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So last month I traded in my variety Rover for a Nissan Leaf. No really.

After my very first 1,000 miles right here are some rambling thoughts, early observations and opinions on living with an EV…

Autumn Leaf

I’ve been driving SUV’s for much more than 7 years, but in 2013 I had my very first test drive in an electric automobile and it’s been on my mind ever since. This isn’t something I’ve chose to do on a whim.

In purchase for our household to try living with an EV one of our cars and trucks had to go. With a little petrol saloon and a 3 heap 4.4L V8 diesel in the garage, in one method it wasn’t a difficult decision to make.

In another method of course it was. providing up the comfort, equipment and the high driving setting in specific will be difficult as I go back to sitting in a lower, smaller car.

Pretty Ugly

There’s no good method to put it, the leaf has a deal with only a mom could love. The shape of those front headlights is functional, managing the airflow around the bodywork. but Tesla can make an aero efficient car that’s stunning too.

Related: Is the Tesla design 3 the Tipping point for the EV

It seems well developed (in Sunderland) and does have personality. It’s bigger than it looks, can take 5 adults and has a good sized boot too.

My better half had only one stipulation about the new car, it had to have heated seats. That implied going for the Tekna design which includes some other upgrades like a Bose noise system, 360 degree outside video camera configuration and a leather interior, vegans requirement not apply.

The Tech

Getting the automobile enrolled on the ironically named ‘Nissan Connect’ system was painful. It took a number of days to get the app paired with our Leaf and there was even an excursion under the bonnet for a serial number engraved on the motor at the request of the support staff. It was disappointing after the outstanding experience we had with the salesman at the Belfast dealership.

When we lastly got the automobile linked we got an email confirmation which contained an inaccurate URL that result in even much more head scratching and lost time too.

I tried difficult to get somebody in Nissan to allow me to share my experience and tips and save others from going with the same pain (some have even provided up). but in spite of tweets emails and on the internet chats I got nowhere.

The web interface to the automobile is sluggish and poorly designed. The app is no better, although there are much more contemporary interfaces from third party apps like EVA for iOS and leaf manager for Android.

You can inspect on the specify of charge and begin the climate manage remotely with the apps. Usefully the on-board timer can schedule the automobile to pre-heat the cabin for you each morning while still linked to the mains.

Driving

The cabin is a good location to be and that incredibly strange and eerie silence as you back out of the garage each morning never gets old.

That sound, or lack of it, is something that’s commonly overlooked with an EV, but it makes it such a enjoyable experience, one that you truly appreciate when you go back to a routine car. The lack of vibrations, best from the starter motor on, truly does make a difference. My better half will take the leaf at any chance over the petrol car. and that’s not just because she doesn’t have to fuel it, she really prefers its quiet, smooth drive too.

Once you’re behind the wheel, utilizing the Eco mode dulls the acceleration for the most cost-effective driving. pressing the throttle flat finds a button on the floor that allows you to quickly over-ride it and temporarily access full power if required. It feels pleasantly torquey and is decently quick 0-30 and you can quickly invoke the traction manage on a moist road.
Of course it’s not the kind of automobile for hooning around in. The new challenge is to max out your economy. There are different features to assist you screen your driving style, score your method and gamify the whole experience.

The dash is a confusing, cluttered and inconsistent style from the institution of much more is more. You grow bit trees on the top display, the much more economically you drive, the much more trees you grow.

Flicking the ‘gear lever’ down into Drive a second time switches the automobile into Brake Mode. This boosts braking regen and recuperates much more energy, enabling you to one-pedal drive, only needing to touch the brake pedal when concerning a complete stop.

The web interface offers (slow) access to all this data and rates your driving too. Here’s a summary from the web interface after around 10 days of driving the Leaf.

I believe if everybody had an EV for a week it would provide them a excellent insight into exactly how to drive much more economically. Back in the petrol automobile I discovered myself frowning at all that energy I was throwing away on motorways off ramps and down hills.

Range & Public Charging

Even though its genuine world variety is only around 85 miles, we can reach quite much any part of northern Ireland in the 24kWh Leaf, even without a full battery (check out the variety map below with the automobile at around 65% charge). Both my other half and I averaged around 20 miles each day last year so 85 is much more than enough for 99% of our journeys. and unlike a petrol or diesel automobile you leave the home every morning with a full ‘tank’.

We have several Rapid chargers around us that can bring the EV to 80% in just 30 minutes. type 2 chargers are much slower but so far we’ve not needed them.

We did try the one in the picture below out of curiosity during a recent weekend away to the coast. Our destination was around 80 miles from house and although we could just about have made it we took a 20min fast charge on the motorway services. inspect out plugshare.com for a look at the chargers available in your area.

As an absolute last resort there’s a 3 year healing service with the automobile that will put you on a flat bed and take you to your nearest charger ought to you get into trouble.

We’ve met the nicest people at public chargers, an fascinating bunch that are friendly and helpful. So far we’ve not been ICE’d and all chargers we went to bar-one have been in working order.

There does seem to be a major problem with some public chargers being out of purchase for long periods though. also some are in automobile parks that are locked at night which seems truly stupid, particularly as many were installed with the assist of public money. They ought to all be accessible 24/7.

For the 1% of trips that are even more afield we have the petrol automobile to autumn back on. In addition Nissan will lend you a fossil powered car for as much as 2 weeks a year at no charge (you’ll requirement to switch your own insurance coverage onto the car for the duration).

Home Charger

The electric car Homecharge plan / OLEV provided us a £500 government grant and our PCP deal with Nissan qualified us for the rest of the money (£390) to in shape a totally free 16amp Pod point charger in our garage.

