Battery capacity!

[Mkycdf]

When I got my car in march, it had a full charge of 301 miles. After about 3 full charge over about a month, my maximum mileage is 291-5! Anyone know how I can get it back to the capacity of 301? 🤔🙄

[ernieb]

Possibly the car working the range based on your driving style, current temperatures etc.?

[Mkycdf]

To be honest, there have been occasions where I have accelerated hard! (Instant torque) 🤔🙄

[Cyker]

In the EV world that range is known as the GOM - Guess-o-meter. It is literally a guess - Don't take it as gospel.

The fact that it's gone down is not because the car has 'lost' range, but more likely it's revising its guess to be more accurate based on how it's been driven and some sort of internal running average on how much energy it's needed to go a certain distance.

The only way to get it to go 'up' is to drive more efficiently, but realistically I doubt you'd ever get 300 miles out of it unless you drained the Battery to the point it's getting damaged, or had a particularly favourable down-hill run.

Also just to prepare yourself, note that as we head towards winter, it will begin to drop quite alarmingly, but this is also normal so don't panic! It's not unusual for EVs to lose up to a third of their range in winter, as the batteries loose capacity when they are cold and more energy gets diverted for things other than propulsion (e.g. heating!) - Even the hybrids get hit by that to a certain extent.

It's one gripe I have with EV advertising, as the rated ranges of current EVs is as misleading as the rated mpg under the old NEDC system - It's literally the best range the car can have under ideal conditions and, like the old mpg ratings, is virtually unattainable in the real world.

If they'd quoted ranges at a sustained 70mph or in winter it would be less misleading...

[Mister Mike]

Cardiff is currently quite warm, like much of the UK.

Cold weather can reduce the driving range, but so will very hot weather. 20 degrees C seems the be the sweet spot. Today, even with A/C turned off, my car was pumping cool air like crazy into the interior.

[Paul john]

1 hour ago, Mister Mike said:

Cardiff is currently quite warm, like much of the UK.

Cold weather can reduce the driving range, but so will very hot weather. 20 degrees C seems the be the sweet spot. Today, even with A/C turned off, my car was pumping cool air like crazy into the interior.

Essex was fairly damn warm today at 34.

def not a no ac moment.

[TonyHSD]

Imagine you buy a car £40k+ and keep ac or heating off just to save few miles range ? These ranges are impossible anyway and if you drive long miles the car will probably die well before projected miles when Battery is full. 

In any car , any type of fuel the hvac settings should be 22C° , AC ON, Auto mode selected. Then we are talking about range, performance, drivability. 👍

[Gray86]

Unless you need 300 miles (let’s face it if you can charge at home or have a normal bladder) a range beyond 160 miles is largely irrelevant. 
 

battery’s degrade by around 5% in their first year (on average) so what you may be seeing there is first bit of degradation. Good news is the next 5% will take a long time to depart 

[Cyker]

Speak for yourself! I'm not going anywhere near an EV until they can do over 300 miles at 70mph in winter in something the size of a Yaris...

I want a vehicle that I can just jump in and go to anywhere I want on a whim, I don't want to have to pre-plan every slightly unusual journey I make!

Otherwise what's the point? You may as well use public transport!

[Gray86]

On 8/13/2024 at 9:09 PM, Cyker said:

Speak for yourself! I'm not going anywhere near an EV until they can do over 300 miles at 70mph in winter in something the size of a Yaris...

I want a vehicle that I can just jump in and go to anywhere I want on a whim, I don't want to have to pre-plan every slightly unusual journey I make!

Otherwise what's the point? You may as well use public transport!

Because can you do over 300 miles non-stop? If you can, I’d be very impressed with the size of your erm. . .bladder. 
 

in EVs range = money, and weight. 
 

If you regularly do a range beyond the Battery (assuming you can charge at home at 7p/kwh) then ( Tesla aside) you would have to suffer the public charging network which isn’t great, but if only once or twice a year you go on a whim drive to the middle of no where, then it may be a worthwhile compromise. Motoring at 1.2-1.8p / mile, waking up every day to a full ‘tank’, the smoothness, quietness, and performance of an EV trumps any petrol. 
 

