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We collected my wife's Inster today. Seems a great wee car for the price. It's like a tardis inside. It has more rear space than my cupra born. I am waiting patiently for permission to have a go.
Very nice @andy4d. That with a 350 mile range would pretty much be my perfect EV. I guess we’ll have to wait for cheap solid state batteries (if they ever appear) for that to be possible. In the meantime it is good to see someone making small chap(ish) EVs. Be interested to hear how your wife gets on with it. And you if she ever lets you near it 😀
Just heard back from the Roof Box Company who are the go to people for roofrack knowledge - the Kia flush style roof rails are to all intents and purposes fake. You can't use roof bars that clamp to them, you have to use bars that bolt to the mount points hidden within them under very fiddly covers.
Weird. My older e-niro has aluminium rails and standard clamping bars fit fine.
We may soon need a car to drive us and chairs and stuff a mile to the beach.
A cheap old ev with a worn battery would be great for us as a second car.
My question is … if a new car costs £10 to charge and gives you 100 miles , would a used car that only gives you 50 miles range still cost £10 to charge?
Both batteries going from zero to full in my mind says yes.
I reckon the battery capacity drops so it'd cost £5 for 50 miles assuming battery degradation is 50%. 🤔
Both batteries going from zero to full in my mind says yes.
No. Well, no but maybe! Maybe sort of!
Think of battery size as a fuel tank size. A big battery will take more energy to charge and therefore will cost more like a big fuel tank in a petrol car. It will however take you further with all that extra energy. Older tech and an older battery will be inefficient in terms of kw put into to milage got out. So an new EV with a tiny battery but stupidly efficient might not get particular far per charge but do it for next to no money.
The early leafs had smallish 24kwh batteries. That's small by todays standards - and an older battery of that size with old tech might only get you 50 miles for a charge. But you might be able to buy the car for £1500 now.
Where the EV bangernomics falls down is if you have to charge it on a public charger where it might well work out more expensive that an old petrol car per mile- though the other costs might well be cheaper. If you can charge it at home that changes the maths hugely....only snag is you have to have access to a home charger which is big outlay if its for a few miles every now and then on an old leaf.
But big picture....if it's literally going to go a mile to the beach the fuel cost is almost irrelevant. The fact an old leaf can be bought so cheap and pays next to no VED and has very little to service to have to pay for - what's not to like!
My question is … if a new car costs £10 to charge and gives you 100 miles , would a used car that only gives you 50 miles range still cost £10 to charge?
No, as @convert said, you can think of the battery capacity like the size of the fuel tank if it drops by 50% (which is a big drop even for an old EV by the way) it will cost less to fill
What matters for your cost per mile is the efficiency (miles per kWh) rather than the capacity of the battery. I guess it’s possible that this might also drop slightly on an older EV as parts wear but I’ve not seen any evidence for that and if it does happen it’s probably only a small effect
The much bigger factor is that (unlike ICE) there is a huge variability in how much you could pay for each kWh of charge. From 7p on a cheap home tariff to over 80p on a public charger.
But I do think old EVs are going to end up providing cheap motoring for some folk as there is just less to go wrong and a use case like this sounds ideal.
This weeks Late Brake Show seems slightly relevant here - EV bangeromics with a £5k Tesla…
If you ignore the clickbait title, this is very pertinent.
We may soon need a car to drive us and chairs and stuff a mile to the beach.
A cheap old ev with a worn battery would be great for us as a second car.
Interesting idea.... We could the same requirement.
The only issue would be getting the car the initial 110 miles to the house there!
I guess we’ll have to wait for cheap solid state batteries (if they ever appear) for that to be possible.
They absolutely will. I get spammed with articles on this on SM. This is not at the theoretical stage, there are full scale factories being built to produce these things right now.
My question is … if a new car costs £10 to charge and gives you 100 miles , would a used car that only gives you 50 miles range still cost £10 to charge?
No. Remember that the problem with older cars is smaller batteries, not worse efficiency. Those old Leafs are not bad in efficiency terms, just that the battery is tiny. So your charge will cost less because the battery is small.
Thanks @convert. I saw that Mat Watson video a while back but was put off by the title. It's not quite as awful as I feared though.
