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So I've decided on the Born V3 77kWh after a chat with the boss. I just prefer the looks, the interior, and how it drives compared to the others. I'd have taken the Megane if it had a bigger battery. Need to get things moving with my charger. I'm leaning towards EON who supply a Wallbox charger. I assume the chargers are all much of a muchness?
Off to MOT my 2020 ioniq ev. Wish me luck 😉. Going to the Hyundai dealership for the MOT and they are updating some software with the charging system which is part of a recall. Must be a new recall as the car had recently visited the dealership for a 5yr service and nothing was mentioned at that point?
@stcolin Just make sure either your car or charger are compatible with whatever tariff you will be on. I've an Ohme which was all lovely until OVO stopped supporting it, car's compatible so now the Ohme's 'dumb' (plug-in approval only) and the scheduling is done with the OVO app via the car.
If the std stereo in the born is the same as the ID3 then I'd strongly recommend upgrading it as it's naff - I did and it's great (mine's Harmon Kardon, looks like Cupra use Sennheiser). Nice to see Cupra put the light switches in the right place, not that you'll use them much with auto lights. They also bundle the split boot floor with a granny charger which is a pain as the boot floor was a £75 option before and is way more useful than the 13amp charger you'll never use.
Yea I did have reservations about the stereo. But I've squeezed the budget and will go with the standard option. I know that the newer Borns (from mid 2024 or so) did get an upgraded standard stereo, with more speakers at least.
Off to MOT my 2020 ioniq ev. Wish me luck 😉. Going to the Hyundai dealership for the MOT and they are updating some software with the charging system which is part of a recall. Must be a new recall as the car had recently visited the dealership for a 5yr service and nothing was mentioned at that point?
Be wary and check it charges after they do the update - ideally at the dealer if you can.
I had this at my last service and the car wouldnt charge afterwards. Dealer claimed it was co-incidence that the software was updated and the charger port broke. It knackered the servo in the port so it wouldnt lock / unlock and allow charging. Solution was a new 'upgraded' charge port replaced under warranty. Seems to be a relatively common problem looking at forums.
pre-registered (with 22 miles on it) EV3 GT Line picked up this morning, and first impressions are good. It is very different to my i4, understandably, which goes back to Tusker tomorrow.
Obviously cheaper feel and plastics etc, but nice, maybe more comfy, driving position and the tech is a bit more advanced than BMW as far as i can see so far. Mapping doesn't seem as clever for seeing and routing to chargers, but haven't had a proper play with it. Digital key and car play use more streamlined in the Kia by a mile.
Wil update after some proper use.
Took delivery of a hybrid golf on Monday and have a trip to Devon in a couple of weeks.
Looking at the cars menu's it recommends no more than 80% charge. Will running to 100% prior to longer trips cause battery damage? should I always accept that the best practice is to only use 80%?
No battery damage. It'll just take a long time to charge the last 20% and if you are at a public charger it is better leaving and letting someone else use the charger if there is a queue.
Otherwise, charge to 100% and drive. Liion batteries don't like being fully charged and left in that state for a long period of time, or fully discharged.
Lfp slightly different.
I am not a battery expert!
Be wary and check it charges after they do the update - ideally at the dealer if you can.
Off to check now!
Car passed the MOT 😄
A quick test with the 3 pin and it worked. I'll nip to the local fast DC charger when the battery is at a lesser state of charge prior to actually needing a fast DC charge and the warranty running out in August to check that works!
Looking at the cars menu's it recommends no more than 80% charge. Will running to 100% prior to longer trips cause battery damage? should I always accept that the best practice is to only use 80%?
Long-term it'll probably increase degradation slightly but not meaningfully. The reason 80% is recommended (besides battery longevity) is because if the battery is full you'll have nowhere for regenerative braking energy to go.
Home charger installtion....am I best starting this before I've bought a car?
After a '10 things to think about your EV charger' video suggestion on YT it seems I'll need to contact my DNO as I've only an 80A fuse on the main feed, my supplier as I only have 16mm tails and a local electrician as I probably don't have space in the consumer unit for the charger to be on it's own RCD.
