Full EV Woes!

[Ace Modder]

Hi all.

My car is a 370z Nismo (many of you know this).

However my wife got a Vauxhall Mokka-E around 2.5 years ago. The range on it is not brilliant. When fully charged it says 200 miles, but it doesn't gives 200 miles when driving locally around town, it gives maybe 160. She complains that on the motorway it is even worst.

Anyway we went o holiday to New York a few weeks ago, and we flew from LHR airport. We drove from Stoke to LHR with a fully charged car. The trip is around 160 miles. It was the middle of the night and the car managed 120 miles only on a full charge and I was only doing 60 mph for the journey.

We had to charge the car before getting there, which we did at a shell station with a 150kw charger which wasn't too bad. Aside from the fact the cost was 83p per kw. I feel that EV cars range is total crap vs what they state.

Now we only charged the car up enough to get us to LHR and maybe 30 miles more after for the journey home. We had our holiday and after we came back to blighty we got in the car and found a charging place with 4 chargers. Now this is the crappy thing, 3 of the 4 chargers were out of service and we called the help line on the chargers to see if they could reboot them to get them working, they said they have hard faults and are awaiting an engineer to visit and repair them. this left only 1 working charger and there was a car charging and another car waiting to charge before us. We had to wait for over 90mins before we could even plug in our car to start charging. Now this was over 90p per kw and it gave us 120 miles range on 50kw total. This gave us effectively in mpg terms 6.6 galloons of fuel at £1.50 a litre. and this works out at 18 mpg, in a bloody mokka.

Until EV cars give a better range per kw then EV cars will not be any use, 120-130 miles max range at 60mph is terrible (at least for public charging with the pricing etc)

Granted I am on a 9p a kw tarriff at home which does give a much much better cost per mile, but when more and more EV cars flood the market it will for sure cause more problems like waitin 90mins to even plug it in etc.

 

[paradigm]

Question, does your 370z get anywhere near the stated WLTP fuel consumption?

Most of your issues I feel are attributed to the wrong car for the job (low real-world range, long motorway journey), a little bit of bad luck (75% of chargers at one site being offline), and a ruck of poor planning (would have made more sense to stop a few times on the way down, shorter stops and less depleted SoC between stops, you might also have found a cheaper site to charge at this way).

I have no issues getting a real-world 250-275 miles out of my Model 3, when the temperature and conditions are right.

As for the complaint round town, are you pre-conditioning the cabin and drivetrain? If not then your poor "round town" consumption is skewed by getting the cabin up to temp and almost immediately completing the drive. The difference for me between preconditioning for a short journey and just hopping in and going can be the difference between averaging 300mi/kWh and 220-250mi/kWh.

 

[Uther]

EV support squad will be along shortly to tell you how wrong you are and it's all perfect.

 

[Ace Modder]

Question, does your 370z get anywhere near the stated WLTP fuel consumption?

My 370z does 35 mpg on the motorway at 75mph, the mokka does 18mpg in money terms at 60mph, less at 70mph.

A mokka-e isnt what I would consider a city-car. It should be a mid-range distance car. The trip to LHR airport is 155 miles according to google maps, that's not exactly a crazy long journey now is it?

 

[Jonnycoupe]

Need a better EV really then?

I thought people had ICE cars 'as backup for the longer trips'?

EV support squad will be along shortly to tell you how wrong you are and it's all perfect.

Never perfect, but managing expectations would be a start!

 

[Ace Modder]

Need a better EV really then?

I thought people had ICE cars 'as backup for the longer trips'?

So you think a car just under £30k which is EV is expected to not be able to do 155 miles on one charge, this seems crazy. Even a toyota Agyo petrol car can do 400 miles on one tank of fuel (my wifes old car).

 

[Jonnycoupe]

Sounds poor to not meet 3mile/kWh i have to be honest.

 

[paradigm]

So you think a car just under £30k which is EV is expected to not be able to do 155 miles on one charge, this seems crazy. Even a toyota Agyo petrol car can do 400 miles on one tank of fuel (my wifes old car).

There are poor cars of all fuel types, this just happens to be a poor EV.

