lol-lol

PTC heater is going to either eat up the electrical energy of the batteries and whilst it may be near 100% efficiency and then will need topping up by that ICE with its efficiency of 30 or 40% or so. The Heat Pump would gave an efficency of circa 300 to 400%. PTC are only used in EVs that are the cheap ones where cost is wanted to be kept right down. Think the new R5 FIVE is going to have this type of cabin heating ie no Heat Pump, no DC charging, absolute bare bones model. Surprises me so few PHEVs have Heat Pumps, even expensive models but all about biuld price i suppose.

I have signed up to the Pay per Mile consultation and it demonstrates just at what an elemental stage the government is at with the questions they are at. Garages would need to do a certified check as the mileage on those EVs and Hybrids end of year 1 and two, possible at service time but some cars only need a service every two year 18k or so miles. Revenue for garages which are being left doing a lot less chargeable work with EVs as they need less maintenance and use less service parts so typically earn garages much less revenue so this would be a way for them to earn some more and do a check on the car where they could possibly get some more work by hook or by crook. The consultancy questions got more obscure as one worked way thru the question paper. Typical politicians construct, all over the place, clearly trying to consider multiple strands of how to do. If the government get a coherent policy by 2028 I will be amazed. Just create some more toll roads and gave electronic tags like most other places, base tax on Gross Vehicle Weight and vehicle type and actually reduce VED.

The current lab test for PHEVs is just rubbish. Most PHEVs or non PHEV hybrids do not have heat pumps. So in the WLTP lab which is at some 22C one does not reach for the heating. With our Clio hybrid it could do 80 mpg in warm weather. Did not need the heating so starting in electric and if only light throttle needed it could stay in EV mode well over half the time. Those who buy PHEVs, especially with the majority which do not have heat pumps will find that massively inefficient ICE firing up in cool, cold weather, firing up that great lump of an engine just to bring up the cooling water to warm up the cabin occupants. Instead of seeing 400, 500, 600, 700 mpg they will see 50, 60, 70, 80 mpg. PHEV Hybrid owners are dreaming if they think they will achieve anything like the fanciful published mpg then they will turm on the manufacturers. Hopefully a meaningful rise in the Road Tax when it relates to the actual on the road CO2 and mpg and they will not be sucked to believing they have hit on some magical do it all peice of tech. Government will get its big VAT collect on these cars which will still need lots of fuel to keep them going, even with home charging, unless the car has a heat pump, sn government will get excuse duty and VAT on the fuel plus the 1.5p per mile mileage charge, nice for them. PHEV Owners will feel very hard done by. Go full BEV and not some Jack of some trades and Master of none !

Bit better range after charging to 100% and with the warmer weather, about 160 miles of mostly Motorway driving. OK with this but wonder how much better it might be with 15 /16 inch wheels and All seasons tyres rather than the 18 inch summer Contis. The 121 hp, 225 Nm engine in this quite light car is enough to get the traction control working sometimes. A Frunk tray and cable storing in there rather than in the boot should help get more weight on the front axle rather than the rear axle.

Electricity will be almost free, well 5p a kwh or less for those who part generate their own and have grid connection at these cheap night time rates to be used when no sun shine ....

Ah but they do over 700 mpg, ha ha. 20 kwh should get you 70 miles or so even for a fat / heavy PHEV with two whole traction systems !

Big drop. Mostly a problem for manufacturer taking back cars just pcp. There was about a £5k gap on my Zoe going back. I was hoping my Scenic, 60 kw version discontinued in UK, would rise in value if cars over 2.4 tonnes GVW suddenly attracted much more expensive parking charges !

Ouch. Renault have changed their deposit needed from 30% to 40% ie it was over £8.5k for my poverty spec evolution version. Combination of that they could do this and people would go through getting the R5 and that Renault were not really making any money and new CEO has changed that.

That wad generally down to staff at Revenue Directorate to work it out, write the law. Some of the chat had there were amazing, blue sky thinking. As mentioned before when talking about claiming mileage that has been around for decades and the system is full of holes about which measurement to use, dodgy vehicles odometers, Google. Customs tend to like people doing returns and the accepting them, or not, and perhaps issuing their own assessments if they wish too. Sort of what the do in Oregon where it has been in for a while.

