EV general discussion

Tinders said:
My long term MPG is 49mpg over ~90k miles. in 4 years thats not too shabby, 26k miles were electric miles. The manufacturer stated figure are complete nonsense, but the cars are still capable of respectable economy. Not bad at all for 2.0 turbo with 250 hp.
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Pretty much the same economy as my Leon but your car has double the power! Yeah, I think we probably do similar. My onsite work was slow to recover from COVID (education sector) but I'm back around 25k a year.

So, I've done the numbers on the Sportage. Maybe I was a bit quick to knock it...

Loads of caveats here but per year this is how much I'll be better off by;
Never charge it and stick to paying private miles at HMRC rate = £402
Charged on my current tariff = £1057
Charged on Intelligent Octopus (requires proper charger) = £1427

Now for the caveats... this is based on paying 20% on the BIK but my bonus always pushes me over the threshold. If we get a bonus this year the BIK savings are worth much more than my calculated values. It also doesn't allow for 'profit' on work trips which will be paid at 16ppm from the off while, in theory at least, I'll do the first 35 miles at about half that (or less), maybe another £150 a year to be saved from that alone even without an off peak tariff. The savings also diminish over time as the bands increase 1% year on year and 1% on £22k is a lot less than 1% on £40k.

I'll run the Enyaq numbers next. Honestly, I don't think the boss will go for it but the savings may well give me the motivation to fight my corner a little harder! Sums are a bit harder as there is there is home vs public charging costs to consider.
 
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lordrobs said:
Interesting... I might suggest that they get the sales guy a new car first and come back to me in 6 months as it seems there are loads of options just on the cusp of hitting the price bracket I think I can get them to stretch to.
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Might be a good shout, although don't get your hopes up about those BP Pulse chargers getting any better any time soon, they've been seen to be the among the worst for 3-4 years running now. :p

https://www.whatcar.com/news/electric-car-charging-networks-rated-number-8-2/n23270 - 2023

https://www.fleetnews.co.uk/news/la...orst-rated-electric-vehicle-charging-networks -2022

https://www.fleetnews.co.uk/news/la...worst-electric-vehicle-charge-point-providers -2021
 
lordrobs said:
I don't know anything about the charging networks TBH. These ones must be working as there was a Polestar on there earlier and now a Kona.
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You'll pick it up, they are slowly getting better. CYC network which they own is a shambles, they've got a heck of a lot of the old Polar legacy 50kW chargers still out there, but to be fair to them they upgraded most of them with contactless payment as well.

I saw a good deal on the Volkswagen Passat GTE ADVANCE DSG PHEV 1.4 5dr, 27.5k 22-plate, 20k miles on it.
 
We are currently at a hotel in Wicklow Ireland after a 112 mile trip on 99% motorway in fairly bad weather, my I-Pace showed 53% charge left. So the hotel has 3x Easy-go destination chargers. A Model Y is plugged in to one of them and charging, one shows dead and I plugged in to the remaining one. It would not initialise charging and I called their support, who were of course very friendly and polite, but unfortunately tried a few things that did not help.

Each one of the chargers had a red power switch, so I did what any IT professional with over 30 years experience would do… and turned it off and on again :D

It took a minute or so to boot up, but it started charging when I plugged in again.

Unfortunately I tried to take this opportunity to show my wife how easy it really is to public charge. She has owned a C40 for over a year, but has never used a public charger. I think after this she may take another year before she agrees to any such demonstrations. :cry:
 
Journey said:
I saw a good deal on the Volkswagen Passat GTE ADVANCE DSG PHEV 1.4 5dr, 27.5k 22-plate, 20k miles on it.
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I'll have to give them another look but I think not being able to drop the boot floor will be a deal breaker. I have to run my Leon with the floor dropped all the time otherwise I can't get certain kit it, also allows the buggy to go in length ways leaving half a boot for other things which is super handy.

If I decide it isn't a deal breaker then that probably means the Cupra Leon would be OK too... Which is what my boss suggested in the first place!

Just a shame they couldn't squeeze another 5 EV miles out of them for the better BIK bracket.

EDIT - Octavia iV Estate has decent shape 490L boot and 41 mile EV range which puts it in the 8% bracket. £30k buys a really nice one, just none within 150 miles of Norwich :rolleyes: Move over Sportage, there is a new contender for the top spot.

Also 308 and Astra have over that critical 40 mile EV range so I now have 3 Estate options to exhaust before going the SUV route, which I really don't want to do. Kind of wish I hadn't mentioned the Sportage to my wife as she likes the idea of an SUV. To be honest though, she's just thrilled that the Leon is going because low power FR (and therefore no independent rear suspension) with optional 18" wheels rides like a flipping pogo stick and she also hates the seats.
 