Half of the problem here is likely the fact that it's not an EV platform. Cars that have to be both EV and ICE always end up being compromises as one or the other, or both.

Reading/watching reviews would have highligted the fact that these are not efficient EVs before purchase. A bit like it's common knowledge that the full-fat Audi eTron is awful from an efficiency standpoint.

 

[Ace Modder]

Sounds poor to not meet 3mile/kWh i have to be honest.

so you get 150 miles on 50kw only too, not exactly great.

 

[paradigm]

so you get 150 miles on 50kw only too, not exactly great.

3mi/kwh is around 90-100MPGe. If that's poor in your book then you are hard to please.

 

[Rilot]

3mi/kwh is around 90-100MPGe. If that's poor in your book then you are hard to please.

If using a public charger at 90p/kWh:

1 gallon of fuel = £6.83 @ £1.50p / litre
£6.83 / 0.90p = 7.59kWh for the same price as a gallon of fuel.
If doing 3miles/kWh then 3 x 7.59 = 22.77 mpg equivelant in terms of cost.

I think the lesson here is; don't use public chargers.

 

[Simon]

If only we had an EV thread.

 

[Demon]

Hi all.

My car is a 370z Nismo (many of you know this).

However my wife got a Vauxhall Mokka-E around 2.5 years ago. The range on it is not brilliant. When fully charged it says 200 miles, but it doesn't gives 200 miles when driving locally around town, it gives maybe 160. She complains that on the motorway it is even worst.

Anyway we went o holiday to New York a few weeks ago, and we flew from LHR airport. We drove from Stoke to LHR with a fully charged car. The trip is around 160 miles. It was the middle of the night and the car managed 120 miles only on a full charge and I was only doing 60 mph for the journey.

We had to charge the car before getting there, which we did at a shell station with a 150kw charger which wasn't too bad. Aside from the fact the cost was 83p per kw. I feel that EV cars range is total crap vs what they state.

Now we only charged the car up enough to get us to LHR and maybe 30 miles more after for the journey home. We had our holiday and after we came back to blighty we got in the car and found a charging place with 4 chargers. Now this is the crappy thing, 3 of the 4 chargers were out of service and we called the help line on the chargers to see if they could reboot them to get them working, they said they have hard faults and are awaiting an engineer to visit and repair them. this left only 1 working charger and there was a car charging and another car waiting to charge before us. We had to wait for over 90mins before we could even plug in our car to start charging. Now this was over 90p per kw and it gave us 120 miles range on 50kw total. This gave us effectively in mpg terms 6.6 galloons of fuel at £1.50 a litre. and this works out at 18 mpg, in a bloody mokka.

Until EV cars give a better range per kw then EV cars will not be any use, 120-130 miles max range at 60mph is terrible (at least for public charging with the pricing etc)

Granted I am on a 9p a kw tarriff at home which does give a much much better cost per mile, but when more and more EV cars flood the market it will for sure cause more problems like waitin 90mins to even plug it in etc.

No issues with this, EVs are very different to ICE for all the above.. and public charging can be frought.

Until EV cars give a better range per kw then EV cars will not be any use, 120-130 miles max range at 60mph is terrible (at least for public charging with the pricing etc)

They already do.. in your case, 2.4kwh efficiency is probably due to small battery with not so great battery management on a cold day. Our ID.3 never got less than 2.8m/kwh and that was -5c with a full car of people/luggage/dog and doing 70mph for 150 miles, in 5-10C conditions it would be 3.2+ m/kwh and over 10C would be 3.8-4 m/kwh.. Our model Y is even more efficient in harsher conditions/at speed.. and having access to reasonable charging rates makes it even easier/cheaper.

It's about educating people, it's not peoples fault, manufacturers claim headline figures only and unless you know there is this large discrepancy that occurs based on speed/temperature etc then people will struggle and fall foul of it, and also the 'planning'.. it may be only occasional, but many people can't plan, and would struggle, but if travelling long distances in an EV it pays to plan ahead and the resources for this can be variable.

