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Just reporting back on the bike rack consumption, I did a 100 mile trip through Wales (fast A-road, a bit of motorway, some pottering through town) in my ID7 on Saturday and got 3.6 m/kWh with two bikes on a towball rack.
Realised I'd never got around to reporting back, have done the same trip twice now without bikes on the back and managed 3.9m/kWh each time - so less than 10% reduction in range. Happy with that.
My previous ev was an i4, with factory towbar option. I found that one bike on towbar rack would have about a 15-20% range reduction over a typical 50-150 mile trip, mainly dual carriageway/motorway and A roads, cruise usually set at 70 max.
I now have an EV3, and it’s getting a towbar fitted tomorrow, I’ll be interested to see if it’s a similar story.
I think the effect of a rack depends on the shape of the back of the car. If you're towing a big vortex everywhere then it makes little difference, as reported by people who drive Passat estates etc, but there aren't many EVs that do that so you will probably notice a hit.
Mid-holiday in Penzance. So far so good, on the way down had a visit with MiL and used an 11kW charger there for an hour or so, then another comfort and food stop at a KFC near Camborne where I could refill while we sat and ate - I didn't need much charge to get to the holiday accommodation but topped it to 80% anyway so we then had some for general use.
The rest of the time has been using carparks with usually 7kW chargers and putting 10-20 kWh in at a time. Got a bit low and needed to plan a charge yesterday but only 20 mins at a place a bit out of the town.
Given it's a major town in the SW Penzance itself has one 50kW charger, one 22kW charger and the rest are 7's afaict. And the 50/22 unit is out of order. That is pretty crap.
Places like Penzance are going to be among the last to get significant infrastructure though. Not really on the way to many other places and not enough population to warrant more rapid chargers. From memory, the town I work is a similar size but would be mid route for many journeys. It's had 5 new rapid sites in the last few years.
It's as much about being near electricity on the way to somewhere as it is cars. I bet Penzance has bugger all supply.
Tiverton equally shit.
The most annoyingly shit place (in terms of EV charging!) I know of is Hereford. It is on the way to places, it's centrally located, but there's only maybe three rapids in the whole place. Shrewsbury's a bit better but not a lot.
It's as much about being near electricity on the way to somewhere as it is cars. I bet Penzance has bugger all supply.
It has a large fishing port and a rail depot / terminus, I think it should have supply. More crap is that its one fast charger is oos and appears to have been so for some time from electroverse. And while not exactly on the road to anywhere (except Lands End) it is quite a holiday hub and us rich holiday makers from the SE need to charge our EV luxury barges somewhere 😉
[It also has about 56 pastie shops which might be where all the power goes]
It has a large fishing port and a rail depot / terminus, I think it should have supply.
It's not about supply, it's about headroom at the substation. A quick Google suggests there isn't any, though the only info I could find was a few years old. Note that the train station isn't electrified.
I found out that the Merc EQC and the Polestar 3 have self levelling suspension. Most people who tow seem strangely unbothered by this but I like it a lot. I really like the look of the Polestar 3 but it's likely way out of my price range for a few more years. The EQC has poor range solo, around 250 miles out of an 80kWh battery, but when towing a caravan that seems to be the limiting factor so everyone seems to get a bit either side of 2 miles per kWh. For the EQC that would give around 160 miles out of an 80kWh battery. That would be comparable to most other options for towing (if I'm right). 250 miles solo I can live with. People seem to be reporting lower miles than that, but I dunno what people do with their cars, some get awful mileage.
But in 2-3 years' time when I come to change, the picture could be different.
I know there could be many reasons, just after ideas. Currently in France and tried to top up the battery. Plugged car in went through menu options but wouldn’t start charging. The other lead from unit was in use. It failed when I tried to use bank car to pay. It wouldn’t recognise or do anything.
Impossible to tell from that but make sure you are swiping your bank card at the right reader. On some units there are two card readers, one for the subscription card and a different one for actual contactless payments. The symbol is similar but different. This confused me once or twice.
