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Cont: Electric Vehicles II

I've had an MG4 for almost 18 months. I just decided to go for it when my Golf was written off by a BMW driver who crossed a stop sign. On 31st March last year I was demanding my car back, I don't want it written off, I'll repair it. Oh, that was in the morning. By the evening I'd watched a bunch of YouTube videos about EVs and was quite smitten. The MG4 was exactly what I wanted and pretty much the only model in my price range, so it was a bit of a no-brainer. I drove off in my new car on 13th April.

I love the car to bits. It drives like a dream, it's so convenient just to plug it in at home rather than go off searching for petrol, and it's incredibly cheap to run - about 2p per mile. Within four months of getting it I had driven down to the south coast of England and back - and bear in mind my car is the shortest range of the MG4 models.

I love all its little conveniences, like being able to heat (or cool) it before I even leave the house, and the way the heating comes up instantly without having to wait for an engine to heat up. And the fact that it's a power source in its own right, whether to use away from home, or tide the house over during a power cut (that last hasn't actually happened, but I read about an Australian EV owner who was able to keep a home kidney dialysis unit running from the car during a prolonged power cut following a tornado).

I've recently cottoned on to its potential as a one-person campervan. You can leave an EV on all night with the heating (or aircon, if you live where I don't) running so you're comfortable and the windows don't end up running with condensation. Then in the morning, plug your kettle in to the car for hot water to wash in, and a pot of tea. The first time I tried this I actually stayed out two nights in a row without going back to the charger, because I was tired from hiking, I had plenty power, so why not?

Another owner on the motoring forum I'm now a moderator on approached it differently. He wanted to camp with his family, so he ran an extension lead from the car to the tent to power a heater, a fridge, lights and cooking facilities. Takes glamping to a whole new level.

The electric motor is the rational way to propel a vehicle, as has been known for at least 150 years, but nobody could crack the battery problem until now (well, the 1990s). The thing has at least an order of magnitude fewer moving parts than an ICE car, very little to go wrong. In contrast the ICE is a mass of inefficiencies, compromises and work-rounds that looks as if it was dreamed up by Heath Robinson when he was running a fever.

I am so over the internal combustion engine. I don't miss the vibration, the noise, the smell, or the way you just have to wait and hope that something will happen when you press the accelerator. I especially don't miss freezing my bits off for the first ten miles in winter. I also don't miss paying a bloody fortune for petrol on a regular basis. Maybe EVs aren't suitable for all applications just yet, but the way things are developing, you name it, an EV will be able to do it before too much longer. Welcome to the future.
 
Glad to see another evangelist

The EV3 is a lot of car, and 372 miles of range (the Fully Charged review concluded that was pretty accurate), but I'm not sure about the rate you can charge it up.
 
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Rolfe said:
I've had an MG4 for almost 18 months...

I love the car to bits. It drives like a dream, it's so convenient just to plug it in at home rather than go off searching for petrol, and it's incredibly cheap to run - about 2p per mile. Within four months of getting it I had driven down to the south coast of England and back - and bear in mind my car is the shortest range of the MG4 models.

I love all its little conveniences, like being able to heat (or cool) it before I even leave the house, and the way the heating comes up instantly without having to wait for an engine to heat up. And the fact that it's a power source in its own right, whether to use away from home, or tide the house over during a power cut...

Welcome to the future.
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Excellent post.

If I was in the market for a new car the MG4 would be at top of my list.
 
Having the ability to take a 240v supply provides a next level of convenience. Mrs Don's FIAT doesn't allow it but by the time I need to replace the Skoda, it may be the standard.
 
It's VtG that's being touted as the great advance in that area. Although VtH is a bit of an inbetween step. I think actually that I could do VtH from my car by simply using the VtL to power a battery charger attached to the home battery, and top that up in case of need.

I've seen at least one car advertised with an ordinary three-pin socket inside the boot, which you could presumably use to boil your kettle or something without needing to use VtL, or indeed needing to get out of the car.
 
Rolfe said:
I've seen at least one car advertised with an ordinary three-pin socket inside the boot, which you could presumably use to boil your kettle or something without needing to use VtL, or indeed needing to get out of the car.
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The Kia EV6 and the Hyundai Ioniq 5 are examples of cars that have build in inverters and can deliver AC V2L in the car, or outside with an adapter.

Very convenient for example for powering a camping trailer.

When at home, there could be arguments for not having the inverter in the car, and instead using for example an inverter already installed for solar panels. Then you would just get DC out of the car, reversing the flow from when using a fast charger.

There are initiatives that have shown that this is possible today with for example Teslas, but unfortunately the Tesla manual lists it as voiding the warranty.

There is a kickstarter project to build an external inverter that can be used for this, and even though I would love to have it, I don't want to risk the warranty on the car.
 
Filippo Lippi said:
The lease on the e-niro is up next year and I'm torn between extending, it's a really good car, or going for something different.


But not too different, as we're going to the Nottingham launch event of the ev3 on Monday
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I'm very happy with my e-Niro, and I think the newer Niro ev is less desirable; the features aren't quite as good, and economy is reportedly less good. The ev3 does look rather nice, though my other half isn't keen on the Tesla-style pop-out handles.
 