My wife’s Seat Mii electric is a hoot to drive, so nippy off the line surprising many cars at the traffic light Grand Prix, and costs a little over 1p a mile. Feels like we are beating the system with it. 

[Mkycdf]

I wish I was only paying that per KWh! Mine is something like 26.8p per KWh!!

[Cyker]

48 minutes ago, Gray86 said:

Because can you do over 300 miles non-stop? If you can, I’d be very impressed with the size of your erm. . .bladder. 
 

in EVs range = money, and weight. 
 

If you regularly do a range beyond the battery (assuming you can charge at home at 7p/kwh) then ( Tesla aside) you would have to suffer the public charging network which isn’t great, but if only once or twice a year you go on a whim drive to the middle of no where, then it may be a worthwhile compromise. Motoring at 1.8p / mile, waking up every day to a full ‘tank’, the smoothness, quietness, and performance of an EV trumps any petrol. 

I can generally go 3-4 hours in one go, but 300 miles isn't that much if you're on a road trip, but this misses the point, i.e. that I don't want to have to pre-plan a journey if I just want to spontaneously go somewhere.

I semi-regularly do 200-250 mile round trips, i.e. 100-125 up and back (Used to be more regular but less so lately alas!), where crucially there is no charging at the destination before I return (And likely never will unless they start putting charge points in the middle of fields), and being able to do the whole thing, even in coldest winter with a load of mates in the car and all our gear, without having to also go out of my way *just* to charge and potentially adding 30-60 minutes to the journey, is a must.

This is the difficult hurdle EVs have to overcome before they will see widespread adoption, and is something EV people don't seem to understand - If you want people to pay so much more for a vehicle, it has to be *better* than their current car in all the areas that matter, and right now they just aren't.

I think it's coming, if these amazing Battery breakthroughs ever make it to market, as that is literally the only thing holding EVs back, but I reckon we're still 5-10 years away from that point.

At the moment, the only scenario where they make sense over normal cars is a) If you can charge at home (Which I currently can't), b) If 95% of your journeys are within the range of the car (Of which current EVs, maybe 70% of my journeys)

Neither of these criteria are fulfilled in my case, and on top of that they are all significantly larger than my Yaris Mk4, which is already on the limit for size for me (If I could fit this drivetrain into a Mk2 Yaris it would be my perfect car  )

And just for context, 300 miles range is a *big* concession from me on my line-in-the-sand requirements - I was used to being able to do *600* miles on a single tank when I still had my Mk1 D4D! (God I miss that car sometimes!!), but I'm realistic in that there is no way an EV the size of a Yaris is going to be physically capable of such range unless there is some monumental electrical storage breakthrough or they legalize nuclear-powered cars  

TBH I didn't even think it was that much to ask, but the fact that we're still not there in real life, only in theoretical (i.e. BS), is just sad considering how long I've been waiting... If the people hyping up EVs back then had been telling the truth I'd be in one now, but almost nothing they'd promised has materialized and progress has stagnated, with EVs just getting bigger and less efficient instead of smaller and more efficient because nobody knows how to make one properly.

The bar for me getting an EV is much higher now because my Mk4 is such a good car - I'm on 9-10p/mile roughly atm and I think very few EVs can or will be able to beat that outside of home charging, unless the cost of electricity drops to where it was before and charger companies stop gouging us (I'm sorry but these 70-90p/kWh rapid chargers are just taking the ****), esp. as the average efficiency of newer EVs has dropped to 2.5-3miles/kWh, whereas they should be over 5miles/kWh at this point!

I'm hopeful I'll see something materialize that is clearly better, but I'm not going to buy a car that's worse than what I have.

This is why I skipped the Mk3 Yaris Hybrid, as my Mk1 D4D destroyed it for mpg and running costs, and was a fraction of the cost; It took Toyota *20 years* to make a hybrid that could beat the Mk1 D4D, so it's not a stretch that it will take EVs a similar time frame to beat my Mk4...