I still get annoyed by supposed journalists being surprised by stuff that anybody who has read a bit would know already. I dare say it's all confected for clicks, but he spends the first half of the video being "amazed" that the estimated range keeps changing. They are called guess-o-meters for a reason mate (and you know that). A few seconds thought would tell you that it is going to be pretty much impossible to guess how long the battery will last if you don't know anything about the terrain, traffic or weather ahead or how the driver is going to drive. Newer EVs do a better job by trying to take some of those factors into account (at least if you have a route planned) and of "learning" how you tend to drive, but it's always just going to be an estimate. Just like the range estimate on my old ICE car, which always fluctuated quite widely when I got to around 100 miles of range for some reason.
While we're on the topic of Youtube videos I was watching one from the "Just get a Tesla" guy this morning where he was ranting about the autopilot on the new model Y. Again I'm sure a lot of it is confected outrage and possibly a setup for the next video where he can rave about it being fixed, but I thought it was interesting.
I'm not anti-Tesla. Outside of the purchasing decision I'm generally happy to treat the car and the CEO separately and I do think Tesla deserve credit for being amongst the first to demonstrate that it was commercially viable to manufacture an EV with decent range and performance. But it does look as though Tesla have lost a lot of the advantage that they used to have and it is no longer clear that they are better than other options these days. My EV3, for example, doesn't suffer from any of the issues he was ranting about. If I change lanes the adaptive cruise stays on and while the autosteer is disabled while I'm making the change, it switches itself back on as soon as it detects the new lane. I can even do the automatic lane change (just indicate and let the car change lane for you) on a motorway without having to pay thousands extra for the privilege. This isn't meant to be a "my car is better than your car" post though. There are lots of ways in which a model Y is better than my EV3 and I note that Jonathan Porterfield (who has spent years banging on about how good his KIA is) has just bought a new model Y. But as Ian says at the end of his video, the autopilot from lots of other manufacturers is now objectively better than Tesla's current offering, which is surprising for a company that were so far ahead of the game for so long.
They absolutely will. I get spammed with articles on this on SM. This is not at the theoretical stage, there are full scale factories being built to produce these things right now.
I don't doubt that they will arrive, I'm just not clear on the timescale for them becoming cheap enough to be viable in a small cheap EV (or whether they will have the longevity and cold weather performance of current offerings). Obviously companies who are spending millions on producing them have a vested interest in making optimistic claims to keep investors on board, but there is a lot of stuff that we will only know for sure once they have been on the market for a few years. The promise is exciting though.
Anyone on EON Next Drive EV tariff and any views on it ? Having changed cars my new Kia and existing Easee One charger setup is not compatible with IO which I have used for last couple of years. I have swopped to Octopus Go for now, which gives a fixed 5 hours a night cheap rate, Eon gives 7 hours.
Not with EON, but you might want to think about the OVO Charge Anytime tariff too. The plus side is that you can get the 7p/kWh at any time (hence the name) not just at fixed hours overnight and there is no increase to your daytime electricity rate either. The downside is that you only get the 7p rate for your EV charging and not the whole house.
You do need either a compatible charger or a compatible EV. Currently the Kia EV3 is listed on their beta list. I guess this means that it should work but might just mean that you get a horrible buggy experience for a while and then they drop it completely. Thought I'd mention it as an option though.
Anyone on EON Next Drive EV tariff and any views on it ? Having changed cars my new Kia and existing Easee One charger setup is not compatible with IO which I have used for last couple of years. I have swopped to Octopus Go for now, which gives a fixed 5 hours a night cheap rate, Eon gives 7 hours.
You're not tied to a car brand its just cheap 1200-0700
I'm on it, don't expect the same Ollie customer service as Eon's, it is woeful at best but you'll get any issues resolved eventually.
off peak as you say 7p and with my solar I'm getting 16.5p for exporting excess back to grid.
I can send you a referral code if you wish.
Extended hours is a red herring IMO; 5 hours a night on OG gives me 35kWh per night and 245kWh / week if I needed it - that's 900 miles per week or 45k miles per year.
EON would give me 2 more hours per night but I don't need it and i suspect not many others do either.
