EV general discussion

I'd suspect people in PHEVs on a fast charger don't have a clue, it's just a car, and it's just a charger. I dare say there'll be people in a Kona EV with a 50kw charge speed sat on an ultra rapid right now too.
 
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Love that Polestar 4 from all front and side angles. Really smart looking. The back however is somewhere around "now from our commercial van team, the new Polestar 4 - Van Edition".

Maybe a car that will look way better from that angle in the flesh.
 
sandys said:
Short sighted governments are really the only reason PHEVs struggled as they are taxed unfairly due to the assumption they are not used properly by those that buy them, but there are plenty of people that do use them properly and of course it is not difficult with all the hardware and software onboard to force these thing to be EV in LEZ.

Shame PHEVs get such a bashing really, does everything well, round town EV, no problem, towing big stuff, no problem, no range issues there either, I’d struggle to do less than 350 miles even when towing, never mind the ability to do 600 without towing, do I need that, no, but then I don’t need to be planning trips with military precision factoring in multiple fall back chargers or clinging to undesirable routes so I can stay on a motorway with rapid charge facilities either.

There’d be a lot more zero emission driving if governments were a bit more relaxed on what technology was acceptable, it does irk me that I‘ll have to pay such silly amounts of tax versus an EV, 75% of our use has been done on electric, most of the EV use is inner city driving where the air quality is more of a concern, surely that is better than the 0% it would have been if I didn’t have that PHEV choice, hey ho, it is what it is.

More PHEV range would be sweet, low to mid 30s of mine not quite enough some days, that updated X5 50e with ~60 looks handy.
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Massive company car tax breaks on PHEVs though with sub 50g CO2 and the more miles they do on electric only, the less the company car tax is. Thats why RR went 70 miles on the new model. it means company car tax is only 5%. A full EV is currently 2% so its not much more.

Sadly I do have friends who have long range PHEVS and they have never charged it once in their life. They purely got the PHEV for the 5% company car tax and drive it all the time on the ICE with some EV assistance.

Me, I do 40 EV miles every day. Would do more if the car didnt start the engine after 60mph. The new 50e stays electric until 85 mph so will be better.
 
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maybe not - changed my view - 2nd hand prices and residuals now on ev's partly reflect that mftr had inflated RRP's to milk the fleet market where they knew low tax would make them compelling,
(and 75% of them are sold) so the leasing companies now have a bloodied nose; sad for private buyers who had forked out though.
..........

So how does the Highland get 10-15% more efficiency, is it real - much improved regen ? so will pay off predominately in town driving.
 
Read the Tesla press release, it’s stated there very clearly.

The drive train is identical. The gains come from optimising aero to lower its CD and tyres.

The WLTP test says yes, it is real….
 
Greebo said:
Massive company car tax breaks on PHEVs though with sub 50g CO2 and the more miles they do on electric only, the less the company car tax is. Thats why RR went 70 miles on the new model. it means company car tax is only 5%. A full EV is currently 2% so its not much more.

Sadly I do have friends who have long range PHEVS and they have never charged it once in their life. They purely got the PHEV for the 5% company car tax and drive it all the time on the ICE with some EV assistance.

Me, I do 40 EV miles every day. Would do more if the car didnt start the engine after 60mph. The new 50e stays electric until 85 mph so will be better.
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Said it a while back with 330e. Friend had one and he knew a bunch of others - unwrapped cables factory fresh in the boot lol.
 
b0rn2sk8 said:
The drive train is identical. The gains come from optimising aero to lower its CD and tyres.

The WLTP test says yes, it is real….
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sorry I had meant 'real' in the sense that at highway speeds you would see the benefit,
versus just WLTP measure which is a large % of city driving (where regen efficiency also comes into play)
if it is exclusively an aero improvement the efficiency gains at highway speed maybe small/insignificant (cubic impact etc)

[I thought the over-specing of range on teslas, that adam (not me) had also referred too , was largely because of the use of wltp measures where a good regen helps, but doesn't at a constamt 70mph]

e:it's like the formula e cars that couldn't complete the course w/o regen
 
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If they reduced the CD and the frontal area remains the same (fundamentally, it’s the same car), the overall drag is going to reduce.

Lower drag = more range.

Drag increases exponentially with speed, lower drag means the exponential growth is lower.

So yes, it is real. The faster you go, the bigger the gap between the old model and the new one will be.

It’s not just the aero, they have also fitted more efficient tyres. The new tyres mean the top speed has been reduced to 120mph because the new tyres have a lower speed rating. It does make sense given outside of the German autobahn, max speeds are generally 70 or 80 mph.
 
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On the topic of Phev's, I charged mine for the 1st 2 years regularly, when the electric prices shot up I stopped bothering.

My G20 330e is now 3 years old and the autumn range for pure electric is 16-17 miles on a local run. I still get 52mpg on a run when starting with a full charge (250+ miles round trip). Its not worth charging up if you look at it purely from a cost POV.

I will be choosing my next CC later this year, so i hope the 60 miles range on the new Passat/C class really live up to the hype, as the 330e has been a disapointment in this regard. With my annual mileage the EV is still not an option
 
Genuine Q: What's the issue with your annual milage that makes it problematic for an EV?

Usually its the case that more miles means EV's make more sense and people say its the individual trips which are problematic.

An i4/Ionic 6/Model 3 (all in their big battery guise) would comfortably do 250miles round trip on a charge. 350 miles would probably require a ~10 minute rapid charge, 400 miles ~15-20 mins if you couldn't charge at your destination. Presumably on >350 miles you'll be stopping for fuel in an 330e anyway.
 
My 2 regular visits (twice a month) are a round trip of 475 miles, if I could get destination charging (for sensible money) then I’d go EV, otherwise financially it won’t make sense. Work don’t pay enough to cover charging costs whilst on the road. All my other customer visits would be taken care of a full charge if that gave 300 miles.

Plus my next car needs to be estate based or a big hatch. A saloon with kids is a royal pain.
 
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b0rn2sk8 said:
So yes, it is real. The faster you go, the bigger the gap between the old model and the new one will be.

It’s not just the aero, they have also fitted more efficient tyres. The new tyres mean the top speed has been reduced to 120mph because the new tyres have a lower speed rating. It does make sense given outside of the German autobahn, max speeds are generally 70 or 80 mph.
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yes - whether the increase in wltp will provide a significant range increase at 70mph ? (drag force is increasing squared with the velocity not cubic as I wrongly said)
scanning internet, doesn't seem there have been any highland tests yet that I can find (just one flawed comparison with different wheel sizes and 95% battery starting point)

For jpaul public wltp is not what matters most (yes the govt wanted to know about pollution for ice's on a typical route which is what it was conceived for),
most ev's have enough miles for the average commute, its the longer trips, mostly at highway speed that matter more, the typical weekend away/visiting relatives ....

I'd speculate there is something additional in the highland improvement, like they have reduced further any battery buffer with the increased data/learning they have
 
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