Or do I need to find the car first so they know what kwh I'm connecting?
Strongly recommend getting three companies out (local if possible) to give you a quote - they'll know what's hot and what's not with your current set up.
And your home charger will be 7kw, regardless of car (AFAIK)
I went with the charger first and it did take over 6 months from initial request to actually getting it installed. There were some unusual issues (e.g. installer quitting with no notice just before the original instal date) and I’m sure it doesn’t always take that long but it can take a while. I do now have an EV charger in a driveway with two ICE cars though, which is a bit daft, but at least it’s ready if I ever actually pull my finger out and buy an EV.
Unless you've got 3 phase every "charger" is basically a box that supplies (up to) 7.5kW so the requirements will be the same. The difference is in the features like scheduling and smart control (wifi or phone signal). They'll generally want to run a new dedicated circuit through it's own RCD rather than going via your consumer unit. But yes, DNOs can take a while to do stuff like fuses so worth starting early.
After a '10 things to think about your EV charger' video suggestion on YT it seems I'll need to contact my DNO as I've only an 80A fuse on the main feed, my supplier as I only have 16mm tails and a local electrician as I probably don't have space in the consumer unit for the charger to be on it's own RCD.
I would start the ball rolling with installers. Anyone you speak to will want you to send them through lots of pictures of consumer unit, fuse, charger location, and the route in-between, so they can quote what is needed. If a new extra RCD is needed then they can work that into the quote. It was identified that I needed a fuse upgrade, but that did not halt the process. The installers fitted a load monitoring/balancing thing so that I could charge happily on my existing fuse (60A), and then when the DNO upgraded me to 100A the installers came back and adjusted/removed the load management (not actually sure if the load management was just software in the charger or there was hardware as well). The installers would have also done all the liaising with DNO, but I'd already started that process.
I used these guys for the install, they were incredible good- www.cawoods.net
Thanks all, will set that ball in motion then. We're Sth Manchester based so cawoods don't cover this area.
Thanks all, will set that ball in motion then. We're Sth Manchester based so cawoods don't cover this area.
I can recommend solarus ( https://solarus.co.uk/), they fitted an ohme home pro charger for us a year ago and did a decent job, they're in Didsbury.
A quick test with the 3 pin and it worked. I'll nip to the local fast DC charger when the battery is at a lesser state of charge prior to actually needing a fast DC charge and the warranty running out in August to check that works!
Great news! I know what you mean about warranty - mine runs out in a couple of months so am searching to make sure there are no niggles remaining.
Timely posts regarding the DNO. I've just had an email today from EON to say they are contacting our DNO for approval and then they will contact me with a date for the install. I hope this doesn't take too long. I'm in a new build, 100A main fuse etc.
Well, after nearly nine months of prevarication, the end came rather suddenly for me.
As a few people on here had pointed out, an EV3 looked like the option that came closest to ticking the boxes I wanted. I'd been watching them on autotrader for a while, but as a new (and fairly popular) model, prices were staying stubbornly high. But then a couple of days ago I saw an ex-demonstrator with only 1,600 miles on the clock pop up at a dealer "only" 150 miles away at a price that was a couple of grand lower than all the others. So, I stuck down a deposit and went down yesterday for a test drive. That went fine and I had the V5 for my old car with me, so we agreed a price and I drove it away 😀
I mainly just wanted to say thanks for all the advice and opinions on here. Anybody who has read all of my ramblings deserves a medal, but the comments really have been very helpful and I'll try to keep an eye on the thread to give some back.
As a start; a few early thoughts for anyone interested:
First, it isn't small. The EV3 is marketed as a compact SUV (whatever that's supposed to mean) and OK, compared with a monster like the EV9 it's a lot more reasonable, but it still isn't a small car. I'd much prefer something smaller, but at the moment if you want the longer range you can't have anything properly small. Manufacturers also use the same "platform" for multiple models these days and it seems as though the bigger models just get longer. So, while it is "only" 4.3m long (same as my old Suzuki S-cross) it is wider than you'd expect for a car that length (8.5cm wider than the S-cross). My wife, who drives a little petrol Ignis and loves being able to squeeze into tight parking spaces isn't a fan.
