Ok have a 2017 zoe and an evie charger at home. Set it to charge at 10pm to start charge at 2pm, cheap rate, constantly does not charge. It appears the trickle charge drops out I think.

Any suggestions

I find on Octopus Go we get about 35-45% of our electricity use into the off-peak period. Car charging, dishwasher every night (delay by a couple of hours) and try to do washing machine loads at night too.

re: towing, I think it’s PHEV all the way right now assuming your everyday use is in that nice <30 miles per day average that they do well at. Still get a lot of the EV benefits, hardly use any fuel day to day, but can do the long, towing trips without fuss. Something like an Outlander PHEV will do 1500kg, the big SUVs all do 2000+.

Karnali:
We have a Zoe and a Tesla and run both on the 4 hours per night cheap charging, as well as water heating, dishwasher and washing machine. Zoe has no problem with scheduled charging in the night.
Are you running the schedule via the car or the charger. I leave the cars on immediate charging and then schedule the charge with the app for the home charger – in our case a Zappi charger. Seems to work fine every time.
Maybe if you are scheduling from the car it is confusing the charger? Just a guess I should add!

Our EV comes later this year, through Tusker, as per previous posts. The Easee charger was installed a few weeks back. We are on Scottish Power standard tariff, which is about 30p I think. We use a load of power, as at least one of the 4 of us in or WFH during day. I can see the car doing around 300 miles in an average week so likely a couple of charges/part charges.

Not sure whether a switch to cheaper night rate/more costly day rate will save us money. Not prepared to set up dishwasher and washing machine for night running due fire risk when we are asleep.

My reckoning spreadsheet, comparing current diesel car to the EV has a monthly saving of £60 on fuel, which is not much more than a guess based on approx 300 miles/£60 of diesel a week, so £240 a month.

Keen for thoughts on my estimates, and on tariff options.

Something like an Outlander PHEV will do 1500kg, the big SUVs all do 2000+.

We looked at the Outlander but the electric only range was abysmal and made it totally unworkable. If it was short enough to work on the battery I’d more likely be on a bike or bus. My commute is 20miles each way but slow going so you’d probably want 30 of electric mileage to make it work. Plenty of charging near the office and I assume I’d manage 30 miles worth from a home charge each night. I only need 750kg of towing capacity with 75-90kg of nose weight. Maybe we are hovering around a Passat GTE or similar. I can’t quite work out if a PHEV estate would also work out better than an ICE for the longer motorway trips to family etc. It’s mainly idle musings at the minute as we’re a way off making the leap but I’m learning from others on here far more than from the marketing bs.

I had an Outlander PHEV, it’s max range when fully charged on a hot day never exceeded 30 miles. Then at motorway speeds it dropped quickly. Doubt you’d tow for long on electric only!

So I have this to play with until Friday. I40 eDrive40 M Sport with Tech and Pro packs.

63 grand and it doesn’t even have electric seats and lumbar support was an option apparently…. Will report back after I’ve done some miles.

Keen to hear the feedback. Mine, whenever it arrives, is the base white version, only upgrades being leather and towball. Think it has cool blue trim tho … 😁

Not sure there’s a great deal of point having an EV tariff unless you maximise the benefit. Fire risk seems a bizarre reason not to run them at night.

63 grand and it doesn’t even have electric seats and lumbar support was an option apparently

🤯 I suppose that’s always been the BMW way – enticing base price, bump it up on extras?

Tesla have a model 3 Performance + enhanced autopilot at £62,000. Biggest drawback is saloon rather than hatchback though. Nippier than the M40. Did I read right on the BMW website – 5.7s 0-60? That is about the acceleration of the rear-wheel-drive Model 3 and that’s £52,000.

Still, if the BMW is what you like go for it.

@bensales – I’ll be interested to hear how you get on – that’s almost identical to my car that should finally be arriving in two months time (just mine doesn’t have the pro pack).

Re the lack of kit yes it agree – the stuff that they are getting away with making optional is nuts – same with Audi and Merc.

Re the comparison to a Model 3, having driven both the BMW is in my view a much better car. Yes the M3 is quicker in a straight line but the BMW is still bloody quick (actually a little quicker than claimed – more like 5-5.1 secs to 60) and drives and handles much better, plus cabin quality is head and shoulders better. The BMW is missing some kit but more than makes up for that by having a proper boot (it’s basically a hatchback). Fingers crossed it actually arrives!