Wow. I just did a search on Autotrader for new cars nationally sorted by price low-high (for another conversation) and the cheapest cars are all electric - Daia Spring and Leapmotor T03 by virtue of special offers (and Citroen Ami but they are a special case). The cheapest spring is £12k(!) and the cheapest ICE is a Kia Picanto at £14.5k. It's happened. The first couple of pages are almost all EVs.
not driven a leapmotor but the reviews weren't exactly shining .
i have driven a spring and despite thinking it would be a real contender for my next daily car ..... i can see why they are practically giving them away - its slower than my old non turbo berlingo. 19.1 Seconds is the book ... and it felt like every single one of those seconds and more - which when your trying to join a fast A road is frightening.... thats actually slower than a 1990s land rover defender.....
a used leaf was a better buy all day long. ( and thats what we did)
I was watching a review of the Fisker Ocean on Marques Brownlee's YouTube channel. One thing I thought was interesting was that it has a roof covered in solar panels, and that these panels contribute ALMOST NOTHING to the range of the car - about a mile a day, from memory. Probably it's not surprising if you just sit down and think about it (which apparently the Fisker engineers never did).
Just googling 2nd hand EV's:
https://octopusev.com/cars/quote/omoda-e5
Above £299 month with small deposit
Is that good deal?? Not a clue about EV's, Thanks
No idea what’s going on, tried a different charger today same result. Downloaded an app and managed to connect ok.
Just googling 2nd hand EV's:
https://octopusev.com/cars/quote/omoda-e5
Above £299 month with small deposit
Is that good deal?? Not a clue about EV's, Thanks
It's not bad but it's not amazing.
With leases you have to keep looking they literally change all the time.
For ref I just got a vauxhall Grandland Ultimate 73 kWh for 310 first month and 17 months at 310.
I've seen some Konas for good prices on xcitelease where I got mine from.
Leases tend to work best for lower mileage drivers - I'm lucky in that I can build my life around. 7000-8000 miles.
Also watch the extra mileage charge.
Thanks
(which apparently the Fisker engineers never did).You can be sure the marketing department knew what they were doing though.
Interesting piece on bbc breakfast news just before 8am, about the rise of the Chinese electric car companies. From nowhere to one of the 10 biggest globally in 3 years I think it said.
Very interesting was one company is now going with battery swap stations....topped up in I think they said under 5 mins. Pull up to a station, the controller takes over and backs you in directly to the exact place needed for the robotic mechanic to swap out the battery completely and as you'll have 'booked it in' through the navigation app beforehand there's no queue as such as it knows exactly when you're due.
You can be sure the marketing department knew what they were doing though.
Yeah - you'd have to think that the engineers said "this will make f all difference to the range", and the marketing folk said "yeah, we know, but it does look kinda cool". Seems like that happened a lot with that car.
Took the Polestar to another track day - this time a local one to me!
I think Goodwood has been my favourite circuit so far!
DrP
I found out that the Merc EQC and the Polestar 3 have self levelling suspension. Most people who tow seem strangely unbothered by this but I like it a lot. I really like the look of the Polestar 3 but it's likely way out of my price range for a few more years. The EQC has poor range solo, around 250 miles out of an 80kWh battery, but when towing a caravan that seems to be the limiting factor so everyone seems to get a bit either side of 2 miles per kWh. For the EQC that would give around 160 miles out of an 80kWh battery. That would be comparable to most other options for towing (if I'm right). 250 miles solo I can live with. People seem to be reporting lower miles than that, but I dunno what people do with their cars, some get awful mileage.
But in 2-3 years' time when I come to change, the picture could be different.
We're getting 240 miles out of our eqc at motorway speeds in the current warm weather, that works out to be 3 mpwh.
In winter that drops to 180 miles
We're getting 240 miles out of our eqc at motorway speeds in the current warm weather, that works out to be 3 mpwh.
In winter that drops to 180 miles
That's a shocking range drop, to me. I lose about 10%. I get 180 miles in winter from a battery half the size of the EQC. Still - it would be workable for us. Although it would make for a very expensive long trip in winter time.
Very interesting was one company is now going with battery swap stations
I don't think so. Massively expensive infrastructure and investment required, complex engineering at the charging station and the car, and for what? Saves people 15 mins at a coffee break? It's just not worth it.
That's a shocking range drop, to me. I lose about 10%.
We don't make any concessions to improving the range in winter, so that's with the climate control set to 21c and the heated seats on, doing the same speeds as summer (speed limiter set to 85mph, but just flowing with the traffic between 70 and 85). It just gets driven like we used to drive the petrol car.
I'd lump battery swapping in with 500+ mile range and 5-minute charging as things that are designed to persuade petrol-heads to make the switch to an EV but which don't actually make sense once you've made the mental swich required to actually live with one.