How is it going to work ? What if I drive on private roads quite a bit or take the car abroad. Westminster going to charge me for driving on Irish or French roads ? Lots of shortcut trips i can see. Going thru towns and A, B, C, D and E roads, more point to point, clogging up villages, towns and cities ! Bigger wheels so odometer records less, big tall all season and winter tyres pumped up high !

At least Mk 4s moved on from leaf suspension but it was still not great.... Friend had an earlish Lotus Cortina Mk1, twin cam, over 100 hp, deadly

All these stories about the problems with supplier software talking to charger software makes me glad I keep it simple with Octopus GO rather than Intellgent Octopus GO. Yes I only get 5 hours of cheap lecky at a slightly higher price but still 20p per kwh than the single or Day rate and in hundreds of charges, I have an INDRA charger and a PodPoint, I have never had a failed charging session. Once or twice a year I reboot the charger to update the software as the both talk to my router and to the charger manufacturer but absolutely no issues with GO. Just hope the ultra low prices stay when Day rates and Single rates get hiked in January.

Think my Day rate will be close to 30p per kwh. Key thing is my 8.5 p per kwh Night rate does not change at all or if it does is still below 9 p per kwh. Am trawling the Black Friday deals to see if there are some battery deals, plenty advertised at half price but prices should be naturally falling as the key component batteries have been falling big time in cost. Aim is always to use no day time lecky and only nighttime, or solar generated lecky.

Oh yes we need to wack those profiteer oil and gas companies supplying the peaker electricity as they are making a killing, far more the the suppliers who pass on those costs. UK needs to pay properly for that very expensive 4pm to 8 pm electricity. £1 per kwh or whatever the cost really is, i have heard it can be as high as £5 per kwh true cost at times. We get cheap power at night but the other side of the coin is nany using power at tea time when actual cost can be 2, 4, 6,8 times and more than the 28p or so people are paying for lecky.

Not related. Prices going up loads not due to renewable, but due to the nuclear program, debt relief to those who cannot pay etc. Renewable prices, particularly solar, has been dropping like a stone. UK is now looking at sourcing cheaper but bigger Chinese wind turbines, 1000 feet plus in size, 20, 30, 35 MW which produce power at a lower pence per kwh than the current crop of 15 MW turbines. It is the peg of electricity prices to gas and then all these add ons for the likes of Sizewell C and debt relief. Martin Lewis and Greg Jackson just did a good session on this on MSE show.

Some murmurs that the quarterly published rates to compensate thise who drive for the business because as diesel and petrol cars progressively get better mileage due to the increasing amount of the electrical traction side ever increasing resulting in better mpg then the mileage rate will go down. New rates, expected to be lower, due out Monday 1st of December.

Solar and Wind us producing power at about 1p per kwh. It is nuclear which is the really costly electricity source. But we need to generate electricity during those non windy non sunny times or take the obvious route about installing hydro schemes like the Great Glens 30 Gwh pump storage scheme and Bristol Channel and Scottish Island tidal power schemes which can supply more consistent power. Let hope we never get a Chenobol or Three Mile Island disaster.

With UK electricity costs going up big time in 35 days ie about 5% on the daily cao price but I hope the Octopus 🐙 Night rate, GO and IOG, are lovely and cheap abd hope it stays that way. I can see the single rate electricy cost and the Day time rate for the dual rate users like most of us EV users have. UK government needs to off load much of these expensive add ons to electricity to put them on to gas or somewhere else across hydrocarbons ie natural gas, oil.

North of Worcester ie Frankley Services i have used the the Tesla V4 chargers. Going south not sure there are TESLA V4 chargers. Think the R5 can talk to V2, V3 chargers but not sure the 2024 Scenic can. I like Ionity and have used Gridserve a few times but I would rather slow down and become more economical usual but this time I am taking a bunch of lads to a clay pigeon shoot as part of a Stag weekend so may need to get a shift on but it is all A roads across Salisbury Plain and watch out for the 70 tonnes Chiefton tasks which can move much quicker than you think and seem to have no respect for right of way ! Think there are some MFG chargers at Poole.