I’ve got a Model 3 Performance at the moment. Its lease ends later this year, so I’m scouting for the replacement. The only two decent candidates on my company car list are the i4 and the Polestar 2.

Performance isn’t an issue, they’re all quick enough for me. My primary wants are better build and materials than the Tesla, better headlights than the Tesla, comfort on long motorway drives and enough room to stick a growing family in once in a while.

I’ll not be having another Tesla, not because it’s hasn’t been a great EV, but because they’re not very good cars. I also disagree with their philosophical design position of removing proven, working, sensors in favour of using computer vision. The vision doesn’t work. The adaptive cruise, auto headlights and auto wipers in the Tesla have been the worse of any car I’ve owned. To the extent that I don’t use them any more. Yes, they’re unnecessary luxuries, but if they’re on the car, they should bloody work. Vision might work one day, but I’m not being a guinea pig any more.

I’ve tested the Polestar and really liked it. It was quiet, comfortable and extremely well put together. The Long Range Single or Dual motor have plenty of performance and with two option packs it has pretty much every toy you could ever want. Decent size boot and a small, but usable, frunk. It also has the charge port in the same place as Tesla, making use of Tesla superchargers less contentious.

Initial thoughts on the BMW are it’s even better made than the Polestar, as quiet, and it rides beautifully, although the test car I have has fully adaptive suspension. I don’t find the seats anywhere near as comfortable as the Polestar, they’re narrow and hard. The infotainment system is excellent and the head-up display fantastic. However, for me, it’s substantially more expensive than the Polestar when optioned to the same level, and it’s going to take a lot to convince me to part with the extra money.

We looked at the Outlander but the electric only range was abysmal and made it totally unworkable. If it was short enough to work on the battery I’d more likely be on a bike or bus.

is the outlander phev just crap then ? We had a Toyota chr hybrid as a hire car and it was surprising how useful it was and I guess you don’t realise how long a petrol engine spends idling or at low load /energy recovered by braking etc. the typically 20-30mpg petrol engine was boosted to 65 plus by the hybrid side.

On paper the numbers don’t add up but in real world use quite good.

It’s not an electric car and doesn’t try to be. I think thats where mitsubishis tax avoidance scheme went wrong. People believed it would actually be an electric car with an engine.

Still wouldn’t spend 35grand on a car though

is the outlander phev just crap then

rhetorical question?

I suppose it does have a big boot?

PHEVs seem like ‘compliance’ cars

All the downsides of ICE and BEV with no upside?

Does it not function as a proper hybrid then does it just deplete battery first then go to engine ?

While I agree it is/was a tax avoidance car

It also strikes me that people have unrealistic expectation to use it as an electric car when it’s a hybrid…..

Funny my last 2 cars were new style Minis (made by BMW) and their auto windscreen wipers were dreadful.

Did I read right on the BMW website – 5.7s 0-60? That is about the acceleration of the rear-wheel-drive Model 3 and that’s £52,000.

that’s the standard RWD i4. The dual motor M40 is 3.9 or something like that.

The one I sat in was comfy, with the leather seats, which are an upgrade that I guess most will opt for.

The seats were a shame. Other than being too narrow (for me) and having a hard base, they were great. The fabric/fake leather mix is very nice and they’re a great looking design.

But the Polestar ones are better for me.

is the outlander phev just crap then ?

I’ve not driven one but that’s what people say about it. It IS an EV, but only if you drive less than 15 miles a day or whatever it is. My neighbours had one on a lease and they did drive it to work all the time, about 5 miles, and rarely put any petrol in it. I think the problems with them is that they are rubbish as hybrids getting terrible MPG when the petrol engine is involved in any way. To be fair it was a pretty early effort.

All the downsides of ICE and BEV with no upside?

I disagree. There are plenty of use cases where they work well. Short commute and occasional long drive is not an unreasonable situation. A colleague had one and in winter would drive to work and most of the way back on electricity, using a tiny amount of petrol. If we had charging at work he’d have been able to get home on electricity as well. They work well IF the battery range covers your regular driving. If not, then they don’t.

Does it not function as a proper hybrid then does it just deplete battery first then go to engine ?