It's also not light. OK, for an EV it isn't heavy and yes, the weight is low down, but coming from an ICE car the extra weight is noticeable. It caught me out a few times at first as it picks up speed so smoothly and quietly that I found myself going into bends faster than I was expecting and then having to deal with that weight mid-corner. Pity the poor salesman who was sitting beside me on a rainy test drive on unfamiliar roads 😀
I can see why petrol-heads say that EVs are not fun to drive. That extra weight just takes some of the fun away and even my turbo petrol S-cross (which was no sports car) was more fun to flick around bends and roundabouts. I'm also glad that I didn't go for one of the options with insane acceleration. Although that sounds fun on paper and I'm sure there is fun to be had from drag racing ICE cars, if you can't make it stick round the bend it's a bit pointless. That's not to say that the EV3 is slow, but it just seems to encourage more of a gentle waft down the road. I had it in Sport mode for a bit yesterday and did indeed pull away from a BMW coming out of a roundabout, but once I got up to the speed limit I was happy enough just to move over and not get sucked into a race.
The EV3 is "tuned" to feed the power in smoothly from a start (to reduce wheel-spin) so it encourages more of a gently approach. There is still plenty of grunt for getting past stuff. Put your foot down on the dual carriageway and you'll notice that you are going past other cars easily. But that's the thing, it's easy and there is no real sense of speed.
Having not driven an automatic in almost 30 years, getting used to not changing gears took a bit of adjusting. When I pulled up at the first roundabout I also instinctively jammed my left foot on the (non-existent) clutch to stop it stalling, which made for a rather abrupt halt. But it only took about half an hour to adapt really.
I went with the GT-Line S model as I wanted things like the 360 degree camera and upgraded stereo. It's certainly packed with tech, It's impressive and at the same time a bit overwhelming at first. I felt a bit like a pilot at first trying to deal with all the mass of information I was being given.
The driver aids are not as intrusive as I was expecting. I've done lots of youtube research but I guess they edit those videos to make it sound as though the bongs are almost constant. You can easily turn off lane keep assist and the audible speed warning and I expected to just do that automatically at the start of each journey. But already I find I don't bother and just switch them off if/when they annoy me. I have the volume for the warnings down low and they don't interrupt the media, so most the time I can't really hear them anyway. There are quite a few things that all result in a very similar bong though, so it will sometimes bong and I have no idea why, which makes them rather pointless.
The HUD is a bit of a mixed blessing in that regard. It's the first car I've owned with a HUD and I love having that information right in my eye-line. But even if you turn off the audible speed limit warning it will still make the speed sign flash when it thinks you are well over the limit, which is easy to ignore on the dashboard but less easy in the HUD. Not really a bad thing in general but a bit annoying when it gets the speed limit very wrong, as it does from time to time.
The HK audio is a step up from the no-name stereo in the old S-cross, but for the combination of punk and podcasts that I listen to most of the time the difference isn't really that significant. I do really notice it if I stick on a bit of Radio 3 to relax though, so it's a decent upgrade if you prefer something tuneful.
Being day two, I'm in the buyers remorse phase and I do wonder whether I should have waited for one with a heat-pump to pop up. From all the information I could find, it looks as though the heat-pump only really saves around 1kw in the winter, which didn't seem like enough to worry about when you have 80 kwh to play with. Dropping your speed by a few mph on the motorway seems to make more difference than whether or not the car has a heat pump. But I may well think very differently come January. Mind you, but then I expect I'll have stopped obsessing about the details and just have learnt to live with the car as it is.
Happy to answer any questions anyone may have about the EV3 in particular or about the experience of moving from an ICE car to an EV. Overall, I'm happy enough with the decision but I am someone who enjoys trying new things. I rode a recumbent bike (and then a recumbent trike) for a few years, jumped onto 29ers quickly and even flirted with fatbikes for a while. I think, if you have that mindset and are happy to go into it with an open mind and deal with the issues as they arise then it might be for you. But it's definitely not for everyone yet.