The answer is that anyone in your situation (and I hate to say it).. Just get a Tesla.. its much more efficient, it has access to more chargers because of the super charger network and is very good at determining your efficiency on a route so will accurately help you find a working charger with far less stress..

 

[b0rn2sk8]

To be fair there is a reason why the Mokka-e is the fastest deprecating car in the U.K. currently (on a % basis).

It’s just not the best EV because the battery is simply too small for the size/efficiency of the car and it was quite expensive.

The rated range minus 30% is about what you can expect in winter, it’s always been that way. It’s also not that dissimilar to ICE. My last diesel car was rated at 65mpg, I’d be lucky if I saw over 52mpg on a run or 40mpg around town. If I drove like a grandad at 45mph on the motorway, I might have hit the rated MPG if I didn’t die in the process.

Public chargers can be dire and some networks are not very well maintained at all and can cause mega issues for people. Fortunately most motorway services are better these days.

Not all EVs are bad, a Model 3 SR which has a similar RRP to a Mokka-e (no discounts mind) would have had a 300 mile WLTP range and comfortably cover 200 miles in the depth of winter and then recharge back to full at 170kw using one of the 40 Tesla superchargers at Heathrow airport for 46p/kwh or as little as 33p/kwh depending on the time of day.

To be honest, the fatal mistake was parking the car without recharging to a high state of charge (say 80%) first. Whenever we are parking at the airport, we always recharge before we park up so we can just get in the car on return and drive home.

Fortunately we never need more than 70% in the car to get back from Gatwick which is the furthest London airport so it never takes more than 10-15 mins. I only need to add about 10% charge to do Heathrow and back.

 

[-Ad-]

Not shocked that a poor vauxhall EV costs loads at an expensive public charger.

In other news, eating steak at a restaurant is more expensive than cooking one at home

 

[Jonnycoupe]

so you get 150 miles on 50kw only too, not exactly great.

It gets to airports at 75mph and your 370Z wouldnt see which way it went.

Sounds great to me.

 

[[TW]Fox]

I think the lesson here is; don't use public chargers

Should he have had the car towed home from the airport then? That wouldn't have been cheap either.

 

[Jonnycoupe]

Trick here is to charge on the way; especially if it was middle of the night, nothing worse than driving home after a flight and having to charge too.

Or take that 370Z, they are ideal for long journeys - yes? What will you do next time tells us how much Woe was really present.

 

[jpaul]

yes - I thought 120 range was 'common' had recently read a thread on the opel/stellantis evs and their 50kwh type batteries,
architectures I had thought give a good ~200m range , without being heavy weight cars, or unnecessarily powerful - upcoming estate in particular had caught my eye

Spoiler: excerpt

This is my first post here and I'm around half way through reading all 155 pages of this thread XD
I received my Corsa-E on 23/12/21 through Leaseplan (Vanarama) and was very interested to get more info on the car so stumbled upon this site and chat. I have a few questions, so I'm sorry if I waffle on and I hope I can get some help!!

As above, I haven't completely read through the entire thread, yet, but I have seen people having multiple issues with the car. For example, the e-REMOTE not working correctly, or keyless entry issues, issues with the Nav and other devices etc. I am thankful to say, that I haven't had any of these issues, as of yet. My only and biggest concern, is the range and mls/kwh.

I've seen a few other post with these concerns and everyone seems very quick to tell people not to worry. Unfortunately, I am worried. At the moment I use 6 miles driving from my house to work, that consists of 3.5 miles of 45mph, 2.5 miles of 70mph. From this, I am only get an average of 2.7 mpkwh. I know it's cold at the moment, but it means I am only getting just over 100 miles for a full charge. This is a lot less than most people saying they are getting a minimum of 150 etc. I also know that this particular EV doesn't really like high speeds, but hear me out: When I get the car to 70 and stick the cruise control on, I'm getting 3.5 to 4.5 mpkwh. I think the biggest issue is the actual acceleration part, as until I get up to speed, no matter how eco friendly I drive, I'm getting less than 2 mpkwh. So my 3.5 miles at lower speeds is when I'm getting the lowest mpkwh.

 

[Jonnycoupe]

Heres the real Woe of EV - jpaul posting.