More accurately these are special power outlets as the charger is actually in the car.

Even though our leaf doesn’t have the quicker 6.6kW charger on board, we wished to future proof the grant-aided house installation as much as possible so we paid £95 to upgrade to the 32amp / 7kW version.

A grand (on paper at least) for this charger seems method over priced. A quick look on eBay shows 16amp chargers available for under £200 and the easy set up took less than 2 hours. Is somebody making a killing from this gov scheme?

Sun Powered Car?

We’re looking forward to charging the leaf from our solar array. While a 4kW system in northern Europe is unlikely to ever offer sufficient surplus power for even the lowest mileage users, it ought to be able to contribute something over the brighter months of the year.

That will rely on us charging relatively slowly though so as not to be pulling in power from the grid. We will have to utilize the 13amp 3-pin ‘granny’ charger  to limit the rate.

Coal Powered Car?

So where does the electrical power for your fancy electric automobile truly come from then? It’s a fair question.

This table from our latest electricity bill shows the source of our electrons (using 2014 data). It may be a surprise to see that the largest contributor is Renewable (wind) energy at 36%. For EVs to make the most sense though we requirement to push that much higher – filthy coal is still third at 25%. but with the current trend, the EV you purchase today will get cleaner over time.

Electric Efficiency

Even if the BEV was powered completely by electrical power produced from fossil fuels, it would still be a significant enhancement over an ICE automobile though. The interior combustion engine is around 20% effective compared to much more than 80% for an electric motor.

1 litre of petrol or diesel includes approximately 10 kWh’s of energy (petrol 9.7 kWh/l, diesel 10.7 kWh/l ). Therefore…

1 litre of diesel takes you about 6 miles in the variety Rover

The equivalent 10.7 kWh takes you about 43 miles in the Leaf

But lets take a much more similar smaller ICE car that can average state 40mpg. The leaf will still go 4 to 5 times even more with the exact same amount of energy, whilst moving all those toxic fumes out of our towns and cities.

Even though there’s currently lots of spare generation capacity on the national grid at night, if all of us altered to EV’s tomorrow it would be in big trouble. last week Elon Musk stated that globally we need 3 times the current level of generation to relocation to an all electric economy.

The finest automobile is…..a Bike

We’re in a period of shift and we requirement to ramp up sustainable energy and transportation technologies. Sure there are environmental costs in building all these new things, but unless we’re all going to be huddled in caves using animal fur again we requirement to discover a method to balance our contemporary method of life whilst reducing our consumption. At the exact same time this blog brings you shiny new products weekly to covet and that irony is not lost on me.

Electric automobile movie critics commonly site higher preliminary producing emissions for these vehicles, but we’re barely in the second generation of the modern EV compared to a century of advancement of the ICE and it’s producing processes. Oh, and keep in mind about the on-going energy demands to refine the fuels to keep our ICE’s running…

Self Driving / level 5 Autonomy

The environmental benefits of EVs include the prospective for fewer cars and trucks on the roads in the future too. Rather than your second largest purchase sitting idle for 90% of its life, it could be working for you. additionally you may just end up with a membership for a automobile in the future (CaaS – automobile as a Service?), summoning an autonomous car from an app when you requirement it.

Check out the video below in this weeks homework section on the science behind the autonomous self-driving cars and trucks that are only possibly a year away (the tech will be right here by then, if not the legislation).

Savings

A side-effect of our EV experiment is the decreased costs of our household transport. This 24kWh leaf is essentially a run out model, because of be discontinued in favour of the existing and larger 30kW design extremely soon. Additionally, the statement of the completely new generation leaf is due any day now to replace the current ageing style thats been around because 2010.

All that implies there are some excellent offers around. The £4,500 Plug-In automobile grant from the government assists the lease company so our 3 year x 8,000 mile PCP payments don’t even come close to paying just the depreciation on the car.

All in all a really inexpensive method of dipping our toe in the EV world and if we can get by with a very first gen, restricted variety automobile such as this then anything in the future will be easy. right here are a few of the annual savings…

£500 saved on road tax – £0 road tax for leaf versus £500 for the variety Rover.

£1,300 on fuel – We’re averaging an suggested 4.0 miles per kWh so far, that works out at a bit over £0.03 per mile vs around £0.19 per mile for the SUV. Those cost savings are calculated on electrical power vs diesel over 8,000 miles yearly and ignores the prospective for house Solar charging and (still free, but not for long) public chargers in northern Ireland.

£350 saved on insurance coverage – Unsurprisingly the leaf is much cheaper to insure than the RR.

BIK – If you’re lucky sufficient to get a company automobile (I’m not) then an EV will offer the lowest benefit in kind rate. I spoke with a good friend the other day who told me he’d efficiently provided himself a £2K pay increase by moving to an EV.

Fabulous or Folly

We’re only 3 years away from the decade of change over to the EV according to Bloomberg. the time when an electric automobile will be the exact same cost as an ICE powered one, variety will be high sufficient to no longer matter and running costs will still be extremely advantageous. the time when purchasing the ICE automobile over the EV will be the unusual decision, not the other method around.

As electric cars and trucks begin to become the norm, the design choice will boost from the fairly little providing available today. who knows, I could be sitting high up again but in an EV, or perhaps I’ll stick with being closer to the ground.

So there it is, it’s early days in our EV experiment, but so far so good.

What do you call the opposite of a mid-life crisis? A mid-life cognisance? Maybe. I’m all in.

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