Random EV thoughts.....

You are of course correct, but that really doesnt make a very good headline to confirm the ICE bias now does it. You will never get a job for the sun with that kind of nuisanced thought process.

Seriously, this is so true. I've just returned from being abroad with a 500km+ roundtrip in a rental petrol car (Peugeot 2008) and I missed the simplicity of the BEV - smooth drive, instant acceleration, no engine noise.

Although, Peugeot probably deserve an honourable mention for making a petrol car feel, sound and rattle like an old diesel engine (and to combine this with no acceleration to speak of, even in 'sport' mode).

I was delighted to get back into my car at the airport.

If you thought Ionity was expensive 😱

I wonder will we see another price hike here soon

Very interesting video from Fully Charged. Showing off crazy charging speeds and speaks of even faster already in the works.

AionY looks like a great small car.

Each to their own and I suppose this is an EV forum after all. Personally, and I'm an old git so set in my ways, but I still get a lot of enjoyment from driving different types of cars. Drive an EV and yes it's easy, just point and squirt, but to me it gets monotonous after a while to the point that I have to stab at the accelerator every now and again to get some reaction from it.

Still really enjoy driving a manual, much better connection with the car, especially on good national/ rural roads. Nowadays people like their comforts and having it easy so there's no doubt EVs are a good fit. My wife loves the Ev but then again she dislikes driving and just wants to get from a to b with the least possible hassle and driver input. Ideal scenario is to have an EV and manual ice so can continue to enjoy having to drive a car rather than the car doing most of the enjoyable elements of the experience. Problem is the price of experiencing that enjoyment is becoming prohibitive, as is the case with most good things in life.

A similar story happened to my mum, uncle & aunt when they went to Cornwall last year. They had to fly to Exeter or somewhere and rent a car, ended up getting a Yaris hybrid

If you've been to Cornwall you'll probably know that it's pretty hilly, lots of fairly steep climbs and descents on the A30. The poor car was steadily losing power on one of the steeper climbs and was struggling to figure out what gear it should have been in. They thought it was going to give up around 2 thirds of the way up

Then a few weeks ago I drove the same road in the ID.4 and had a massive grin on my face the whole time.

Great bit of road to be driving on when you've a car with some power.

Now that you say it, my primary underwhelming experience was also a Toyota - a CHR PHEV (0% SOC obviously) rented in gothenburg. No hills, no real overtaking on the wrong side of the road...but lots of merging and it just felt sh1t.

So maybe rental companies just love an underpowered Toyota!

Speaking of power, the spinny thing now go spinny faster

It's kinda buried in the article, but it seems to mean you can get the same power from a much samller motor, saving weight and materials

So pretty soon you might have an EV motor that fits into a backpack instead of a duffle bag

Or, taken the other direction, from the same size motor you can get MOAR POWER!!!!

Those Cornish hills won't know what hit them 😂

It's more complicated than that. Compare these two: Huge weight and power difference, the latter having 3x the battery capacity and probably 7 times the power yet their consumption figures are almost identical.

Car 1: https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/noframes/40769.shtml

Car 2: https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/Find.do?action=sbs&id=45015

The conventional wisdom about power and weight vs. efficiency does not really apply to BEVs. In our household the 24 kWh LEAF had pretty much identical efficiency to our current 75 kWh car.

Charging at my local circle k. Had to wait on a taxi finishing. Literally got the charger and another taxi pulled in (grey Id4). About a minute later another (so I thought) grey Id4 pulls in the other side. I barely glanced up. It was only when he slowly pulled out again I realised it was the Nissan Ariya. Nice motor alright but at a glance it looks incredibly like the Id4.

Yes but the Leaf is old tech and very inefficient, especially at any reasonable speed. While increased weigh might have a lessor impact on efficiency compared to an ICE

The grant doesn't help as it incentives people to buy bigger and more expensive cars.

If the grant was capped or tapered at say €40k, there would be a greater demand for and subsequent supply of smaller more efficient EVs. Amazing how the demand for EVs hasn't collapsed in the UK since the grant was significantly reduced.

Points for actually doing some analysis, but it's a bit silly that they automatically chose the most expensive charging network. I've known people who would drive 30 mins to save 5c/l on petrol (I was one!) so I imagine that folks living off of public charging would do the same

However, the article made me think of an interesting point. In these days of high fuel prices we're seeing governments slashing taxes on fuel in an effort to drive down the price at the pumps

And that's fair enough IMO. Don't like to encourage fossil fuel use but it's a bit counterproductive if a significant portion of the population can't afford to go anywhere and are at the mercy of Ireland's miserable public transport system

But what are they doing to drive down public charging costs? For example is some of that windfall tax that the government is getting from ESB group going to be sent towards charging providers to lower their grid costs?

The cynic might point out that EV drivers are only a small portion of the population, and are often on higher incomes so can just suck it up

However in equal measure there's lads going out in big gas guzzling SUVs who are enjoying tax breaks on filling up their cars, so it seems like measures aren't being applied equally

Again, I'm not saying that government shouldn't be helping, but where the help for EV drivers?