The Electric Car Thread

@Drac sounds good 👍
I test drove one about a year ago which was stunning. My trusted car salesman friend (yes, I know) rang me about an ex demo car that’s just come available – the 55 model which also already has a tow bar for my bike rack at a price that would be rude not to take him up on.
Besides, I secretly looking forward to the slightly raised ride height, for my creaking joints.

Well we’ve gone an ordered the 52kwh ID.4, delivery expected in god knows when.

That’s the local pootler sorted which we don’t envisage ever charging up nationally, only from home hence the smaller battery. Will wait for the tech and infrastructure to improve before moving both cars to leccy.

What is the infrastructure like in places abroad that you might take a car on holiday? France and Spain I guess I’m most interested in.

Not an issue with Tesla. Eg https://www.tesla.com/en_gb/trips#/?v=M3_2020_LongRange&o=London,%20UK_London%20London%20Greater%20London@51.5073509,-0.1277583&s=&d=Madrid,%20Spain_Madrid%20M%20MD@40.4167754,-3.7037902

Can’t speak for other networks. Quentin Wilson published a short video on YouTube chronicling his drive through France in a Model 3. Looked pretty idiot proof.

I’m in Spain, we have SuperChargers although I don’t think we have as many as other countries but they do seem to be ramming more in.

Its pretty pain free and tbh the number of free slots are also shown on the map in the car.

They do seem to put them in random locations thou 🙂

The thing that struck me is whether there’s actually any demand for self-driving. I hate driving and would happily pay a premium to absolve myself of the job, but I think I’m in a minority.

Ah think about the 20mph zones people absolutely moan about.

I must admit I still find it odd when the Teslas doing its following of the lane on big sweeping bends on the motorway but all the gimmicks like and the adaptive cruise do make it munch up the miles surprisingly easy. I never really enjoyed motorways much as I didn’t really drive that much due to cycling everywhere but I find it a joy to drive on the motorway nowadays post Tesla.

What is the infrastructure like in places abroad that you might take a car on holiday? France and Spain I guess I’m most interested in.

No personal experience but I frequent EV social media and web forums and from what I’ve seen posted charging infrasturcture in Spain is a bit problematic

What is the infrastructure like in places abroad that you might take a car on holiday? France and Spain I guess I’m most interested in

Pre Covid we did the drive down to property in Perpignan once or twice a year in our Volvo, I noticed a few IBIS autoroute hotels (I think) when we broke the journey up had Tesla chargers that always had a few UK plated Tesla’s on them.
I’m guessing the French would be pretty sorted for the charging network? The road network/transportation in general is very good

all the gimmicks like and the adaptive cruise do make it munch up the miles surprisingly easy

To be fair adaptive cruise is very common these days, and yes it is fantastic. The only issue is that without engine noise you don’t necessarily notice you’ve slowed quite a bit behind someone with poor speed control.

Who is best for installing a home charger. Any real difference between suppliers or just pick on price?

I got a recommended local spark to fit mine, bought the charge point direct myself. I know there are grants etc available but the local spark isn’t on the scheme so I didn’t get them, but it allowed me to have things where I wanted and not just where the standard installation might end up putting it, the local spark left me a drum of cable so that I could route it up through my loft and under ground to my detached garage before he came to do the installation, saved him time and me money so it’s worked out well even if I didn’t go down the grant route.

Ohme coz it has a good app.

Re chargers, OVO energy now offer 5p/kWh charging all day, but not all the time – it’s managed to charge your car only when there’s excess energy and only when it’s renewable. Presumably though, like with my charger it’ll still charge your car to your specified charge level and time even if there’s no cheap energy available, you’d just pay a higher rate. This is what my tariff does if it can’t meet your specified charge in the 4 cheap hours.

Apparently it works with a range of ‘smart’ chargers including the Ohme one.

Apparently it works with a range of ‘smart’ chargers including the Ohme one.

The Ovo website implies that it only works with the (crap) Indra chargers at the moment. It also requires a smart meter even though the calculation is done based on kWh reported by the charger, which means that pretty much anyone in the north of the country is out of luck.

The Ovo website implies that it only works with the (crap) Indra chargers at the moment.

I didn’t see that – they sell the Ohme charger to OVO customers, so I assumed it worked.

Why are Indra chargers crap?

Can confirm that a family of four can go camping in a model 3. It does require black belt tetris packing skills but lets be honest, Dads enjoy that. 🤫

Molgrips – they don’t have wireless so you have to run an ethernet cable to them from somewhere.

Oh yeah that is crap. Mine has a 4G SIM in it.

Can confirm that a family of four can go camping in a model 3

Does the campsite have EHU? 😂

Nice plate at llandegla today. No points for guessing what it was on.

T35LAX

A very laid-back T35?

