of chargers? I know apps like ZapMap etc will show you how many chargers are currently available at each site but it would be interesting to see what the data look like over time. For example, we’ve just had the Easter weekend, which is a fairly busy time on the roads. Where there sites that were busy while others still had lots of free chargers or were all sites busy?
@winston - maybe, but my point was more that they’ve nailed the hardware aspects, but the software and systems integration are poor and this isn’t just with EVs. This is a common complaint for a lot of Chinese tech. My inverter for example works fine, but things get altered in pushed software updates which randomly lockout key features or, remove them entirely. Similarly the cooling fan for the control electronics is/was mounted with a cross threaded screw which allowed it to vibrate at certain frequencies.
We have a production line in China and it took and continues to take vast amounts of effort to make sure that both assembly and procurement don’t try to cut seemingly small corners in order to maintain headline rate.
I’m always amazed by their speed of development but in many cases it seems to come at the expense of quality and control. Don’t get me wrong, it’s never catastrophic but in many cases, it simply shouldn’t be happening at all.
In that video they literally talk about how much better the software has become in a very short time and how it is the legacy brands that can’t integrate software properly.
This is going to sound conspiracy theory / spy novel, but we've had a number of talks at work about the risks from unfriendly nations, and that we are already at economic war whether we accept it or not. eg: https://www.npsa.gov.uk/
I'm therefore concerned about all this software control by car companies, etc. Like I say spy novel stuff but how many connect your phones to cars to be able to control your charging, or pre-heat on a cold day, etc. To play media and have it read your messages to you and tell you when you have an email. It's entirely feasible that these could be nicking data or used to back door into systems, may even be able to do that now. And while the CN car cos claim to be independent*, where is the trust really?
*that said, 1984 style I'm not sure I trust the American ones either. Or the French, German, Korean.......
It's not totally mad to think that someone in the Chinese government could think of something useful to do with all that data.
One of the arguments about the "dumping" of Chinese EVs on the market is that it's a good thing for Western consumers - don't we want a rapid uptake of EVs? And if the Chinese government is so silly as to subsidise them for us - well, fine, let's grab them while they're still available.
But could the CCP be so keen on market penetration with short term losses because they'll be able to capture and control all that data (and maybe the OSs...?) in the long term?
Curious, do home chargers attach to a spur off the meter or off the main fuse box?
how it is the legacy brands that can’t integrate software properly
I test drove a Polestar 4 last week. The likely alternative to a new Tesla next year for us. Polestar software and software/car/UX is pretty advanced but Tesla’s makes it look only OK. Other EVs’ software I’ve experienced seem poor and aligns with your comment.
do home chargers attach to a spur off the meter or off the main fuse box?
Mine is direct off the meter. Don't know if that's universal. Mine's a Zappi, but if there is a variation, I suspect that the installer and DNO have more effect than the brand.
We watched Harry's Garage review of the Renault 5 last night.
That would make a great replacement for our Fiesta.
I think chargers can come from the main fuse box, but mine is a teed off from the incoming supply cables directly after the meter - it means that there is no question about the condition or quality of the fuse board so I was happy with that arrangement.