.... pop up at a dealer "only" 150 miles away
phffft
Next Friday I'm travelling down to from Inverness to collect a Niro from....Gravesend. Just the the 570mile return journey. It'll be a fast learning curve experience in the the public charger network.
A bit jealous of your EV3. It's the car I'd buy if I had the cash. I'm buying mine on a Energy Saving Trust interest free loan 2nd hand EV scheme for people in rural Scottish communities and there is a limit on the value of the car that can be bought (as in you can't top up the loan to buy something more expensive that £23K sticker price). I've gone for a niro (which I think is a little dull in all honesty) very much as a head choice because of the 7yr warranty. This one is a '4' with all the bells and whistles....and a heat pump.
Apparently there is a AWD EV3 for other markets but I don't think it's coming to the UK which is a shame....at that would be (apart from the price) my perfect car.
The Nero appears to be a good car, sounds like a decent choice to me.
Saying that, as much as I think cars can look good and look bad, for my own car I don't actually care as it just keeps me and my kit dry to get me from A to B...
I’m on day 4 with my EV3, in GT line spec. @roverpig, great isn’t it !
First self steering motorway experience in the early hours today, taking eldest to Edinburgh airport from Glasgow at 3am. When you select cruise (which is adaptive) on a motorway it recognises the environment and clicks into auto steer, where you just need a light touch on wheel. Push the indicator to change lanes, it checks all safe and steers out, or in, to the required lane. All vey odd at first, but by half way back home it was feeling intuitive and quite welcome after only 2 hours sleep and being 430am. Really safe feeling. It can obviously be part or all disabled via a push button control on the wheel.
im not missing my i4, yet..
Picked up my Niro 4 on Tuesday last week. Still getting grips with all the functions. Really like it so far
Really safe feeling
I did experiment to see how long I could take my hands right off the wheel….about 6 seconds and it beeps at you and up comes a big screen warning to put hands on again 😃.
The car also has a camera/sensor on the top of the wheel, that monitors your eye behaviour, such that just a few seconds not looking where you should and you get a beep and a flashing eye logo on the main dash screen..
Push the indicator to change lanes, it checks all safe and steers out, or in, to the required lane.
FFS, that's a £3,500 option on Teslas even though the hardware is already in place and half the time it doesn't work (or fails half way through and returns you to your original lane while stamping on the brakes, usually at the point where the BMW that's been tailgating you is doing the thing where they start to pass before you're out of the lane).
I did experiment to see how long I could take my hands right off the wheel….about 6 seconds and it beeps at you and up comes a big screen warning to put hands on again
You get a good 30 seconds in the EV6. It senses small inputs on the wheel and I find it tends to want to hug the left hand side of the lane. I also find that a thumb and finger on the wheel to give it just a tiny bit of resistance to centre it in the lane is enough to shush that warning and let it take care of most of the steering on the motorway.
Next Friday I'm travelling down to from Inverness to collect a Niro from....Gravesend. Just the the 570mile return journey. It'll be a fast learning curve experience in the the public charger network.
Good luck. That's just the price we pay for living somewhere nice though 😀 I was resigned to travelling a long way if the right car at the right price came up and just got lucky that it wasn't too far away.
A bit jealous of your EV3. It's the car I'd buy if I had the cash.
Bit of a mixed blessing really. Not that I'm complaining, but the sweet spot for EVs at the moment probably is something a bit older and a bit cheaper. The niro is a good choice I reckon. The problem with having the cash in the bank is that I find it hard to resit buying extra toys that I don't really need. Still, better I spend it and put it back into the economy than leave it in the bank right 😀
Apparently there is a AWD EV3 for other markets
Yes, I saw that and did think about waiting until it came here (as I'm sure it will). We've had AWD cars for over 20 years and have found them useful up here in the frozen north. But various people on here told me that modern cars with modern traction control systems combined with good winter tyres made AWD unnecessary. Guess I'll find out next winter.
I do tend to think that dual-motor EVs mainly just give you insane acceleration (that you can't fully use as the weight stops you going round bends quickly) and a bit less range. I'd rather they put their efforts into making a small one-tonne EV with a decent range and good handling as I'm sure that would be a blast. Probably have to wait for solid state batteries to become mainstream for that though.