7p vs 8.5p - sounds tempting. However, even on my relatively high mileage (13-14k per year = 260/wk = 70-odd kWh that's saving me £1 a week. I'm totally OK paying that just to avoid having to deal with E.ON's service.
YMMV (literally) and for some £50 a year might be significant.
Can anyone give a quick explainer on how chargers work,
The car is a hybrid so i doubt i'll use public chargers that often, but as the car is new i thought it made sense just to make sure everything works.
The charger had a claimed output of 150wkh, the car a claimed 50kwh. But the presented charge speed was 32kwh?
I started from the battery at 8% and took it up to 60%
Just curious where the speed issue is?
Did you (or can you) precondition the battery? Getting the maximum charge rate requires the battery to be at the optimal temperature.
I had my first play on a public charger today. Similar story, didn’t need to but car is new (to me) and wanted to try it a few times before I had to do it in anger. Had a bit of spare time and there is a bank of Ionity chargers nearby with lots showing as free.
First issue when I got there was that the instructions were in Dutch and I couldn’t work out how to change it. But no matter, there was a button marked start on the card reader, so I pressed that and presented my card. It seemed to accept that so I plugged the charger into the car. The display changed and said something in Dutch which looked as though it could have been something about communicating with the car. Then it started to charge. Got a charge rate of around 127kw at 50% charge which dropped to around 50kw at 80%. At which point I pressed the stop button on the charger. I thought I would have to present my card again but it just stopped and I could unplug the cable from the car. All pretty simple really. Especially considering I couldn’t understand any of the messages 😀
Charging speed is measured in kW (not kWh that's battery capacity, or the size of the battery)
A car will have a max rate it can charge at all 'things' being perfect. Things being battery state of health, battery temperature, battery state of charge etc. Most EVs have quite high max rates these days for external chargers - 150kW is common. However a PHEV like yours will have a lower max rate as they have much smaller batteries and less need for an emergency charge, afterall you have an engine as well. So 50kW is probably right.
Even if your car will do 50kW max rate, it will only do that under optimum circumstances and normally battery temperature is the main culprit, especially on a PHEV as the battery may not have been being used as you drove in to the charger as you could have been on fuel. 32kw is pretty good for a 50kw max rate car, though I'd be annoyed if my car could do 150kW and I was only getting 32!
Needless to say a car will only charge to its max rate, even if the charger is capable of more.
Thanks for the Eon thoughts, think I’ll stick with Octopus Go and try and forget how much easier Intelligent Octopus Go was🙄
EON would give me 2 more hours per night but I don't need it and i suspect not many others do either.
Its more useful in the winter months when there is very little solar time from daylight. I have 15kw batteries that get charged up overnight in winter, I'll also have EV to charge as will this winter so I fully expect to use the full 7hrs
Just curious where the speed issue is?
Your car controls how fast it charges, not the charger. How much current it draws is based on a carefully engineered curve to maximise the speed without damaging the battery. If you are on a low state of charge, most cars start fairly slow, speed up to a peak between say 30-60%, then start to slow down. But it's also temperature dependent - the ideal temperature for charging is a bit warmer than for driving, so if your car doesn't pre-heat the battery (this is a premium feature so not on that many cars) then you'll have to wait for it to warm up before it can take max power. This means that in cooler weather it takes longer, or it may not even reach max. Likewise in extremely hot conditions it can be slower too.
Just curious where the speed issue is?
As well as what everyone else above said, you can also experience less charging speed than the max if all the other chargers on the site are in use. Some sites do not have an electric supply 'big' enough to power all chargers at their full speed at the same time, so you can get some throttling.
I once went to a fast 75kw DC charger (evyee), 2 bays, one charging unit. One bay was occupied and a byd atto3 was mid battery and drawing a solid 60kw+. I plugged in the Corsa e and the atto3 plummeted to 25kw and the Corsa e took the rest of the available capacity.
On a future visit the role was reversed and a 2nd car took the dominant bay and reduced the available power to the Corsa e.
My non scientific analysis of this was that there was a faster bay. So future visits I opted for that bay or went up the road to the Osprey charger if it was occupied.
It’s more likely that the difference in charging speeds between bays was due to the individual charging curves of the cars.
