Electric Cars:what's available?

[NewcastleFalcon]

Thats good to know Neil, Any particular charging operator or are they all free?

Northumberland is well covered with about 20 odd rapid chargers dotted around all currently free. When out and about we have been getting a bit more free and easy, as the paid for chargers are always vacant Morrisons have geniepoint, and used the Instavolt chargers on a few occasions to avoid arriving at the free ones and finding them occupied or out of order. They seem better now but there was a period when 2 or 3 of our normal free chargers were out of order.

The regular charge up is a free 7kWh charger which I can leave the car at for a couple of hours at no great inconvenience and it gets the dog walked anyway!

REgards Neil

[Mandrake]

Interesting video of a battery upgrade of a 30kWh Leaf Taxi which has done about 94k miles:



Rather than just replacing the old battery completely for one that is more dense and higher capacity (expensive!) the Muxsan upgrade kits take the approach of essentially adding another battery in parallel with the original, mounted in the boot with a new higher false boot floor.

The description of the video says the original battery is degraded but I've actually posted a query about that in the comments because at one point in the video before the additional cells are connected they show a claimed range of 90 miles from 86% SoC - which is actually pretty normal for a 30kWh Leaf in November! So if it is degraded it's not by much.

Full charge range after adding the additional battery is 168 miles vs around 100 miles for the original car like mine, and a heck of a lot cheaper than replacing the entire battery, the downside is it took them nearly 2 days to do the job (their first time though, they reckon they could do it in a day now with the experience they have now) and you lose about half of the boot capacity, but the Leaf boot is pretty big to start with.

Probably not what you'd want to do for a personal car but for a Taxi adding an extra 68 miles of range to an existing car that's already paid for itself with low running costs over 94k miles seems like a reasonable thing to do vs buying a newer car.

I noticed as well that when they had the main battery pack out the under pan of the car was absolutely spotless and rust free, fingers crossed mine is the same!

[Mandrake]

And now for a quick video review of the Peugeot e-208:

[mickthemaverick]

Interesting video of a battery upgrade of a 30kWh Leaf Taxi which has done about 94k miles:

Rather than just replacing the old battery completely for one that is more dense and higher capacity (expensive!) the Muxsan upgrade kits take the approach of essentially adding another battery in parallel with the original, mounted in the boot with a new higher false boot floor.

Full charge range after adding the additional battery is 168 miles vs around 100 miles for the original car like mine, and a heck of a lot cheaper than replacing the entire battery, the downside is it took them nearly 2 days to do the job (their first time though, they reckon they could do it in a day now with the experience they have now) and you lose about half of the boot capacity, but the Leaf boot is pretty big to start with.

What impact will the extender have on charging times Simon?

[Skull]

Did those results allow for the additional battery weight

[mickthemaverick]

I have just heard from my German based daughter and discovered that my son-in-law is considering working for a company which hope to bring a new electric vehicle to market very soon, full info here.

[CitroJim]

I have just heard from my German based daughter and discovered that my son-in-law is considering working for a company which hope to bring a new electric vehicle to market very soon, full info here.

At last Flying cars! Excellent

[myglaren]

Some yeller for Jim

[CitroJim]

Some yeller for Jim

Yelling more like

[myglaren]

Plenty of that too, in common with all 'presenters', very off-putting. If I do watch any of these things I generally turn the sound off, especially with male presenters.

[Mandrake]

Drive until they die range test of a number of BEV "super minis" including:

Honda e
Peugeot e-208
Volkswagen e-Up!
Vauxhall Corsa-e
MINI Electric
Renault Zoe

[NewcastleFalcon]

Watched a video of the same bloke driving a Honda-e around London landmarks. I made it through the 30 odd minutes. Funny thing that Honda-e. As far as Honda are concerned if they sell enough of them at the price point they have chosen they will be happy and there appears to be plenty demand, even for its apparent shortcomings in range and space.

As far as the "disappointing results" for the Peugeot, and the hint that some tweak of the software may be necessary, I wonder if car makers these days actually go out and do some decent real world testing, before they ship out a product to the market. Back in the 1950's Vauxhall used to send their cars off to the Alps for a long drive and a whizz around, or have the cars go up and down Porlock hill in Somerset 50 times.

Maybe that bloke should go off to Somerset with his little fleet of test vehicles and reproduce the 50 times up and down Porlock Hill test and watch the range indicator plummet! then rise, plummet then rise 50 times!

Nice little film of those old days of testing on this post here
viewtopic.php?p=599002#p599002



Regards Neil

[Mandrake]

As far as the "disappointing results" for the Peugeot, and the hint that some tweak of the software may be necessary, I wonder if car makers these days actually go out and do some decent real world testing, before they ship out a product to the market. Back in the 1950's Vauxhall used to send their cars off to the Alps for a long drive and a whizz around, or have the cars go up and down Porlock hill in Somerset 50 times.

The range of the Peugeot and Vauxhall being so much lower than claimed and the low miles/kWh is quite disappointing but not entirely unexpected. If I recall correctly the drive train platform PSA is using for their EV's was basically designed out of house ?

I have to say I'm really impressed with the 5.2 miles/kWh the Zoe managed, that is far higher than I could ever achieve in the Leaf in similar conditions - I'd get around 4 maybe 4.2 miles/kWh in summer with that sort of driving, tops, vs about 5 miles/kWh in the Ion.

Now in winter with the heater set to a comfy 22 degrees I'm only managing around 3.3 miles/kWh. (About what I got in the Ion in winter, due to its lack of a heat pump and poor thermal insulation, so the Leaf catches up in winter due to heat pump, preheating and better insulation)

The gulf between the most efficient EV's and least efficient is quite large it seems. If there's one good thing about the first decade of EV's having relatively small batteries and range is that it is pushing the manufacturers hard to optimise the efficiency, with some really excelling (Renault, Hyundai, Kia) and some falling a bit flat. If battery capacity was similar to a petrol tank and range was easy peasy they never would have bothered with optimising efficiency!

[Mandrake]

Doesn't really fall under any of the existing EV threads so I'll just post this here:

https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/car ... -week.html

How long until some "enterprising souls" start sticking green stickers on their non BEV car number plates ?

[NewcastleFalcon]

Got a bit of a mention here on a thread initiated by marc.

viewtopic.php?p=663981#p663981

Might help with the EV spotting thread if nothing else, but I dont think I'll be changing my plates for green strip ones , or getting some sticky back green plastic to DIY any time soon

Regards Neil