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lordrobs said:
I'll have to give them another look but I think not being able to drop the boot floor will be a deal breaker. I have to run my Leon with the floor dropped all the time otherwise I can't get certain kit it, also allows the buggy to go in length ways leaving half a boot for other things which is super handy.

If I decide it isn't a deal breaker then that probably means the Cupra Leon would be OK too... Which is what my boss suggested in the first place!

Just a shame they couldn't squeeze another 5 EV miles out of them for the better BIK bracket.

EDIT - Octavia iV Estate has decent shape 490L boot and 41 mile EV range which puts it in the 8% bracket. £30k buys a really nice one, just none within 150 miles of Norwich :rolleyes: Move over Sportage, there is a new contender for the top spot.

Also 308 and Astra have over that critical 40 mile EV range so I now have 3 Estate options to exhaust before going the SUV route, which I really don't want to do. Kind of wish I hadn't mentioned the Sportage to my wife as she likes the idea of an SUV. To be honest though, she's just thrilled that the Leon is going because low power FR (and therefore no independent rear suspension) with optional 18" wheels rides like a flipping pogo stick and she also hates the seats.
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Passat boot is huge even without the variable height floor

It’s a different class to the Leon/Octavia and very similar to the Superb
 
It has been almost a month and we've just passed 1000 miles in the ID.3. We've done none of the usual commute mileage due to holidays etc but instead we've been using it as if I didn't have the Allroad just to see what living with it is like before the commute starts up again in September. We've done one long (400mi total) trip in it, mostly to build her confidence in going long distances in an EV. So far, so good really!

That 400mi trip was (predictably) really easy, leaving home at 100% charge we decided to stop at a services for a break and use the public chargers there while getting a drink and some food. We charged before heading home at a 150kW charger with a peak actual charging rate of about 85kW. The car reckoned we had 220mi of range after charging, we had 191mi to home and we got home with 6% remaining ie no way would it actually have got 220mi. While the headline range figures are obvious nonsense, I think the fact it was getting on for 30c outside had contributed to the difference. Having the AC running hard on a long motorway drive probably wasn't the optimum hypermiling strat...

For everything else we've both been reasonably impressed with it. There are some irritations - the buttons on the steering wheel are terrible to use, the adaptive cruise seems to be worse than the Golf's older system and it takes far, far too long for CarPlay to fire up. Beyond that, it has been a great first 1000 miles. Charging at home thus far has been 'free' in that our solar export has more than covered our charging costs. Gross, we've used about £15 for ~750mi of the miles driven, plus the (very) expensive public charging on that long trip - which we'll probably not ever do again as it doesn't fit the bill for us for trips like that really.
 
DRZ said:
hat 400mi trip was (predictably) really easy, leaving home at 100% charge we decided to stop at a services for a break and use the public chargers there while getting a drink and some food. We charged before heading home at a 150kW charger with a peak actual charging rate of about 85kW. The car reckoned we had 220mi of range after charging, we had 191mi to home and we got home with 6% remaining ie no way would it actually have got 220mi. While the headline range figures are obvious nonsense, I think the fact it was getting on for 30c outside had contributed to the difference. Having the AC running hard on a long motorway drive probably wasn't the optimum hypermiling strat...
...
. Gross, we've used about £15 for ~750mi of the miles driven, plus the (very) expensive public charging on that long trip - which we'll probably not ever do again as it doesn't fit the bill for us for trips like that really.
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It's a 58Kwh one ? - retrospectively could you have planned cheaper destination charging for return ? was 30mins or so, each ?
 
DRZ said:
There are some irritations - the buttons on the steering wheel are terrible to use...
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They're so annoying. Just baffling that anyone thought they were a good idea, ditto the stupid touch controls for temperature and volume. Took a well tried, reliable, user friendly approach and replaced it with utter carp because it "looks modern" or some other equal stupidity.

Apart from that I really like our ID.3.
 
Anyone had hands on the new Explorer yet? Is it a full size?
 
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Ah that's a shame. In my head it was OG explorer tank size. Is ID5 or ID7 bigger boot size? I'll check out Enyaq too. Model Y is a bit rich on arval I think.
 
Cheers will take a look this eve..I have a VW garage local too. Is there a full size EV? I guess EV9 is the biggest?

Is ID5 Tiguan size? Doesn't seem much bigger than my e43.
 
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