 

The idea of having a 'full tank' every morning does appeal to me though, and the eventual goal is to get my own house so I can stick solar panels and a charger point on it that I can charge my theoretical EV from...!

I just need to find all the idiots who are somehow paying a million quid for normal crappy houses in London and find a way to get rid of them so they stop pushing all the house prices up!   

 

[Gray86]

23 hours ago, Mkycdf said:

I wish I was only paying that per KWh! Mine is something like 26.8p per KWh!!

Intelligent octopus Go tariff - you need either an Ohme or Zappi charger to connect to octopus, as the BZ isn’t directly compatible 

[Gray86]

22 hours ago, Cyker said:

I can generally go 3-4 hours in one go, but 300 miles isn't that much if you're on a road trip, but this misses the point, i.e. that I don't want to have to pre-plan a journey if I just want to spontaneously go somewhere.

I semi-regularly do 200-250 mile round trips, i.e. 100-125 up and back (Used to be more regular but less so lately alas!), where crucially there is no charging at the destination before I return (And likely never will unless they start putting charge points in the middle of fields), and being able to do the whole thing, even in coldest winter with a load of mates in the car and all our gear, without having to also go out of my way *just* to charge and potentially adding 30-60 minutes to the journey, is a must.

This is the difficult hurdle EVs have to overcome before they will see widespread adoption, and is something EV people don't seem to understand - If you want people to pay so much more for a vehicle, it has to be *better* than their current car in all the areas that matter, and right now they just aren't.

I think it's coming, if these amazing battery breakthroughs ever make it to market, as that is literally the only thing holding EVs back, but I reckon we're still 5-10 years away from that point.

At the moment, the only scenario where they make sense over normal cars is a) If you can charge at home (Which I currently can't), b) If 95% of your journeys are within the range of the car (Of which current EVs, maybe 70% of my journeys)

Neither of these criteria are fulfilled in my case, and on top of that they are all significantly larger than my Yaris Mk4, which is already on the limit for size for me (If I could fit this drivetrain into a Mk2 Yaris it would be my perfect car  )

And just for context, 300 miles range is a *big* concession from me on my line-in-the-sand requirements - I was used to being able to do *600* miles on a single tank when I still had my Mk1 D4D! (God I miss that car sometimes!!), but I'm realistic in that there is no way an EV the size of a Yaris is going to be physically capable of such range unless there is some monumental electrical storage breakthrough or they legalize nuclear-powered cars  

TBH I didn't even think it was that much to ask, but the fact that we're still not there in real life, only in theoretical (i.e. BS), is just sad considering how long I've been waiting... If the people hyping up EVs back then had been telling the truth I'd be in one now, but almost nothing they'd promised has materialized and progress has stagnated, with EVs just getting bigger and less efficient instead of smaller and more efficient because nobody knows how to make one properly.

The bar for me getting an EV is much higher now because my Mk4 is such a good car - I'm on 9-10p/mile roughly atm and I think very few EVs can or will be able to beat that outside of home charging, unless the cost of electricity drops to where it was before and charger companies stop gouging us (I'm sorry but these 70-90p/kWh rapid chargers are just taking the ****), esp. as the average efficiency of newer EVs has dropped to 2.5-3miles/kWh, whereas they should be over 5miles/kWh at this point!

I'm hopeful I'll see something materialize that is clearly better, but I'm not going to buy a car that's worse than what I have.

This is why I skipped the Mk3 Yaris Hybrid, as my Mk1 D4D destroyed it for mpg and running costs, and was a fraction of the cost; It took Toyota *20 years* to make a hybrid that could beat the Mk1 D4D, so it's not a stretch that it will take EVs a similar time frame to beat my Mk4...

 

The idea of having a 'full tank' every morning does appeal to me though, and the eventual goal is to get my own house so I can stick solar panels and a charger point on it that I can charge my theoretical EV from...!

