My life with an EV - 5 months in.

  • Lee_EONNext's Avatar
    Community Team
    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
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  • 57 Replies

  • meldrewreborn's Avatar
    Level 91
    @Lee_EONNext

    Balanced post - well done. My hybrid uses regenerative breaking and I would expect all EVs to have this . Are you sure yours doesn't?
    Current Eon Next customer, ex EDF, Zog and Symbio. Don't think dual fuel saves money and don't like smart meters. Chronologically Gifted. If I offend let me know by private message, but I’ll continue to express my opinions nonetheless.
  • retrotecchie's Avatar
    Level 92
    @Lee_EONNext

    Good informative post.

    For me, everything in life follows an 80:20 rule. If your lifestyle fits within the 80% and you will only ever dip in to the 20% very rarely, then an EV is a sensible choice. But much of my life is spent in the 20% band where an EV is just not suitable for my needs. Fine for pootling around or the weekly 60 mile round trip to the shops. I don't have a daily work run but when I do work, my shortest round trip is 240 miles and my longest is 700 miles. I could have two or three such trips in a week. The time travelling from A to C via B does not allow for charging and none of my (isolated, for obvious reasons) destinations tend to have anything better than a 13A socket to plug into.

    Last week, I did home to Morpeth (350 miles), two days commuting (240 miles) and then the 350 miles home again. Not possible with an EV, I'm afraid and even if I had added several hours charging time at motorway chargers to top up, the premium prices would have cost me more than the diesel I used. So for me, they aren't viable...yet.
    Don't shoot me, I'm only the piano player. I DON'T work for or on behalf of EON.Next, but am willing to try and help if I can. Not on mains gas, mobile network or mains drainage. House heated almost entirely by baby dragons.
  • Lee_EONNext's Avatar
    Community Team
    @meldrewreborn Thank you, I tried to keep it balanced as with the charging I have 0 patience. It does have that but we forget to change the settings, our car resets every time you turn it off, so it's remembering to do it every time.

    We will be looking at a Hybrid next 100% our lease is another 2 and a half years, the car itself is great.

    Thank you for your reply @meldrewreborn
    Last edited by Lee_EONNext; 08-02-24 at 14:11. Reason: added info
  • retrotecchie's Avatar
    Level 92
    @Lee_EONNext

    I've ruled out hybrids as they tend to use petrol which is a no-no for me. A diesel hybrid, on the other hand...

    Of course, a car I paid cash for (£500 in 2018) and doesn't owe me a penny and is still good for another five years or so makes more economic sense than leasing a newer car for which that £500 might just cover two months lease. Plus, when it does finally bite the dust, I'll probably get more back in parts and scrap than I paid for it!
  • Lee_EONNext's Avatar
    Community Team
    @retrotecchie 100% I had this conversation with our @DebF_EONNext she's miles away from a shop. I live in a small town in Central Beds so everything is within walking distance, it's purely those long trips that the better half has to do for her job.

    Our Eon Drive Charger I should have an update on that this weekend, the company the lease is with are having issues. So ive decided to take matters into my own hands. The car is great, next time we have somethinking to do, hybrid is looking the way forward, however if we get another EV, it will need to have a long range battery.

    I was wanting to talk to you about this, I was wondering if there was anything out there that you could use as a make shift remote charger? You know those Solar Generators you can buy, I was wondering, can that concept work? Has this been done?

    I'd anticipate the connections might be an issue? Dragons Den I think for me 🤣

    I know a man who will know 😂
  • retrotecchie's Avatar
    Level 92
    @Lee_EONNext

    A full day charging with the optional Tesla solar roof in favourable weather will give you fifteen miles additional range. Does that give you a clue?!!

    In peak sun, in the UK, one square metre of polycrystalline PV panel will harvest about 200W of power. In a day, that equates to about 600Wh as the panel will not be optimised for the suns angle. You can get 3kWh from a domestic 13A socket in an hour.
  • geoffers's Avatar
    Level 32
    My take on EVs is ... I'm happy with my hybrid and pretty much against full on EVs.

    A significant proportion of car use is short journeys in urban environments, so a hybrid is ideal for this - cutting down pollution in cities but without the range anxiety for longer journeys. Also, a dedicated charger is probably unnecessary for most people since 8 amps overnight charging from a 3-pin socket is adequate to replenish the battery. (YMMV)

    EV's may not be particularly green when you take into account manufacturing; battery production plus the rare earth metals required for these etc etc

    Toyota's CEO reckons EVs will never make more than 30% of car usage - particularly in 3rd world countries - with other technologies being developed to reduce CO² emissions.

    Interesting & quite worrying first responder conference on Li-Ion batteries : Professor Paul Christensen's opening slide is "Lithium ion batteries are thermally unstable and shouldn't exist" 😲 https://youtu.be/AIXTP-TgPEw
    Last edited by geoffers; 08-02-24 at 18:05.
  • retrotecchie's Avatar
    Level 92
    I think we're being led down a "green" route by our political masters

    Au contraire. The Conservatives have very much backed off as they've backtracked on the ban on sales of diesel and petrol cars by five years, are still granting licences for North Sea oil and gas exploration and have decided not to fine boiler manufacturers for not selling heat pumps that no-one wants. Yesterday Labour announced that their '28 Billion a year for green projects' ain't gonna happen. Likely to be less than half of that in their first term, if they get in.

    As for lithium batteries, they are rather like uranium 235. Fine in small quantities but when you stack enough together in close proximity to make a 'critical mass'....
    Last edited by retrotecchie; 08-02-24 at 14:54.
  • Lee_EONNext's Avatar
    Community Team
    @geoffers I read a lot about this, I tried to stay away from that in the post and just focus on how it's effected me directly, not that climate change and being green does'nt effect me because we all can be better with our carbon footprints, more than others, It was on my mind and did consider discussing so its great you have brought this up.

    I never thought we would own an EV to be honest, however the opportunity was there and our Car had been written off, someone decided to crash into the side of the car whilst it was parked. We had a hire car for a bit and then we got the EV.

    We have already discussed cancelling the agreement or changing to a Diesel Hybrid, just to have the flexibility of both.