Hey Everyone,
Lets Talk about my experience with an Electric Car. ⚡🚙
A lot of what you read in this post will be my experiences and my personal opinions, it would be great to hear your personal experiences with your EV's too?
My Family are petrol heads, My Grand Dad, My Dad, My Uncle and a couple of my Cousins are mechanics. I've always preferred 2 wheels over 4, I'm sure some can understand this, the wind rushing through your hair whilst you cook inside your protective gear. The rain too! you can't see a thing because the rain is splashing against your visor and headlights make it impossible to see 🤣 Ride safe everyone. Enough about that,
My Partner was given the option through her work to lease an Electric Vehicle. So we took the option. Will we lease another? Answer at the end 👇
My honest opinion on EV's is i'm still on the fence, my only critique is the charging speed, this is because we're so used to petrol, rocking up, paying at the pump, filling up and leaving, busy lives and all that.
I found the acceleration incredible and it shocked me, it's fairly nice inside too, decent boot space and clean, in terms of clutter. Has a couple of screens etc. Most of the EV's are nice inside to be fair, I like basic, minimal clutter, everything on the digital screen is a win for me, I know lots of Car's have these, not just EV's
So we went for the MG4, we were deciding between this and the Mini EV, range and number of doors were the deciding factor, anyone who has small children knows a 3 door can be restrictive, there were no Tesla's all out of stock. Everything so far is great, not having engine breaking and having something basically assist this took some getting used too but you can adjust this in the settings. Talking with friends who have EV's it seems these settings are on all of them? Like the engine recovery mode, power save etc.
There are lots of settings on EV's doing some research a lot of these are standard, some have extra and some don't. One thing we found is daily you have to set these settings, which you can forget to do. This could be specific to our make and model.
Battery
64kw is what we have. Is this enough?
So range is massive here, how far can you go before you need to top up, or fully charge.
Our car does around 225 on a full charge, we found this a little less because everything uses the battery, the centre console, the heating, AC, the lights, even the brightness of your console screen can deplete your battery. The little things like charging your phone, again affect battery life.
Popping the screen in dark mode, having the brightness down, can make more of a difference than you think. In the Winter months, expect your battery to drain even more, heating, unless you want to pop on some thermals and an extra jumper? (Like my Dad suggested) It's not that bad.
Charging
A charger at home isn't essential however it will make life so much easier, you'd be surprised by the amount of people I know who have an EV without a charger. We had to wait, still waiting, however it was manageable without. I would get one asap if you can. We went to Norfolk once, which is a good 140 mile round trip and this is where I had first experienced something negative.
We should have our charger by the end of Feb/March there has been a little delay.
So with our range, we needed to find a charger at some point. We set off with 100% finding a charger is easy enough, i'm quite prepared so I had a list of locations on the way etc...... Here was the issue later that day, every charger we went to, was either busy or out of order. You have to wait for the chargers to be reset, and try again.
We found a station full of fast chargers, you can see on an App what is exactly in use.
The chargers we have come across usually range from 7kw - 50kw at your local charging points. On this occasion there were chargers up to 120kw, usually the 120kw is not beneficial for us as it's over double our battery, another 30 min charge and we were on our way. You just have to think, of your next charge all the time, if you're out and about. We often use the 22kw chargers, they keep ours topped up and its 2-3 hours to a full charge. This is why i'm on the fence.
There is a company in China who have charging swap stations, I would really love this type of tech here, you drive in and have the battery swapped for a fully charged one, it takes 5 mins.
So you can see charging the car on the slower charger will take some time, we often pop around town while it's charging or do the food shop if we need to. Most of the time it's charged at the Office and topped up on long journeys at home.
Charging is my only critique atm if you take away the engine sound, to some this is enough to put them off.
Summary of our life with an EV
There have been a few occasions where it's not been ideal however on the whole its been a good experience.
Will we opt for another EV? Possibly, if we do the battery will have to be on the larger size so we don't have to charge as much using public chargers and the cost of that.
Charging at home and the EV Tariff rates are key for me, we are slightly better off financially leasing the car so there is that to take into consideration.
Let me know if you have an EV? What EV do you have? Are you on an EV tariff?