Got to travel to Bournemouth from Worcester so outside my there and back range in the Scenic so need to charge in Dorset or Wiltshire which are not great for charging. Always please that I can generally find a charger I can use my Octopus Electroverse card, get a bit of a discount and it goes against my house energy bill so may not feel or see the hit if I am in credit and can manage that and of course one can be super accurate on how much energy to draw from the public charger to get me home and then fill up with the cheap lecky.

I dod not hear what battery size it was, presuming 30 khw and tgat battery which is air cooled and no active cooling system has gained a reputation of being susceptible of losing capacity due to overheating, rapidgating so just was pleased to hear a battery reckoned to be one of the weakest out there had survived so many charging connections and still ran even jf yhe capacity was done by a quarter or a third or so. Think Modern Hero did get rid of it after a while and the way the vans battery just dropped like a stone in tge final quarter of the range was frustrating and one would rather see less range at the upper SoC than have it fade too quickly in the lower SoC part. Good to see that all car traction batteries are liquid cooled now as air cooled traction batteries can be a pain. The Renault Zoe will hardly charge at all if the ambient temp is well in to the 40s degree C. Hope Nissan gets lots of sales for the LEAF, Micra, Ariya etc for the sake of Nissan in the NE of England. Good to see the new LEAF get the full £3750 EV grant.

Scottish guy with an EV business in Gloucester. This van Rapid charged nearly six thousands times !!!!!!

I have the smaller battery version ie 40 / 43 kwh. R5 great to drive with the multi link rear suspension. Space in the back seats seats is tiny but I have the Scenic if I think need to give people taller than the average French man (apparently 5 foot 7 inches! my daughters are taller than that ). A policy of charging to 80 otlr 85 % normally abd then topping up to 100% just before I leave for a longer journey I reckon could be the right policy.

Aspmam.... We've done a little research and apparently 100% on VWs is actually only 94%. Was an unoffical source. But I do think it's a bit out of order to say that a car does say 200 miles on a charge but then very forcefully set the car to only charge to 80% to 'preserve the battery'. Really the range should be on the 'recommended charge level'. We certailly didn;t pick the car based on 80% of it's max range nor did anyone at any point suggest that we would only get 80% or would damage the car.. I think this 5 or 6 % buffer above and below the displayed SoC is common with European cars, not so surecabout Far East cars which i suspect report smaller buffers. Toyota / Subaru not withstanding which seem to make a pigs ear of their first fill EV launch. What would be nice is to have a 97 or 98% setting or a displayed 100% and a real 100% charged as 95% displayed seems like it is really 90%. Think i will charge to 95%, stop record the SoC shown and then add the remaining 5% which hopefully is more like 10%. Both my Renault EVs suddenly show about 20% more range now the temps are up by 10c or so. Either as you trundle along or press the trip rest and suddenly you have another 30 miles of reported range !

Nah because you dont want the car battery pack to be equal to the 400V charge you want it to be a good few volts less so 390 is probably a good fully charged voltage with 93 packs. 3.7v is a nominal figure. In fact you can see over 4 volts, almost 4.15 volts and the Lithium ion cells, below is for a 18650 type cell, and amazingly the pack can drop to 3.35v and still be giving power. Nominally a car display showing State of Charge will probably show 100% charged when the cell is showing about 3.95 volts and the same call SOC display will show 0% when the voltage hits about 3.2V. We are warned the first and last 5% or so are preferable not to be used and preferable the manufactures would like us to use the 20% to 80% range displayed, but many owners use 10% to 90% as a guide and many owners are not aware of the 5 or 6 % "buffers" or steeper parts of the curve. Big question are all Chinese, European, Korean manufactures working with similar buffers or some less? Bjorn https://www.youtube.com/@bjornnyland/search?query=drive%20until%20die Bigger battery R5, 45 km past zero !!!