They are all designed to allow you to drive an EV like you would an ICE car, but that's missing the point. They are different so you treat them differently.
Once you get away from the idea that refuelling is something that you have to make a special stop for (as you do in an ICE car) and see it as something that happens while you are doing other things (eating, sleeping, shopping etc) then the ability to charge quickly (whether ultra-rapid charging or battery swapping) seems pointless.
Similar arguments apply to range. Once you realise that you are going to stop to do something else every xxx miles anyway (where xxx varies from person to person) paying extra for a car that can travel much further than that starts to seem a bit pointless.
Long range and the ability to refuel quickly matters in an ICE car as you can't refuel while doing something else, so have to make a special stop. Most of us have got used to that over many years and just assume that it's normal. But once you've driven an EV for a while, the idea that you have to make a special stop somewhere just to refuel your car starts to seem like the daft idea.
Imagine if EVs had been the norm for a hundred years and then somebody tried to sell us this new technology that required you to visit some special facility every few hundred miles to fill a tank with highly flammable toxic liquid. I think they might struggle to sell 😀
My Skoda Enyaq does about 190 miles in winter (dropped to 175 when we had a week where the temp didn't go above 1c)...spring and autumn seems to be 226 miles and summer is between 245 and 263 miles.
I don't tend to have air con on as I hate the fact it drops the range. I don't get range anxiety, but it annoys me when I have to charge more regularly - no home charger so I need to plan a wee bit.
The battery swap thing sounds good, but it needs lots of places to do this to be practical. I thought there was a Scandinavian company doing this a couple of years back as well...it makes sense to me, but a bigger headache to manage in terms of standards and availability.
The current process of plugging in works very well so the battery swap has a real battle to make it worthwhile.
That's a shocking range drop, to me. I lose about 10%.
I've not come across anyone who gets range like you do in an EV - though I think you're somewhere in Wales where we're up north in Glasgow and temperature makes a big difference.
We see 25 - 30% range hit in a eNiro, all speeds, summer to winter. I do 12K a year, the vast majority is local ( <30 mph) driving, A/C and heating isn't used much TBH.
Battery swaps comes up every now and again, "amazing new tech", "robots", "10 minute swaps", blah blah blah.
It keeps dying. I'm not surprised.
No one is going to keep a triple digit (or even double digit) number of batteries in stock to swap with you at several grand a pop. They still need to be charged as well, there's a massive fire risk with a huge stack of batteries of not 100% guaranteed status in the back of a swapping/charging station. Not to mention all the car side changes that need to be made.
I've not come across anyone who gets range like you do in an EV - though I think you're somewhere in Wales where we're up north in Glasgow and temperature makes a big difference.I lose about 10-12% in Scandinavia, only been down to -20 with an EV, and about the same in a PHEV (-22 IIRC). Ex wife has been driving/using test cars down to well below -40, at the point, even starting the damn thing is a struggle.
For my part i do try and make sure charging finishes just before i leave the house. And i switch the preconditioning on, so at least i can start with a warm cabin.
so that's with the climate control set to 21c and the heated seats on, doing the same speeds as summe
Same here except I stick to the speed limit, both summer and winter.
I do 12K a year, the vast majority is local ( <30 mph) driving, A/C and heating isn't used much TBH.
That's probably it. On a short trip in our car, the heating takes 2kW or so to get up to temperature, but once it's there it only uses maybe 4-500W even when it's sub-zero. When you're driving at lower speeds using 5kW for driving, 2kW is a lot so it ruins the range calculation. When you are driving on a motorway at 12kW then 500W isn't much. Most of our driving is longer trips at higher speeds, by mileage. We see 4.5-4.8 miles/kWh commuting or on motorway in winter, but on a slow trip in traffic it does drop to 3.5, or if we drive on lanes etc. But that doesn't happen often. If we lived in the countryside and drove lanes all the time to local places I'm sure we'd be down to 3.5 in winter.
My wife's commuting profile may change a lot in September (though we don't yet know what it will look like) so I'll let you know!
Anyway @julians those numbers seem compelling as I think my requirements would yield better mileage than that. If I can verify from the EV caravanners that 2.0 is achievable towing, then an EQC would shoot to the top of my list. Ideally I'd have a Polestar 3 but there's zero chance of affording one for a good long time. Downside would be 110kW charging - if you have to stop every 2hrs then a 40 minute charge is annoying, when an Ioniq 5 would be done in 20. But an EQC would be a much nicer car probably.
