Random EV thoughts.....

“The site is strategically placed on the A56 and has eight dedicated ultra-rapid 150kW EV charging bays”

Is J14 Mayfield still in testing? Esb rollout seems to have slowed to a complete halt, especially when it comes to hubs.

J14 is not sorted. I see on plugshare people reporting slow speeds. I noticed when a car is connected on the 350kW side the 200kW turns red. I bet we won't hear anything about a new hubs unless these issues are resolved. Also there is one smaller hub with the units installed since March and not powered up. https://www.plugshare.com/location/34914. The Porlaoise 150kW unit still limited @50kW.

Depends on a lot of factors, including how much the car is driven, how often it's charged and to what level it's charged and discharged

To give you an idea of what to expect, most EVs now come with a battery warranty of 8 years and some mileage limit, 160,000km seems standard

The warranty is that the battery will not experience higher than expected degredation over this time period. If that does happen then they need to replace the battery at no cost to you

At the end of this period, the car will likely still have the majority of its battery capacity, assuming it's been reasonably well looked after. So it's far from useless, if you started with a 400km range EV, and it loses a fairly drastic 20% over 8 years, then you still have a 320km EV

Another way of looking at it is to check older EVs. The Leafs from 2011 are largely still going but many have lost a good bit of capacity, close to 40% in some cases. They're pretty much worst case as the Leaf doesn't have battery cooling that most modern EVs have.

Older Tesla's are also generally going strong without any real degredation issues. Tesla are talking about batteries that can last for over a million miles on some of their cars

To answer your question of "is it like a phone battery?", the answer is no, phone batteries are treated way worse. Batteries in phones are typically exposed to hot and cold temperatures, they have no real cooling systems, they're charged to maximum capacity and discharged to empty.

All of this accelerates degredation and means your phone battery often loses a big chunk of capacity after 3 years. Having said that, I'm typing this on a 5 year old phone which usually lasts the day on a charge 😁

EV batteries are basically the same technology, but they have way more safeguards to stop them overheating, freezing, being discharged to empty of charged too fast. This is how they last much longer than typical phone batteries

Thanks folks, appreciate the info

And the other one the same

I never answered your second question about getting a replacement battery

Short version, unless it's a warranty replacement, it's not really worth it

In technical terms, replacing the battery is simple enough:

1. Lift car
2. Unscrew battery bolts under car
3. Battery drops out (have something ready to catch it, it weighs 200-300kg 😀)
4. Put new battery in and connect it
5. Reprogram BMS for new battery via CAN Bus adaptor (there's programs to do this via a laptop or phone)
6. Drop car

Obviously lifting a car and heavy battery isn't easy, but it's something most mechanics could potentially do, there's no great science to it

In addition, battery packs are often compatible between cars of similar brands

• All Nissan Leafs have the same size and shape pack, there have been examples of older Leafs being upgraded to 40kWh or 62kWh pack
• All VW ID cars use the same battery pack, the only difference is the number of cells. In theory you could take a small battery ID.3 and add more cells to bring it up to the biggest battery size

Now comes the tricky question, is any of this worth it?

Unless you get the new battery for a low price and are willing to do the work yourself so the labour is free, then it isn't worth it

There are companies that will replace and upgrade battery packs for you. Cheapest seems to be €6,990 to upgrade a Leaf 24kWh to 30kWh, that's if you let them keep the old battery to resell

Considering you can buy a 24kWh Leaf for around €5k these days, and a 30kWh one for around €11k, that doesn't seem like much of a bargain. It also probably wouldn't raise the resale value and would have insurance implications since the car has been modified (some companies say a battery replacement is minor works but that refers to the 12v battery on all cars)

So unless you really like your current EV and want to give it a longer life, and have access to a car lift and you're fairly handy with mechanics, then battery swaps aren't really worthwhile

Have discovered an issue with work chargers, and was wondering if anyone would have any thoughts on what might be causing it?

We had a single charge point installed a few years ago, a ChargePoint one. It's display says it's an 11kw one and I noticed it charges my Leaf at 3.3.

Have now got more points in, and their display shows them as 22kw ones. But my Leaf constantly interrupts charging after a minute or two. Seems to start ok. Tried couple of the chargers and all doing the same.

The old one still working fine. So that would rule out the timer charging that I am overriding etc. If it works on one, should work on the other. Talking to work colleagues the new chargers are working for them without issues.

So why might the new ones be interrupting?

Based on what you’ve described I’d say it’s the charge points, not your car.

is your leaf 6.6kW? Maybe the new charge points dont like that being pulled on one phase.

any of the others users got a Leaf? If not, do you know anyone that could try one?

How are you guys measuring the degradation on your batteries?

I just got an OBD dongle to use with Carscanner and according to the app the SOH of my battery is 100%.

Is that it, or am I missing something?

Depends on car, ioniq typically shows 100% up to and above 160,000km but that can't be 100% true as there has to be some degredation, Hyundai and presumably Kia hide the true value and use some of the extra battery buffer. It's like the car starts with 110% and only drops below 100% when it's actually degraded 10%. I am typically a bit suspicious of reported by car degredation as it has warranty and reputation implications and Nissan released BMS updates which suddenly reports the battery improved, which can't be true, but they claim they just fixed a bug. I would say the truth is that they decided to show higher values to prevent battery warranty claims, and allow the battery to drain more to zero % so giving a bit more range. I know Tesla have different battery sizes in the exact same cars, so the extra buffer can vary depending on the exact pack installed the day it was built with many standard range cars often having long range batteries, but software restricted. The only real way to know would be an independent discharge test and measure the amount of energy supplied before the battery management system shuts off the battery.

What charger is in your Leaf and in his Leaf... are they 3.6kW or 6.6kW?

Maybe also try his cable on your car on the new charge points.