I’m on day 4 with my EV3, in GT line spec. @roverpig, great isn’t it !
I'm still at the "buyer's remorse" stage, so a bit early for "great" but the more I drive it the more I like it so I may well get there soon 😀 It's certainly a nice place to be though and of the ones I looked at it seems to offer the best combination of features for my needs. YMMV of course. Brake feel, for example, which can be an issue on some EVs, feels very natural and adds to that calm feeling, which seems to be its defining characteristic at the moment.
I'm only just getting the hang of regen to be honest. At first the paddles seemed rather pointless. It engages regen if you gently press the pedal anyway and the worst thing for range it to slow down too much and have to accelerate again. So, at first, it was just easier to leave the regen on 0 and use the brake pedal. But now I've worked out that, on higher regen levels, you don't have to take your foot right off the pedal to get to that "coast" point so can actually drive without ever having to go to all the effort of moving your right foot from one pedal to another. What a time to be alive.
First self steering motorway experience in the early hours today,
I played about a fair bit with the self-steering on the drive home yesterday and on a few drives today. It's quite impressive. I've found that it will basically steer itself on most roads with decent lane markings. You don't even need to have cruise control on, which is a bit weird, but if you do it basically feels as though it's doing most of the work for you. All it takes to keep it happy is a light touch on the wheel as it's capacitive so doesn't need any steering input to know that your hand is on the wheel. You can just rest one hand lightly on the lower part of the steering wheel and it seems happy enough. I wouldn't trust it enough on two-way roads (although it does seem to work) as the gap between it giving up and you hitting an oncoming car could be very short. But on anything with multiple carriageways it seems to work well and hasn't failed on me yet.
I've not really worked out the difference between lane centring with adaptive cruise control (which works anywhere) and highway drive assist (which only works on certain motorways). Maybe it's that auto lane change. I did see a message pop up a few times telling me to hit OK to activate auto lane changing but I was still getting used to the car and couldn't work out where the OK button was for a while. Even when I found the OK button I think I just initiated the lane change myself before it got a chance. Something else to play with I guess.
Apparently there is a AWD EV3 for other markets
Yes, I saw that and did think about waiting until it came here (as I'm sure it will). We've had AWD cars for over 20 years and have found them useful up here in the frozen north. But various people on here told me that modern cars with modern traction control systems combined with good winter tyres made AWD unnecessary. Guess I'll find out next winter.
I do tend to think that dual-motor EVs mainly just give you insane acceleration (that you can't fully use as the weight stops you going round bends quickly) and a bit less range. I'd rather they put their efforts into making a small one-tonne EV with a decent range and good handling as I'm sure that would be a blast. Probably have to wait for solid state batteries to become mainstream for that though.
I think we've discussed this before. I too only have had 4wd cars since living here. Not everyone in the little rural area I live does, but most of us who 'have' to be out on the commute before 0700 on the untreated roads do. Retireds who can afford to just not bother going out...just don't go out! And 4WD also saves me digging the longish drive out to the road. 2wd with winters on regularly get stuck. So we'll see. I'll still have the 4wd yeti for to use for the next few years if Mrs C doesn't need it at the same time.
I thought the Subaru Solterra (or whatever the 4wd Toyota equivalent is called - lots of numbers and letters!) was going to be a good choice - a dual motor with 'normal' acceleration, but it seems to be very underwhelming in reviews and still quite pricey second hand.
Yes, I had high hopes for that Soltera too. Having owned a Forester for a while I thought, if anyone can make a dual-motor EV That is about traction rather than bonkers acceleration it should be Subaru. But at the end of the day it's just a re-badged Toyota and if the original isn't up to much then I guess there is only so much they can do. As you say, very pricey too.
My wife's little Ignis is AWD and (with good tyres) actually copes remarkably well in snow. Just floats on top of it I guess. So that's still an option for us. Also, we just don't get the winters we used to twenty years ago and my son's FWD Swift with proper winter tyres felt pretty much as secure as my AWD S-cross on all-season tyres last year. He just lacked the clearance when it got a bit deeper really. Of course, now I've bough a FWD EV we are bound to get the whitest winter on record 😀
Mrs OD has owned a Kia Soul EV from new for coming up to 3 years. It's a great car.