The eNiro does seem to have a very good reputation. Although I seem to keep coming across examples of the car either running out of charge or very nearly doing it. I'm not quite sure why that should happen.
 
I cleared space in the garage for our Ioniq 5. If Helene knocks out our power, I can plug our refrigerator and TV into the car along with a fan and light. It should be able to power those things for at least a few days until our power is restored. I didn't buy the car for its V2L capability, but it'll be much nicer than running a gas powered generator.
 
When I mention that I have been sleeping in my car with the heating on all night, most people say, but what about your battery?

What about it? More and more I'm coming to regard the power in the battery as a simple resource that I can use for multiple things, not just driving the car. Yes, I can belt down the motorway pretty fast, or I can cruise gently along a winding single-track road. These two will give me very different economy figures of course, but why would I actually care? I can also sleep all night snug as a bug in a rug, and I can boil my kettle and I can use the electric pump to inflate my airbed. I'm thinking about an induction hob. All this uses power from the battery, and it's not all about miles/kwh.

What many people fail to appreciate is that moving the car takes far more energy than anything else you can do with it. When the car is stationary it takes very little energy in comparison - even to heat it. I reckon that on a mild night I'll use about 1% of the battery every hour, which is only 15% even if I stay at the camp site from 7pm till 10 am the next day. (Obviously this does ramp up in cold weather, but even if it doubles it's still nowhere close to prohibitive.)

My cigarette-lighter-powered cool box is only 48 watts, so that's about 1.5% of the battery for 15 hours. The electric pump doesn't use much, and even the kettle isn't a lot if I only boil as much water as I need.

Only a raving idiot would set up camp with a low battery. I've done it with 50% though, having driven quite a long way from my previous charge-up. That night was quite cold and I had the cool box on as well as the kettle and stuff. When I woke up the battery was on 30%, and by the time I was ready to leave - having deflated the airbed and made a pot of tea for breakfast - it was showing 28%. Google maps told me the distance to the next charging station was 29 miles, which was absolutely fine, and since I was camping at 800 feet and the charger was literally at sea level, it was more than fine.

It's a different mindset. I take on charge for multiple purposes, and it doesn't bother me, out touring, if I spend as much as an hour on a 50 kw charger. I usually manage to make it coincide with lunch. If I'm going to camp, I make damn sure I get to the camp site with enough charge to see me through the night and then get me to the next charging station with a decent amount in hand. There are 50 kw chargers all over the place, and I'm not in a rush.

It certainly gives the lie to all these silly stories (sometimes told by someone who claims actually to have witnessed it) of multiple EVs being stranded with drained batteries due to a traffic jam of only a few hours. Maybe one unwise virgin might have been very low on charge when caught in the jam, but multiple? Even someone on a low SoC only has to turn the car off and forego the heating and entertainment to preserve the charge. An EV doesn't use anything at all if it's turned off. I've left mine in airport car parks for a couple of weeks and more and it's still shown the same % charge when I got back as I left it with. More likely, though, the EV drivers in the traffic jam, if it's really cold, will be able to invite people in ICE cars in to keep warm. People have done tests, and if the car is at a reasonably high SoC to begin with the time it can sit with the heating on is measured in days, not hours.

It's a different mindset, and for me I don't mind the time the car sits on a charger if I'm out gallivanting - whether or not I'm actually camping. If I'm driving a long distance I can do with a 40-minute break after two or three (or even four) hours driving. (On the motorway it might be 2 hours, especially if I'm on my second or subsequent leg and only charged to 85-90%, but on slower roads it can easily be 4 hours before I need a charge.) I'm getting to look forward to the charging stops, as a chance to stretch my legs, maybe have a coffee or (on one occasion) drool over top-of-the-range Teslas in a showroom.

This is a small price to pay, if it's even a price at all, against the normal everyday running situation where the car simply charges while I'm asleep and I never even have to think about charging out on the road.

To some extent it's a luxury of being retired, in that I'm not in a rush when I'm doing a long journey. (It also helps that driving an EV is much less tiring than driving an ICE car.) But if I hadn't been retired I would simply have had to forego the luxury of the easy-to-manage and particularly long-lived LFP battery, and gone for the longer range and faster charging NMC battery, at £2,500 extra. The extra 50 miles range might not be such a big deal, but it charges over twice as fast as the LFP, to the point where many owners are saying that it doesn't give them enough time to get a coffee!