The cars themselves will throttle back the charging speeds depending on where they are on the curve.
The BYD Atto 3 will drop from 60ish kW to 30ish when the battery hits 80% charge for example, almost exactly as you described.
Charging curves for most cars are available on the Fastned website and it’s pretty useful if you know how your car is supposed to react when charging.
No. Remember that the problem with older cars is smaller batteries, not worse efficiency. Those old Leafs are not bad in efficiency terms, just that the battery is tiny. So your charge will cost less because the battery is small.
Lithium batteries do generally also lose a little efficiency because their internal resistance increases as they age.
When I considering a Leaf, I read somewhere that this was a particular problem on the 30KWH battery pack, so be wary!
I know there is an "EV charging" thread. With the search function on the new forum I was even able to find it, which was a pleasant surprise. But it seems to be focused on home charging rather than public chargers, so I'll stick this here instead.
I had my first "play" with a public charger yesterday and (despite not being able to work out how to change the instructions from Dutch to English) it worked OK (if we ignore the eye-watering price). But I've got a few trips to various parts of the UK planned over the summer and I'd be interested to know how you approach these. Do you:
- Install apps for all the major charge point operators (CPOs). Looking at videos on how to use different chargers they all seem to use the app. I've got enough space on my phone and could just stick them all in a folder. I'm not keen on having my payment details stored in multiple places, but maybe they let you pay with ApplePay or something.
- Pick a couple of CPOs that you like and try to plan your journeys to just use those.
- Ignore apps altogether and just use a bank card (which is what I did yesterday). Presumably a phone also works using ApplePay.
I'd also be interested to hear whether you plan long journeys out in advance with charging stops that you try to stick to, or do you just drive until you need a charge and then find an available charger? The need to pre-condition in order to get maximum charge speed seems to require some planning. I guess you don't need to decide more than half an hour before charging, but trying to find available chargers on the satnav while driving doesn't sound ideal.
I mostly use Electroverse with a (free) RFID card. No £30 pre auth on a debit card etc and as its linked to my home Octopus account I get 8% off most chargers.
I'd also be interested to hear whether you plan long journeys out in advance with charging stops that you try to stick to
I usually know where I'm planning to stop, but sometimes I'll use the Electroverse app to find something local. My car doesn't have preconditioning.
I know there is an "EV charging" thread. With the search function on the new forum I was even able to find it, which was a pleasant surprise. But it seems to be focused on home charging rather than public chargers, so I'll stick this here instead.
I had my first "play" with a public charger yesterday and (despite not being able to work out how to change the instructions from Dutch to English) it worked OK (if we ignore the eye-watering price). But I've got a few trips to various parts of the UK planned over the summer and I'd be interested to know how you approach these. Do you:
- Install apps for all the major charge point operators (CPOs). Looking at videos on how to use different chargers they all seem to use the app. I've got enough space on my phone and could just stick them all in a folder. I'm not keen on having my payment details stored in multiple places, but maybe they let you pay with ApplePay or something.
- Pick a couple of CPOs that you like and try to plan your journeys to just use those.
- Ignore apps altogether and just use a bank card (which is what I did yesterday). Presumably a phone also works using ApplePay.
I'd also be interested to hear whether you plan long journeys out in advance with charging stops that you try to stick to, or do you just drive until you need a charge and then find an available charger? The need to pre-condition in order to get maximum charge speed seems to require some planning. I guess you don't need to decide more than half an hour before charging, but trying to find available chargers on the satnav while driving doesn't sound ideal.
I Use the octopus electroverse card as my first choice, but if the charger in question doesn't take that, then I just use my credit card.
I do also have the tesla app, as a lot of the tesla public chargers still don't take contactless payment, so you have to use their app.
This has covered all my public charging use, but admittedly I've not done much public charging
Thanks. I guess the Electroverse card/app makes most sense if you are on Octopus (so the charge goes onto your electricity bill). I'm on OVO and it's working well enough that I don't see a need to switch yet. So Electroverse would just be another payment card I guess. I think I read somewhere that the Zapmap card/app worked on all the same chargers as Electroverse, so maybe that's another option I could explore.
