When are you going fully electric?

mjt

mjt

Soldato
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My commute is only 12 miles each way so I charge my i3 60h every night or every other night in the garage plugged into a standard wall socket. Obviously it will only ever be a second car. I wouldn’t consider a BEV as our only family car because I enjoy driving hundreds and hundreds miles for hours and hours overnight when going abroad to avoid the traffic.
I also have a lead foot which has a much more drastic effect when it comes to EVs :(
 
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Diesel costs about ~13p per mile for a mid/largish SUV. The same mileage in my fat lump E-Tron with probably the worst EV efficiency, is ~3.5p per mile on the night rate tariff. On top of that the EV lease rate was about £350 per month less than I would have paid for the lease on a broadly equivalent Audi Q5 diesel.

I didn't even have to use man maths to work out I would be saving a lot of money by going full on EV.
 
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Nissan Dealer called this morning, we'll be getting our 62 kwh Nissan Leaf in October now instead of December, so that was a pleasant surprise.

Question regarding charging at a services which will be something I'll have to do at the end of the year, i'll be doing a 208mile round trip which may push my luck with regards to Nissan's theoretical range, When I pop to the services and park at the charge point, how do I actually pay for it? Can I just waltz up and put my credit card into it or do I have to download an app? I've heard different things about it, personally i just want to go to a charge point and put my card in job done like i would at a petrol station
 
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If it’s Gridserve electric highway, just contactless, so even your phone will do just fine. For the older ecotricity ones you’ll need the app. As an EV driver ideally you want zapmap anyway to make sure you are looking for CHAdeMo stations rather than CCS.
 
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If it’s Gridserve electric highway, just contactless, so even your phone will do just fine. For the older ecotricity ones you’ll need the app. As an EV driver ideally you want zapmap anyway to make sure you are looking for CHAdeMo stations rather than CCS.

I have a lot of research ahead of me, wish I knew what you meant by CHAdeMo and CCS xD


edit

ah right CHAdeMo is the fast charge the leaf uses
 
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To be honest, I’d download the Apps for all the major networks and signed into an account so if you ever find yourself needing a charge somewhere you are not having to mess around downloading an app and signing up so you can just a start the charger.

Fortunately Instavolt and all the new Gridserve chargers take contactless payment. Pretty much anything else needs an App.
 
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I have a lot of research ahead of me, wish I knew what you meant by CHAdeMo and CCS xD


That’s the DC rapid charging connector/protocol. For a new leaf leaf you need stations with CHAdeMo for rapid or Type 2 for normal slow AC charging.

When you get the car you’ll see two charging connectors on the front of it, type 2 is the one you use at home and the other is chademo.
 
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To be honest, I’d download the Apps for all the major networks and signed into an account so if you ever find yourself needing a charge somewhere you are not having to mess around downloading an app and signing up so you can just a start the charger.

Fortunately Instavolt and all the new Gridserve chargers take contactless payment. Pretty much anything else needs an App.

Which major ones are those?

Ah looking at the zap-map site, found a section for a load of the major networks
 
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The number of apps needed to have the smoothest charging experience is something that really needs to be improved drastically.

I currently have 12 apps in my EV folder on my phone for various charging networks, which is too many.

To be fair, most of them never get used as I always try and use InstaVolt or BP Pulse where possible so I don't need to use an app.
 
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Hi all,

I am hoping to get a polestar 2 in the next 2-3 years… a couple of people have warned me about buying a preowned electric car as the batteries would have taken a battering and wouldn’t be running at 100% capacity due to age,

someone said to me that the Tesla model 3 battery normally starts deteriorating at 3 3 years and needs to be replaced by 10 years… is this a load of rubbish or is there some truth behind it ?
 
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How does this tie in with the problems seen in i8s and the need to replace their batteries?
It needs to be put into context though.

Firstly most manufacturers offer an 8 year and at least 100k mile warranty, most states the battery will retain a min of 70% over 8 years and replace if not.
Secondly you can check the battery health in most cars these days, so screening a second hand car to ascertain the exact health is possible in many cases.. My mum has an i3 and I checked that on a test drive (a 2018 model with 99.8% capacity), the i3 we borrowed for a holiday had 97.2% and that was 3 years old as well..

I’ve got colleagues with 2011 Nissan Leafs with all 12 bars (100%)…

I do think people need to be aware of batteries in the same way you do engines… Most will be fine, but there may be some rogue ones out there..
 
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So my first taste of the real life challenges of owning an EV at the moment.

Very short notice 250mile round trip needed and the car only had 60% charge - this was the first mistake, not charging for a few days as not planning a trip.

Journey there fine, stopped at an instavolt and no queue - quick 25 min charge while grabbed food and stretched legs. No drama. Arrive at destination, quick turnaround and head home.

The fun starts at the first bp pulse unit, 30 mins into journey. 150kwh unit only charges at 31kwh - switch to one next - same.

Top up a bit and drive to next unit about 40 miles on. Again it’s bp pulse and again, it’s broken, charging at an even slower rate. I try using a the pulse app, thinking they might be throttling the charge to guest users…nope. So again, sitting for an extended length of time at 1am with a very tired and grumpy family onboard.

Finally get enough charge to reach an ionity station, which works like a dream - 10 minutes charge and enough juice to reach home.

The car is fantastic but it seems like the infrastructure can be a bit flakey if you’re not in a Tesla. A 6 hour round trip ended up at nearly 7.5 hours as a result, not the end of the world, but at the time incredibly frustrating. (Some choice language on journey the **** electric car that’s **** and doesn’t work etc etc)
 
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