😉

@pictonroad grass needs cut.

Terminal 35 at LA International airport?

I posted ages ago about the MG5 estate and how the roof bars it came with were cosmetic and couldn’t actually be used. Well it turns out it was just a regulatory issue and they hadn’t been tested. The new model (due nowish I think) has been tested so has functional roofrails, but interestingly the regulatory stuff was retrospective so any of the older models can now utilise their roof rails officially too.

Just found out that Zap Map has an Android Auto/Car Play option, which would be great except that you have to subscribe and it feels like a lot of money unless you are driving for work or something.

You need to be able to lob them a fiver for three weeks access over your holiday or something.

Yeah they added that recently but I’m not paying that price.

You guys might want to rethink your Tesla orders if you have one. The new Superchargers in Cornwall are charging £1/kWh at the moment…

The faff associated with charging stations needs to go. The tech will be sorted, someone needs to stop these providers taking the piss with subscriptions and cards and the like. Imagine the same palaver with petrol stations?

Government should buy them all out and make it 20-30p/kWh with contactless contract free payment across the board.

@flaperon

You guys might want to rethink your Tesla orders if you have one. The new Superchargers in Cornwall are charging £1/kWh at the moment…

This would be extraordinary, triple the cost of any other supercharger, eye watering stuff.

Who told you this? The only new chargers in Cornwall are in Camborne and they’re currently (yesterday) free to use. Can’t find anywhere saying that they’re going to £1pkwh when they start charging.

Agreed Molgrips there needs to be a simpler process, most seem to make it easy now. But, still the odd one insist on some form of subscription. The council chargers here that were free now use a supplier I’ve never heard of. It involved installing another app as they’re not contactless. And yes there should be a cap, certainly no more than 30p.

This would be extraordinary, triple the cost of any other supercharger, eye watering stuff.

Not been personally but someone who charged there after it opened posted this photo on Twitter:

I don’t know how supercharger billing works but for the suppliers I use in France and Germany you have a connection fee that includes the first hour (France) or the first so many kWhrs (Germany). So a snapshot after three minutes would show 2e for 2kWh but after one hour it would show 2e for 18kWh.

It’s just a running total of kWh * unit price with Tesla.

So why didn’t the person post after a longer time to show a properly astronomic bill? If you are going to shame on social media do it properly rather than showing £3 which is hard to interpret. I’d have filled the thing to the brim and then hit social media with a £50 bill to share if I were that way inclined.

Whatever way I Google it the supercharger UK tarif comes up as 28p/kWh

I’d saved myself £47 and moved on after taking the photo.

I’d have wanted solid evidence for the advertising standards authority. 🙂

I’ve just been out to my car to look up the price. That site doesn’t yet appear on the in car nav which means it’s not fully operational even if it is charging cars. I suspect a bug rather than anything else. This seems to be the consensus on the UK Tesla forum that it’s a default display when the charger is on free vend.

That makes sense rather than false advertising.

The person who actually took the photo posted it here…

https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/posts/5860887/

Then later posted to clarify the price was from a previous charge session, which lends weight to them being on free vend.

https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/posts/5863340/

They’re unlikely to be any differently priced from any other Tesla Supercharger, which range between about 27p and 37p per kWh.

So we can put away our pitch forks?

Whatever way I Google it the supercharger UK tarif comes up as 28p/kWh

Ahh, interesting. Free vending seems more plausible than £1/kWh. I guess there’s no way for the car to know that there’s no charge for the uh, charge.

Supercharger rates vary across the country from 22p/kWh at Heathrow to about 37p at the busiest chargers. The only way to see the actual rates is to sit in a Tesla and look (the rates on the Tesla website are somewhat optimistic).

Having that said with Tesla you pay per DC kWh poured into the car’s battery whereas some other providers charge per AC kWh prior to rectification, so with a 10-15% loss the comparison is a little harder.

Government should buy them all out and make it 20-30p/kWh with contactless contract free payment across the board.

Be careful what you wish for. The Chargeplace Scotland network, which is the biggest charging network in the UK is owned by the Scottish local and National governments. They appointed BP Chargemaster to administrate it. Yes let’s put an oil company in charge of the biggest EV charging network in the UK. What could possibly go wrong? So after Chargemaster made a predictable hash of things the admin contract was given to SWARCO this year and after a couple of months in they’ve done the seemingly impossible and made a bigger mess than Chargemaster so now the Chargeplace Scotland website cannot accept payment details, RFID cards are not being sent out and SWARCO have lost comms with so many chargers they’ve all been put on free vend. National government paid for the chargers, local government installed them and are supposed to maintain them and SWARCO does the administration so if anything goes wrong they point to each other to fix it and nothing gets done. Upside is I’m currently in Scotland and haven’t paid for my last 4 rapid charges 😀