I just need to find all the idiots who are somehow paying a million quid for normal crappy houses in London and find a way to get rid of them so they stop pushing all the house prices up!   

 

I understand your position now, and it really is only Tesla that alows you to put in your destination (and home again ) and the car just works it all out with minimal charging which in reality matches a brief toilet stop & stretch of the legs. and a Tesla isn’t for everyone. 
 

Battery tech & range will improve, although your home charging is limited to 7kw (or 22kw if you have 3-phase). There are now plenty of genuine 300 mile EVs out there, but they are all large family cars - not Yaris sized. I recon that having a Battery that you can charge overnight at home and do around 300 miles is probably the sweet spot for most people. Anything more is just going to be heavy, and therefore inefficient as well as expensive (and take too long to charge).  
 

my wife’s Mii Electric will do 6-8m/kwh in summer, and 4-5 in winter ( blame the PTC heater in lieu of a heat pump). My Tesla Model Y long range will do 270 miles on the motorway, or 300 in mixed driving (even with 5 people & luggage on board - in summer at least). 
 

most public rapid chargers are 79p/kwh standardised, but a few at 80+p, which I point blank refuse to pay (as Tesla chargers offer 250kw at 26-44p depending on location & time of day). Even in my large & heavy Model Y, I can do 9-10p / mile using Tesla’s infrastructure, and is actually cheaper to run than my old Corolla in those circumstances - not that I use superchargers any more than I need to when charging at home is so cheap. 

[Mkycdf]

50 minutes ago, Gray86 said:

Intelligent octopus Go tariff - you need either an Ohme or Zappi charger to connect to octopus, as the BZ isn’t directly compatible 

I have an Ohme pro and. I’m on OVO/SSE prepay!

[Mkycdf]

37 minutes ago, Gray86 said:

I understand your position now, and it really is only Tesla that alows you to put in your destination (and home again ) and the car just works it all out with minimal charging which in reality matches a brief toilet stop & stretch of the legs. and a Tesla isn’t for everyone. 
 

battery tech & range will improve, although your home charging is limited to 7kw (or 22kw if you have 3-phase). There are now plenty of genuine 300 mile EVs out there, but they are all large family cars - not Yaris sized. I recon that having a battery that you can charge overnight at home and do around 300 miles is probably the sweet spot for most people. Anything more is just going to be heavy, and therefore inefficient as well as expensive (and take too long to charge).  
 

my wife’s Mii Electric will do 6-8m/kwh in summer, and 4-5 in winter ( blame the PTC heater in lieu of a heat pump). My Tesla Model Y long range will do 270 miles on the motorway, or 300 in mixed driving (even with 5 people & luggage on board - in summer at least). 
 

most public rapid chargers are 79p/kwh standardised, but a few at 80+p, which I point blank refuse to pay (as Tesla chargers offer 250kw at 26-44p depending on location & time of day). Even in my large & heavy Model Y, I can do 9-10p / mile using Tesla’s infrastructure, and is actually cheaper to run than my old Corolla in those circumstances - not that I use superchargers any more than I need to when charging at home is so cheap. 

To be fair, both the in car navi and Waze can work out when and where I need to charge on any journey!

[Gray86]

34 minutes ago, Mkycdf said:

I have an Ohme pro and. I’m on OVO/SSE prepay!

If you fancy octopus, I can share my referral code 😀

[Andy BZ4x]

Octopus Go works with all chargers, I use POD point, i just set the schedule in my Podpoint app to charge between 00.30 & 05.30 every day. this isn't the 'intelligent' option, but works fine.

[Gray86]

11 hours ago, Andy BZ4x said:

Octopus Go works with all chargers, I use POD point, i just set the schedule in my Podpoint app to charge between 00.30 & 05.30 every day. this isn't the 'intelligent' option, but works fine.

That’s correct. Intelligent gives you an extra hour, but wants to control the car or the charger - which is overall beneficial as it often gives you cheaper charging outside of those core hours, which covers the whole house too