Thanks Dan. We have found a borne de recharge just up the road for €0.28 per kWh.
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I look forward to hearing how your tale ends when you get home and get the car fixed under warranty. The dealer’s comments don’t sound helpful to say the least.
I know you will sort it all out!
It should be them saying don’t worry Mr HH We will fix it all on your arrival home!
It’s all under warranty anyhow. What’s their issue?
That is one great looking vehicle !
As time goes by and more of us adopt EV’s, I really hope we can start to simply enjoy them as cars, without labelling them as EV or fossil-fuelled. Just like that eternal Android vs IOS debate, there’s no ultimate winner - but there is room for both.
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It’s going all electric as far as I can see. Once you change you won’t go back. Mine costs nothing at all to run so far as VW did a deal with OVO energy. OVO gave me £220 up front and charge 7p per kWh home charging.
It’s easier to drive, less to go wrong, brakes barely get used as when you release the acceleration pedal it starts to brake. They have drum brakes on rear as there is so little wear and that’s with my 286 bhp.
I will consider an electric van when my van lease comes up. Not sure yet!
The only thing is at the.moment you need a driveway where you can charge it as furl stations are still too pricey. If you live in a flat or road without driveways you can’t make it work just yet!
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Drum brakes on the rear for EVs are a good idea in my view. We have an MG ZS EV going back nxt month, and after 14k miles the disc brakes on the rear were trashed and needed to be replaced due to lack of use really. A low use drum brake is not going to suffer as much from the elements as a disc brake.
Our next EV is a VW Group Skoda Elroq and has the same drum brakes as the ID.4
All is not lost if you can park outside ones terraced house and the local council are willing to give permission you can get a covered groove cut in the pathway to take a charging cable. It is not so easy to get around if you live in a block of flats unless the organisation that manage the parking areas are willing to put in charging posts in the parking bays. Unfortunatly not many want to do that just yet.
Hi Bruce,
Yes, I was aware of the recall and the slightly disasterous launch with very conservative battery management software algorithms, however Toyota seem to have got their act together quite quickly and addressed the issues with both hardware and software changes before we bought ours.
Brg,
JonathanG
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I have seen it said that it is a good idea to use the brakes every now and then.
Yes, well, they know that if they do that then the whole building will burn down within a few days.
Here in Asgard we use Polestar 2 LR MY 25 and BMW i4 35 MY24. Both fab.
It works well HH. We have similar in Asgaard. Runs Bifrost too!
Argyle-Mikey,
Thanks so much for the kind words! I recall about 3 years ago being at my local Toyota dealer picking up my GT86 from a routine service and while I waited to collect it I wandered over to the Rav 4 in the showroom to have a look at it as a potential replacement for our then Mitsubishi Outlander. My eyes were drawn to the even more stylish and futuristic looking SUV next to it which turned out to be the BZ4X. I had no idea how it was powered and knew nothing about it, but I was smitten right there and then and loved it from the minute I set eyes on it!
At £45-£50k it was far outside my price range at the time, but thanks to the rapid depreciation on EV’s we’ve ended up getting into one much sooner than I might have expected! 3200 miles, 11 months old and £26k! If we service with Toyota that gives us 9 years of warranty remaining and they guarantee the battery for 650 000 miles and ten years…
As others here have said EV’s only really work in the UK if you can charge at home thanks to the utterly ludicrous costs of charging on the move at superchargers. At 79-87p per kWh you’d be looking at around £55-£65 to charge up the average family sized EV in the UK - and most will only do around 250-300 miles on that, so it works out 50-100% more expensive per mile than diesel or petrol. Frankly, I think the government should step in and either cap prices for public EV charging or set up its own rival power company to undercut the majors and bring market prices down - there’s simply no justification for that level of monopolistic price gouging!
I see Norway which is far ahead off the rest of the world in EV adoption has hit 90% of all new cars sales in 2024 being EV’s. I wonder if any Norwegian readers can report back on how much it costs to use public chargers over there? If you want to watch EV reviews I have found Bjorn Nyland’s youtube channel very enjoyable and informative to watch. He’s a slightly eccentric Thai guy who lives in Norway and his approach to reviewing cars is quite different to everyone else. He takes vehicles on a 1000km drive usually through the night and chats about them as he takes you along on his road trip… It sounds simple and boring, but I find it surprisingly relaxing and entertaining telly to watch and he can be very funny.
The only network in the UK I have found that is significantly cheaper, especially if you pay for their £9.99 a month club membership is Tesla. I might not like Elon as a man, but he has done more than anyone on the planet to make EV ownership viable and practical for the masses, Indeed, that may turn out to be his greatest legacy.
As you say, hopefully one day soon we won’t bother to distinguish how a vehicle is powered, merely if it is a good vehicle. EV’s seem to be really coming of age now though and the technology, charging speed and range continues to improve quite dramatically. The danger of that is that whatever you buy right now, there will always be a better car just around the corner. At some point you have to dive in rather than endlessly waiting. Given my lengthy commute of around 90 miles I felt that anything with a 200 miles+ range was fine and perfectly usable. Most of my road trips tend to be under 400 miles in a day and so that means having to stop and charge once which is perfectly acceptable provided you can get from say 10-80% charge and have a coffee and comfort break in around 30 minutes. That is basically par for the course today.
There are new battery technologies on the horizon which will give 500-600 miles of range and the Chinese are bringing cars to market with ultra fast charging architectures which can charge from 10-80% in under 15 minutes. It’s a fast moving industry right now!
What I do find intriguing is Toyota and BMW’s world view which seems to think Hydrogen and not BEV is the future. They’re far better placed than I am to assess this, but I find it very hard to believe they are right… EV’s are better already than any fossil fuel powered car in many ways. A colleague at work has just ordered the Xiaomi SU7 Ultra which has 1500hp, hits 60mph in under 2 seconds and is far faster than any Ferrari, McLaren or Porsche around the Nurburgring, but costs under £100k. That’s bordering on absurd, especially considering it’s being built by a company best known for building telephones!
The pace of innovation in BEV technology is genuinely staggering… The limitations are more to do with the infrastructure than the vehicles themselves.
JonathanG
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Yes it is what’s your point?
Why?
Use your brakes so that they don’t get pitted with rust, and they will last longer. If you drive gently and use regen - which means that your brakes hardly ever get used - then they will deteriorate. Using them can avoid that.
The anti-EV brigade thinks that EVs will spontaneously burst into flames, particularly when in a garage, and especially while being charged. Why? I have no idea. They seem to think that EVs are a huge fire hazard.
I did use the brakes. My point was no theory but a real world event and personal experience. The MG garage I took it too said it was a regular job for them. The rear brakes just do not get used enough.
True some dumb people do.
Yet, they think it is just fine to pipe highly flammable gas into a building when there is evidence that gas leaks cause houses to explode into quite small pieces.
I thought that the garage said that the brakes had not been used enough…
Some EVs I believe have a brake care system that applies them intermittently (presumably during regen or just very subtly) to avoid the disuse/rust issue. Presumably not MG.
Bruce
I don’t think I said that but the ZS EV systems clearly do not use the rear brakes enough. Other makes do not seem to suffer from the issue as much. I do think this as I mentioned this is where drum brakes on the rear is a reasonable solution to the issue they have better protection from the elements.
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