EDIT just found a blog where someone's getting 1.6 miles/kWh in their EQC - that's not enough, really, when 2 is common. They do have a massive caravan though.
Anyway@juliansthose numbers seem compelling as I think my requirements would yield better mileage than that.
I did do one drive where I tried to get better efficiency so sat at 60 to 65mph on the motorway,it managed 3.4miles per kwh, which works out to be 272 miles
I am currently on holiday at my mums in Scotland so have my EV ( Cupra Born) is set to mph, mpkwh etc rather than the usual km which has made it hard for me to compare to figures mentioned on here. I am happy to find today I got 4.5 miles per kWh on a 90 mile round trip to St Andrews with air on on and 5 in the car, yesterdays pootle to Aberfoyle/Callander was over 6 miles per kWh! Most of this driving is 50/60 mph on B roads. Going to Glasgow on Thursday so will be interested to see what the motorway delivers.
Those carrying bikes externally, any of you tried a roof rack. We are going to look at a id7 tourer hopefully this weekend, it comes with roof bars so we could carrying on using it existing roof rack and 4 carriers. I'm sure this is less efficient than a rear rack but was not sure by how much. I was hoping to avoid the large extra cost for a tow hook and associated 4 bike rack (though this would allow us onto the normal rather than oversized part of the Eurotunnel which might offset the cost).
Generally efficiency drops by quite a bit. In my diesel it dropped by about 25% roughly. So expect to lose 25% range. It's a bummer. Bikes on the back might also lower efficiency but they equally might not affect it or even slightly increase it depending on the shape of the back of the car.
Hmm, becomes a bit of a toss up then. For most trips with bikes on the roof at 25% losses there would be plenty of range. It would be the odd (once twice a year) longer trip fully loaded. I suspect those would be manageable, especially if we kept the speed down and considering the max leg length of 1.5-2 hours (dog and kids!).
Well yes - I have a 200 mile range, and it's absolutely fine. In practice that means 2hrs of driving (about 130 miles) on motorway trips, because I don't run it down to 0% and I don't charge to 100%, although if I do it really will do 200 miles. Set off 9am, stop 11am for coffee (charge), stop 1.30pm lunch (charge) stop 4pm coffee (charge) arrive 5.30pm - that's 8hrs of driving without really being inconvenienced, as I'd be stopping like that anyway. Sure, you might be a hard driving Mad Max type with your pedal to floor for hours on end but in that case - chill 🙂
Mert pretty much sums it up for the battery swap thing Nio are doing. Very good until look at the practicalities of actually setting up the swap stations.
They also become a bit redundant when you have enough high speed chargers as it doesn't take seconds, and doesn't save much compared to a 15 minute charge. Still a decent car though
In terms of range at different temperatures 25°C ambient seems about optimum IME. It's only over 35°C that range drops a little accompanied by the battery cooling system audibly doing more work.
Sure, you might be a hard driving Mad Max type with your pedal
No the organic speed limiter kicks in as soon as moderate acceleration is deployed! Fast speeds only used where legal (Germany) and would not try those with bikes anyway.
Car has nominal 370 mile range so should be ok. Quite glad as tow carrier plus dog looks like a pain!
Bikes on the back might also lower efficiency but they equally might not affect it or even slightly increase it depending on the shape of the back of the car.
Yes, that potential increase may well be true though I doubt it for bikes - but chatting to our Thule Rep, the towbar mounted cargo boxes like the Onto2 and Arcos have fractionally increased range on an Enyaq and Polestar in testing.
Ok getting closer to purchasing either Kia Niro or Hyundai Kona 22/23 64KW. My question is Octopus go tariffs? We have to get charger installed. Seems like most chargers work with Octopus go, only some more expensive ones work with Intelligent Go. Seems off peak tariff is only 1p cheaper on Intelligent.
So is it worth it? I see intelligent does something automatic for you, but Im guessing with regular Go tariff I can just set a charge schedule on charger / car to only charge from 12.30am - 5.30? Or am I missing something more?
ta
Re battery swapping there's the big isssue that a lot of the cars inherent value is in the battery and relative to how new and fresh it is. Can you imagine the lease companies or personally owned ones having a massively tired, knackered battery at the point of return cars and getting a low valuation?