I'm not too bothered by the pre-auth charge for using a credit/debit card but a discount on the advertised price never hurts.
I guess the Electroverse card/app makes most sense if you are on Octopus (so the charge goes onto your electricity bill)
It can do, but mine just comes out via debit card on the day. Helps to keep it separate to home charging costs.
Ignore apps altogether and just use a bank card
This. I can't be bothered fannying about to save a few quid.
I'd also be interested to hear whether you plan long journeys out in advance with charging stops that you try to stick to
The first time we went a proper long way in ours, I had planned it out using ABRP but I threw it out of the window (not literally, I actually left it in the glove box) as the car's satnav did a much better job. It doesn't know all the networks (yet, it's being updated regularly) but it does have up-to-the-minute information as to which chargers are busy and it will re-route you to an alternative. It's very good. I believe on the more modern Hyundai ones you can tell it what your favourite cafes etc are and it will factor that in. We found in one situation that Zap Map and the car had different ideas about how busy a charger was - but we went with the car, and it was dead right.
The in-car system is the only one that knows how much charge your car actually has at any given point. So if there's a traffic jam, bad weather, or a diversion etc then it can factor that in. Your pre-planned route does not.
This. I can't be bothered fannying about to save a few quid.
That was kind of my thinking too. Maybe the Tesla app is worth having as there might still be some without card readers and (public) Tesla chargers don't seem to always show up in the in-car satnavs yet. But my one experiencing of charging using a debit card seemed simple enough so not sure why I wouldn't just stick with that.
The in-car system is the only one that knows how much charge your car actually has at any given point. So if there's a traffic jam, bad weather, or a diversion etc then it can factor that in.
I think ABRP can now link to your car app (depending on make/model) so it can pull the state of charge from that. I understand there is a bit of a lag though and it obviously needs the car to have a signal.
I've got into the mindset of using apps (mostly Google maps) through CarPlay and just assume they will always be better than the in-car satnav because they were with my old ICE car. It seems that's not really the case with modern EVs though and the in-car system seems to have pretty much all of the things that I've got used to (live traffic, weather, speed camera etc) plus much better integration with the car (state of charge, directions displayed in various places).
I think ABRP can now link to your car app (depending on make/model)
I think you need a subscription for that though?
You do indeed.
On a Tesla charger now. The last one was 33cents and this one 45cents.
I'd have used an even cheaper iecharge one a few kms back but can't login because it won't work with the memorised e-mail and password, won't send me a new password and if I try to reregister tells me the e-mail is already used. I'll try removing the app, reinstalling and using a different e-mail.
Tesla has never failed me yet.
The Zoe is still charging at 21 kW at 98%, not bad, off we go.
Got a date for my charger install. Next Friday. Hopefully it all goes smoothly...
I've got into the mindset of using apps (mostly Google maps) through CarPlay and just assume they will always be better than the in-car satnav because they were with my old ICE car. It seems that's not really the case with modern EVs though and the in-car system seems to have pretty much all of the things that I've got used to (live traffic, weather, speed camera etc) plus much better integration with the car (state of charge, directions displayed in various places).
I haven’t used the Kia one to map out a long route including charging stops, however the system in my previous i4 was far superior to CarPlay offerings, and was really smart at routing to available fast chargers. I hope EV3 will do similar.
New Tesla charger in the north sea 🤔. 
The lease on our Ionic 5 is ending in October so we're considering what to do.
We have loved it on every level. As far as the car goes the only issue is the poor turning circle but we can live with it quite easily.
The only reason we leased was we were unsure about resale value and how the market would react to secondhand EVs.
Given we have charging point and solar panels running costs and market acceptability we thinking about buying our current car outright, the Hyundai is very very good.
However the only issue is that we don't need a car that is so big. We want the range (real world in winter 220 miles) so have halfheartedly been looking at alternatives. The only one that Mrs Wingnuts and I can agree on currently is the Renault 5 (or even the Alpine A290 at a push) Does anyone have any experience? Going for a test drive halfway through next week b ut would like some pointers if possible.
Would one of the Konas be suitable? Smaller than the Ioniq but with similar efficiency? Tesla Model 3 is smaller and more efficient than the Ioniq, but, well…Elon.