AFAIK PHEVs allow you to choose how you want it to behave, at least some do. So if you are going on a long trip you can run it as a hybrid, then say you have to go through a city you can put battery on. But that seems to vary by manufacturer.

online reviews suggest when used in combo mode its 45-50 mpg.

20 if used in petrol only.

(vs the on paper quoted 26/68MPG

That aligns with my experience in the toyota tbh.

Does combo mode eventually drain the battery then?

It’s a pretty different setup to the Toyota.

andylc
Free Member
Not sure there’s a great deal of point having an EV tariff unless you maximise the benefit. Fire risk seems a bizarre reason not to run them at night.

Posted 12 hours ago
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just coming back on this. We are regularly advised not to run appliances at night due fire risk, but EV tariffs will encourage it.

Wonder if there will be an increase in fire related incidents with more people running washing machines and dishwashers while they are asleep..

just one of many links google threw up :

https://www.thefpa.co.uk/news/running-electrical-items-overnight-poses-fire-risk-charity-says

I’d love to know where they get their figures from when advertising the mpg on hybrids.
Took a Range Rover Sport 440e for a 24 hour test drive. They state up to 70 miles on pure electric, I got 55 so that was pretty good . Wasn’t hanging around and that was a mix of dual carriageway and A roads and town centre. That worked out at around 19p at my electric cost.
Took it on a longer run (after fully charging) it in hybrid mode and returned 65mpg over 140 miles. That worked out at about 17p a mile for me.
Completely forgot to see what it did on petrol alone. ( was making the most of the fuel that was already in the car 😀).

The WTLP figures for hybrid on that vehicle are
313-353 mpg ??

It’s a pretty different setup to the Toyota.

hence my question is the mitsubishi a bit shit – seems like alot of people seem to expect it to run a pure electric then goes to engine.

where as a proper hybrid uses both and tbh even on the long trips through france i never saw the battery deplete to zero.

I think a genuine hybrid has a place in certain circumstances where a full BEV set up would be prohibative for real estate (city car class) or weight (Cargo vehicles)

Much of the PHEV negativity is because so many were sold due to tax benefits for company car drivers but there was no incentive to plug in so largely they didn’t. That and people who thought the official MPG figure would apply to motorway journeys of hundreds of miles.

They work well if you plug them in and start most journeys full of charge. Even on a trip outside of the electric range you can get great economy overall, they still regen brake and switch off the engine where they can. Had a Golf GTE for 2 years on lease and it would do worst case 42mpg motorway starting on an empty battery. Most days I’d just use electric, or for something like my 100 mile round trip for work it’d be about 65mpg equivalent on petrol plus the £1 of electric to fill it. You control how it uses the battery, default is to run down the battery first but on a long trip you can just put in hybrid mode and it uses the engine when you’re cruising but in traffic (where ICE is inefficient) it’s just electric. Doesn’t seem to make a huge difference though as long as you start full and finish empty.

In so many ways getting a PHEV again would really suit us. We have a Leaf and a big petrol MPV at the moment (for the family camping/bike trips, tip runs, etc), if we went down to single car it’d probably be a Passat GTE. I leased the Golf as it was new tech but it seems to be pretty reliable and VW group put that 1.4 TSI PHEV powertrain in lots of stuff now.

The WTLP figures for hybrid on that vehicle are
313-353 mpg ??

I think part of the problem is that you have done two journeys that average nearly 100 miles between them when the average UK journey length is about 8 miles so a hybrid can do those with ease.
I know they do multiple runs with hybrids to get the figures such as how long they go on battery alone, consumption with zero battery etc. but it is a fanciful figure. I don’t think the electricty cost is taken in to account at al but may be wrong.

For what it is worth I have an Octavia hybrid and commute to work 15 miles each way so it works very well for me. I do longer trips maybe three times a month so tend to fill up the relatively small petrol tank about every 1,100 miles.

Oh, and also not all PHEVs are the same. The base spec Outlanders didn’t have an electric heater so need the petrol engine running to get heat, I think similar for the Kia PHEVs. They can also have the engine kick in if you accelerate a bit too hard, later ones got an EV button that could prevent that.

The VWs work well as a short range EV, electric heating (so can preheat, etc) and don’t get the engine kicking in unless you hit the kickdown switch on the throttle.

We are regularly advised not to run appliances at night due fire risk

By whom?