Fancy a chat about anything above? Be sure to tag me
Lets Talk about my experience with an Electric Car. ⚡🚙
A lot of what you read in this post will be my experiences and my personal opinions, it would be great to hear your personal experiences with your EV's too?
My Family are petrol heads, My Grand Dad, My Dad, My Uncle and a couple of my Cousins are mechanics. I've always preferred 2 wheels over 4, I'm sure some can understand this, the wind rushing through your hair whilst you cook inside your protective gear. The rain too! you can't see a thing because the rain is splashing against your visor and headlights make it impossible to see 🤣 Ride safe everyone. Enough about that,
My Partner was given the option through her work to lease an Electric Vehicle. So we took the option. Will we lease another? Answer at the end 👇
My honest opinion on EV's is i'm still on the fence, my only critique is the charging speed, this is because we're so used to petrol, rocking up, paying at the pump, filling up and leaving, busy lives and all that.
I found the acceleration incredible and it shocked me, it's fairly nice inside too, decent boot space and clean, in terms of clutter. Has a couple of screens etc. Most of the EV's are nice inside to be fair, I like basic, minimal clutter, everything on the digital screen is a win for me, I know lots of Car's have these, not just EV's
So we went for the MG4, we were deciding between this and the Mini EV, range and number of doors were the deciding factor, anyone who has small children knows a 3 door can be restrictive, there were no Tesla's all out of stock. Everything so far is great, not having engine breaking and having something basically assist this took some getting used too but you can adjust this in the settings. Talking with friends who have EV's it seems these settings are on all of them? Like the engine recovery mode, power save etc.
There are lots of settings on EV's doing some research a lot of these are standard, some have extra and some don't. One thing we found is daily you have to set these settings, which you can forget to do. This could be specific to our make and model.
Battery
64kw is what we have. Is this enough?
So range is massive here, how far can you go before you need to top up, or fully charge.
Our car does around 225 on a full charge, we found this a little less because everything uses the battery, the centre console, the heating, AC, the lights, even the brightness of your console screen can deplete your battery. The little things like charging your phone, again affect battery life.
Popping the screen in dark mode, having the brightness down, can make more of a difference than you think. In the Winter months, expect your battery to drain even more, heating, unless you want to pop on some thermals and an extra jumper? (Like my Dad suggested) It's not that bad.
Charging
A charger at home isn't essential however it will make life so much easier, you'd be surprised by the amount of people I know who have an EV without a charger. We had to wait, still waiting, however it was manageable without. I would get one asap if you can. We went to Norfolk once, which is a good 140 mile round trip and this is where I had first experienced something negative.
We should have our charger by the end of Feb/March there has been a little delay.
So with our range, we needed to find a charger at some point. We set off with 100% finding a charger is easy enough, i'm quite prepared so I had a list of locations on the way etc...... Here was the issue later that day, every charger we went to, was either busy or out of order. You have to wait for the chargers to be reset, and try again.
We found a station full of fast chargers, you can see on an App what is exactly in use.
The chargers we have come across usually range from 7kw - 50kw at your local charging points. On this occasion there were chargers up to 120kw, usually the 120kw is not beneficial for us as it's over double our battery, another 30 min charge and we were on our way. You just have to think, of your next charge all the time, if you're out and about. We often use the 22kw chargers, they keep ours topped up and its 2-3 hours to a full charge. This is why i'm on the fence.
There is a company in China who have charging swap stations, I would really love this type of tech here, you drive in and have the battery swapped for a fully charged one, it takes 5 mins.
So you can see charging the car on the slower charger will take some time, we often pop around town while it's charging or do the food shop if we need to. Most of the time it's charged at the Office and topped up on long journeys at home.
Charging is my only critique atm if you take away the engine sound, to some this is enough to put them off.
Summary of our life with an EV
There have been a few occasions where it's not been ideal however on the whole its been a good experience.
Will we opt for another EV? Possibly, if we do the battery will have to be on the larger size so we don't have to charge as much using public chargers and the cost of that.
Charging at home and the EV Tariff rates are key for me, we are slightly better off financially leasing the car so there is that to take into consideration.
Let me know if you have an EV? What EV do you have? Are you on an EV tariff?
Fancy a chat about anything above? Be sure to tag me
Last edited by Anasa_EONNext; 08-02-24 at 17:50.
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