I can see that the arithmetic comes out very differently if you can't charge at home. However if you can, it's such a complete no-brainer. 2p/mile, anyone? And out on the road, anyone who baulks at a 20-minute break after three or four hours on the road is probably a danger to other road users.
 
zooterkin said:
I'm very happy with my e-Niro, and I think the newer Niro ev is less desirable; the features aren't quite as good, and economy is reportedly less good. The ev3 does look rather nice, though my other half isn't keen on the Tesla-style pop-out handles.
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I have similar feelings about our, leased, eNiro. On the Niro ev you and I are again of like mind, I was very disappointed when it was released, because I had thought it would be a natural progression when the eNiro goes back. The EV3 seems to be that progression - better comfort, better mileage, better software
 
Rolfe said:
The eNiro does seem to have a very good reputation. Although I seem to keep coming across examples of the car either running out of charge or very nearly doing it. I'm not quite sure why that should happen.
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I don't know whether to enquire further or remain in blissful ignorance
 
Rolfe said:
When I mention that I have been sleeping in my car with the heating on all night, most people say, but what about your battery?
[...]
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I very much agree with what you wrote here. I can add that when we travel, we also have a dog with us (secure in a harness in the back seat). The charging stops are perfect for a dog walk, even though the mostly are too short. So we often do the quick walk during charging. Then move the car to a regular parking slot so that we do not block a fast charger and then take a longer walk.

Two more benefits from an EV:

When traveling with a dog, the Tesla Dog Mode is wonderful. The ability to leave the car locked, with the AC running and information on the screen is perfect when I need to run into a store to pick something up.

And towing with an EV is also a wonderful experience. Now long distance towing is of course something that takes a long time, with roughly double the consumption you need to charge often. But when maneuvering, the instant torque, and ability to go very slow really is wonderful. I helped a friend get his boat out of the water last weekend. When regular gas cars were struggling to get up the ramp, and really having to rev the motor, with the EV I hardly noticed that the boat was there.
 
Filippo Lippi said:
I don't know whether to enquire further or remain in blissful ignorance
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There's a guy with a YouTube channel, Andrew Till, calls himself "Mr EV", who has made a lot of videos with his eNiro. In two of them, filmed two years apart, he managed to run out of charge and strand himself. Both times the car was showing enough range for what he was trying to do, until it wasn't.

I also have friends who have an eNiro, and twice they have missed orchestra practice (or arrived extremely late) with slightly hair-raising tales of struggling home at 10 mph on their last electron.

I'm a bit hazy about why this should happen, especially with an NMC battery. Is the calibration system poor? Or are people omitting to do the six-monthly <10% to 100% long charge to calibrate it? I've never had this problem. I can drive my car down below 10%, even to 4% a couple of times, and never see anything unexpected in the range predictions.
 
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Ah, that's very interesting regarding the need to nearly deplete the battery in order to ensure the accuracy of the range prediction.

Mrs Don has never taken her battery below 17%. Her FIAT seems to be very pessimistic when it comes to range prediction (better that than the alternative) and seems to forecast a 120 mile range on a full charge when 160+ miles would seem to be nearer the mark based on experience.

Maybe we need to discharge the battery from time to time.
 
I've never heard this thing, but I stopped visiting the EV forum I used to look at. Sceptical about it being a "necessity," rather than a fault with individual models. If the former were true, wouldn't it be part of a service?
 
It's not something that could be done at a service. It's user maintenance.

It's questionable whether you could call it a necessity, the car isn't going to stop working if it's not done, but it's generally a good idea for range calibration. The recommendation is that every few months ("three to six months" according to my car's manual) you run the battery down to below 10%, then charge it up on AC in one continuous charge to 100% and then let it balance there.

The car's range estimate day to day works on coulomb counting, with the system trying to keep track of power in and power out to figure out just how much is in there at any given moment. But over time this becomes less and less accurate as the estimate drifts away from the reality. Imagine a well, and you're trying to estimate how much water is in it by measuring the inflow to the well and counting the number of buckets taken out, but you never see the bottom. Eventually you could be well out, and then one day a lot of buckets are taken out and suddenly you see the actual bottom and it may not be where you thought it was, at all. Hasty re-calibration!

Same with the car. It needs to see the bottom of the well every few months to get back on track. They say to run the battery down to under 10% then leave the car sitting for a couple of hours before starting the charge. Go all the way to 100% in a single AC charge, and leave the cells to balance. That way when you next drive the car down quite low, you shouldn't get a nasty surprise when the car suddenly sees the bottom and tells you you actually have 20 miles less than you thought you had.

It's more important with LFP batteries than with NMC, because the charging curve of LFP is very flat in the middle and the car really can't tell where it is by looking at the voltage, but it seems to be beneficial for NMC batteries too. As far as I can make out, not doing it doesn't harm the battery, but you may get increasingly weird range estimates which will all return to normal when you go through this process.
 
Rolfe said:
It's not something that could be done at a service. It's user maintenance...
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Seems like it could be, fairly conveniently, and if it's important to do it properly then let the garage do it and have a record of its being done. It could be quite quick if the garage requested cars for service be brought in with a low battery rather than charged. First thing to do is run it down* below 10%, then service the rest of the car, then charge it up, or let the customer take it home and do that if they're in a hurry.

* Okay, this would be model-dependent and rely on their being a better way to take power out of the battery than just driving around in circles.
 
Rolfe said:
It's not something that could be done at a service. It's user maintenance.

It's questionable whether you could call it a necessity, the car isn't going to stop working if it's not done, but it's generally a good idea for range calibration. The recommendation is that every few months ("three to six months" according to my car's manual) you run the battery down to below 10%, then charge it up on AC in one continuous charge to 100% and then let it balance there.

...
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Where is this recommendation from?
 
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