Just add a smoke alarm above the appliance in question, in this case the car. A clothes drier is much higher risk.

The WTLP figures for hybrid on that vehicle are
313-353 mpg ??

When PHEVs first came out they didn’t change the test, or didn’t change it appropriately, so it would do most of the test on electricity alone and give ridiculous figures. People seemed to want a single figure for fuel economy but it obviously varies – if you drive 10 miles a day then miles per gallon of petrol is infinite.

where as a proper hybrid uses both and tbh even on the long trips through france i never saw the battery deplete to zero.

Yeah in the Toyota all the battery does is store energy that the car would otherwise waste and re-use it when needed i.e. when booting it or in a traffic queue. Ours would always be about 70% charge unless:

– You’d just started – it favoured the electric motor heavily for the first minute or two to allow oil to circulate before loading the engine
– You were in a queue trundling along at 10-15mph
– You were stationary
– You were driving a steady 30mph or so on the flat, in which case it would drain the battery for a bit then recharge it

It’s a great system for maximising fuel efficiency, but that’s all it does because you can’t plug it in and the battery is tiny.

Plug-in is a different thing of course.

By whom?

Just add a smoke alarm above the appliance in question, in this case the car. A clothes drier is much higher risk.

my bad wording, apologies. No, I’m not talking around fire risk from car charging. I am looking at cost benefits of switching from current tariff to the likes of Octopus, where I will save more money by running washing machine, dishwasher etc at night, which is a practice that the fire safety industry dissuades us to do.

If I swop to an EV tariff, yes, I can charge car up for less, at night, but i’ll pay more than currently to run the household appliances during the day..

If I swop to an EV tariff, yes, I can charge car up for less, at night, but i’ll pay more than currently to run the household appliances during the day..

There’s a break-even point in terms of mileage above which you are overall better off on the EV tariff.

My EV tariff is cheaper even without the electric car but I appear to be flouting recommendations by running my dishwasher and washing machines at night.

There’s a break-even point in terms of mileage above which you are overall better off on the EV tariff.

thanks, any idea what that mileage figure might be ?

Break even will depend on your mileage but also all of the other electricity that you use during the night and day. The equation is different for everyone.
If you get the average miles per KWh for your car you can divide your monthly year mileage by that to see how many more KWh you will consumer if you do all of your charging at home. Balance that against your baseline use.

Thanks, yes, need to get some numbers into a spreadsheet and work it all out, was just wondering what figs others had.

By whom?

Fire brigade. There have been countless posts on here telling folk not to run dishwashers, washing machines etc. at night because they are statistically the most likely to go on fire.

Now, charging on your drive is one thing but if you have a built in garage I can see why people would be reluctant to take that risk.

You’ve seen the reports of how quickly battery fires can wipe out houses, whether or not its a statistical likelihood its probably fair to say the intensity would be too much for standard fire proof insulation (based on the heavily insulated charging boxes for RC batteries).

thanks, any idea what that mileage figure might be ?

I can’t remember but it was pretty low. I calculated we are saving about £80/mo on diesel, with my wife doing a 13 mile each way commute. Of course we do other driving – we spent £14 on car charging electricity in January (driving about 850 miles roughly); that would have been at least 10x that cost in diesel so £140 meaning we’ve saved £126 ish. We spent about £73 on peak time electricity. We also used 231kWh of off-peak electricity Jan and only 178kWh went into the car. So someone else can work that out :). Rates are 42p and 7.5p respectively.

Ooh… 7.5p is cheap…. For me, octopus would be 10p off peak..

DrP

Ooh… 7.5p is cheap…. For me, octopus would be 10p off peak..

Yeah it’s the land of signed up ages ago …. Those prices have gone up since….much like the cost of the replacement lease car so it’s pretty moot for the purposes of current cost to break even.

You’ve seen the reports of how quickly battery fires can wipe out houses, whether or not its a statistical likelihood

Worth noting that NMC chemistry found in most car batteries much less thermally stable and want to ignite Vs life4po found in (recent)house batteries before someone makes that comparison.

is the outlander phev just crap then ?

Yes, we have got 2 of them at work as vans. IIRC the biggest range someone ever got out of one was 24 miles on electric by driving extremely carefully. And I can confirm if you knacker the battery it cost £13,000 to have a new one fitted by Mitsubishi.