As roverpig says the drive is much more limo style wafting than petrol head engaging. But plenty quick enough for us and super smooth power delivery
One thing you really need to watch coming from ICE, especially manual ICE, is that it's really easy to speed in an EV as they are quiet, smooth and quick. Need to be aware of the speedo much more that in a normal car where combination of gear and engine noise gives you a pretty good indication of speed. It was a nightmare when I was switching between my diesel van and Mrs OD's EV! Not so bad I've got an auto PHEV
One thing you really need to watch coming from ICE, especially manual ICE, is that it's really easy to speed in an EV
Yes, I'm starting to understand why they are so keen to turn that speed alert back on every time you get in the car 😀
I find it particularly on the motorway - cruising at 70ish, coming up to a car to overtake, mirror check and you see someone coming up the outside lane but with a quick press on the pedal and you can safely go past......
And you've gone from 70ish to 90ish in no time and with barely no realisation
We had a test drive in an EV Soul last month. For what everyone thinks is a granny car it was bonkers fast! Also seemed very well sorted for an EV based on an IC car platform (much better than the Berlingo we tried that felt distinctly bolted-on). I expect the latest clean sheet Kias to be another step forward.
Had a sit in a Hyundai Inster the other week - quite an interesting little car.
Still the interminable wait for the Ford eCourier Tourneo. They were showing the damn thing 2 years ago and you still can't order one. And when it finally comes out, a 44kWh battery is really going to limit something they are trying to market as a lifestyle activity vehicle.
the current Ionic 6 is genuinely repulsive to look at, probably the ugliest mainstream car on sale
I rather like it, I'd definitely have one.
Those getting stuck with Winters and 2WD should try chains. There remains the ground clearance issue but momentum and a sumpguard help with that. The sumpguard specilist in Romania sent me one for 136e.
One thing you really need to watch coming from ICE, especially manual ICE, is that it's really easy to speed in an EV as they are quiet, smooth and quick.
I was very aware of that in my i4, which I had for 2 yrs on a salary sacrifice lease. It went back on Thursday and I have bought an EV3.
The BMW looked and felt like an ICE car, and drove like a very fast one. The interior felt pretty traditional and there was not much gadgetry interference with ‘the driving experience’. It was scarily easy to pull onto a slip road and be doing 80mph plus in a few seconds.
The EV3 is entirely different, obviously a lot less nippy, but it’s so stuffed with gadgets and beeps and bongs, that any deviance from safe and sensible and it’s alerting you. Not a bad thing I reckon.
How'd do you go about choosing your EV charger?
Had a good quote from a local electrician but he asks home owner to buy charger so all warranty etc is with them.
He recommends/like fitting Sync EV. Any one got one?
I'd like untethered and small footprint as it'll be on the front of the house. Any good resources to look at?
Thanks
Have a think about what supplier and tariff you want and check their website for compatibility of charger. Intelligent Octopus for example needs either car or charger to be compliant, if neither are you get a slightly less good tariff, in my case octopus go, not the intelligent one. My charger, an Easee One, came with my last car lease. The car was compatible, the charger isn’t.
How'd do you go about choosing your EV charger?
I'm still in the throws of setting up...so what do I know....and there is a separate charging thread ( https://singletrackworld.com/forum/off-topic/the-electric-car-charging-thread/)
However...are you planning on accessing Intelligent Octopus Go tariffs or similar with OVO etc? If you are, unless you have one of a specific few brands of car, your charger has to be a specific brand.
the current Ionic 6 is genuinely repulsive to look at, probably the ugliest mainstream car on sale
I rather like it, I'd definitely have one.
Same, i think it's one of the only cars around at the moment that looks like it's actually made a bit of an effort. I'd definitely have one.
Do reckon the current mazda3 is the nicest looking car at the mo.
The Ioniq 6 is probably top of the realistic list of choices for me, when used ones fall enough and my budget rises enough. It can tow a 1500kg caravan, has decent range, and is nice inside.
Duplicate post, too keen...