Random EV thoughts.....

Ah I know, most people will only go EV once it has 300km 400km 500km 1000km range, even though almost nobody ever does that sort of driving in Ireland in a day and the average car does about 40km

The Leaf in my example has roughly 100km range. The Ioniq roughly 200km

There's a touch of Comical Ali about you unkel 😁..... nothing to see here, no issues, plenty affordable cars.... what's all the fuss about! 🤣

The reality is that most people wouldn't consider buying an "old" Leaf for the look of it or the range of it. And as others said, the argument doesn't scale up yet.... a few affordable Leaf's doesnt serve the market. Its going to take alot longer to adequately serve the secondhand market

Also, the argument about "average daily mileage" is a strawman argument. By definition you dont drive the average everyday but you do want it to handle your weekend driving, which could be significantly more than your average so that 40km average figure is meaningless (even more so to people in rural Ireland... might be fine around Dublin!)

@KCross - "The reality is that most people wouldn't consider buying an "old" Leaf for the look of it "

Well there is that alright. It's one ugly car. But if you're a beggar, you can't be a chooser. It just riles me that people keep saying EVs are only for rich people and they are poor and anyway it wouldn't suit their lifestyle as they need 1000km range like their diesel gives them. I've given plenty of examples over the years (and bought several myself) of affordable EVs that would save a lot of money. Thousands per year even for a cheap EV doing low miles.

But how many cheap/old EVs can fast charge? That's part of the conundrum putting people off perhaps.

The Leaf 😁

In some ways the original Zoe had the best fast charging for its battery size since it could take 22kW AC

So while for most people the only option for a fast charge was a DC charger, the Zoe could do a fast top up at basically any ESB AC charger, which are probably 10x more abundant

To be fair, the original Leaf and Zoe were pretty expensive from new for what you got

You were basically buying a second car for approx €25k as I recall.

So it's a fairly narrow profile of people who had that much cash to burn and were willing to have a car with short range

They were a great saving in the long run if you held onto one for 7-8 years. And as many people say the majority of them are now perfect second cars for most households

I think there's only 2 places my wife hasn't been able to drive to in her Leaf24, and that's mostly down to her refusal to use a fast charger

Pretty much all of them except the Mercedes B250e (basically a Tesla underneath - rare as hen's teeth although there is one on DoneDeal at the moment) and the Renault Fluence Z.E. - I have one of those as our second car. It never needs to fast charge, so that's fine.

100km was far to little. Real world range of 250+ is what’s needed and why sales are so high.

300km real world (not WLTP) would be enough for most people. To get 300km reliable real world range you probably need 450-500km WLTP range. I suspect this is why the model 3 LFP is so popular as it has 490km WLTP.

Towing is a real use case when you live rurally. Everything from garden equipment to rocks and sand, to waste, and much more besides is towed.

"many, many"?

A bit hyperbolic I think. In terms of percentages of the driving population, you're talking a very small number.

Is the gap between WLTP official figures and the real world that large? I thought we were sold on the fact that WLTP was much more accurate than the outgoing NEDC assessment?

Been following the Swedish guy on Youtube who tests all the EVs - not a bad channel - and he's getting several vehicles that appear to be beating the WLTP figures in the real world, and he's not grannying around either.

Re WLTP,

I was driving around Lithuania last week and was consuming 110Wh/KM which would give me a range of 450km. My car's official WLTP is 409km (A 200km drive used about 44% on one occasion).

In Lithuania the non-motorway routes (of which I mostly used) have a limit of 90km/h, so pretty much the ideal scenario to hit WLTP figures.. (20-22 degrees also is the sweet spot)

Then a few days later I was cruising on the Autobahn at 180km/h, and suffice to say this is not conducive to hitting WLTP, where my range was closer to the 200km mark....

Who listens to the Greens, they were promoting diesel not that long ago.

WLTP of Ioniq 28kWh is 200km. It and the Tesla Model 3 MIC are two of the very few cars that would get close to their range at motorway speeds in ideal weather. Because they are the two most efficient drivetrain EVs ever made and both have excellent aerodynamics