wyx087

Large price drop from £6600 to £5800 as I have now collected my new car and have absolutely zero use for this car. Last chance before I start talking to local dealers next week. 14-Sep edit: Sold it to local dealer for £5200.

Yes, tyres were a hair more than correct pressure, 43-44 PSI. I'm reduced it down to 41-42 PSI and TPMS reads 42 PSI all round when I checked after drive home. 42 is the recommended pressure. I've read should be okay at 40 PSI (no uneven wear), which will probably soften up the ride even more.

Picked up my Model Y LR on Saturday from Staines-upon-thames delivery location: A lot of cars parked in a dusty car park. Many car wash person going around cleaning seemly random cars, probably the ones about to be delivered. All is well with my one, nice and clean when collecting. Go to reception, quick glance at driving license and I was asked to sign for delivery. I wanted to inspect the car first, so the person unlocked the car remotely and waited for me to finish with inspection. Once I was happy, I went back to him and signed for the car. Then drove home, nice and simple. There's 7 days / 100 miles to report anything. No rattles. That afternoon, I gave the car a blast of water and very detailed wipe-down. No condensation in lights, seal issue or paint defect that I can see. Only downside I can say is that given the empty parking spaces further down the lot, cars doesn't need to be parked like regular car park. They could have parked the cars further apart to allow easier inspection. The ride on standard 19inch is softer than my 18inch Octavia. But there's more sideways movement on large one-side bumps. I'd still say Leaf deals with large pot-holes slightly better. But on faster roads with clear markings, this is a pleasure to drive, or rather, sit and monitor. I've experienced 2 or 3 unexpected braking but all instances due to TACC picked the a car on the side rather than the car I've been following. No unexplainable "phantom braking" yet. I'm learning which type of road can smoothly use TACC and auto-steer. This car is said to be vision based, no radar, so completely different to radar only ACC on my Skoda. Also need to see if I tweak the warnings, there were a few instances where the car deemed avoiding parked cars and driving on the center line is incorrect and beeped at me, which makes my passengers unhappy and nervous. Integrates well with Home Assistant and I also spun up TeslaMate for trip logging. So far it's averaging ~3.5mi/kWh over its first 120-ish miles, even mix of careful local roads, spirited driving on back roads and motorways. Overall, very happy with the car. With Tesla I can now sign up for Octopus Intelligent for 6 hours of 7.5p off-peak AND more hours should I plug in the car at low SoC and request high SoC over a single night, just need to hand over charging to Octopus. The car is also able to trickle charge at any power level, I think I can also use Home Assistant to charge as low as 1 amp and trickle charge via excess solar (once I get around programming it).

My experience as well, comparing my local Skoda vs Kia sales team. The very important thing is that you've considered and tried to change. Never say "it used to be this, so it must be so" dogmatism way.

I just looked at my highest gas usage month on my smart meter record 1800 kWh Jan 2022. Translates to 60 kWh of gas per day, so I guess ~25 kWh of electricity per day if I were on ASHP. Other months were around 1200 kWh. This averages out to be 10 kWh electricity per day for ASHP, assuming no de-icing needed in these months. My 7 years old W-E small solar install of just 2.8kWp over Jan 2022 only produced 55 kWh over the whole month. Only 8% excess, it’s pretty much nothing. Of course, typical solar install today are double the size, so might help a little as it can produce more excess. I think it is possible to rely on off-peak tariff and home battery to lower costs. In another words, if I were to install the minimum to help with ASHP costs, a 10-15 kWh home battery is best one to choose, should be able to cover most days except single coldest month. Paying for non off-peak prices is best avoided. First time charging my new car yesterday, hadn’t figured out how to stop charging at set time. My home automation to podpoint failed connection to API at perfect time and didn’t cut off charging at 4:30. Paid ~£2 over 4 hour cheap period for first 28 kWh. Another ~£2 for the final 6 kWh.

Well, if you get a home battery...... The problem with heat pump being more expensive to run is more to do with the broken electricity pricing. Renewables are cheap, gas powered fast-reacting plants are expensive. Electricity price most people pays are based on averages. If prices can be made to vary throughout the day, and the heat pump can be made to utilise cheaper periods smartly using the house as a large thermal mass, it should be possible to have cheaper heating than gas. Certainly, hot water over cheap 7.5p off-peak at 3x efficiency means it is 1/6 cost of using gas based on October gas prices. Store that cheap leccy in battery and off-set by solar throughout the day means it shouldn't be too expensive. Everything has to work together as a system. Only installing heat pump by itself, or retrofitting without good insulation and no careful heat loss calculations means expensive inefficient systems.

This just show that people are greedy and free charging doesn't really work. My workplace podpoint chargers communication broke. The chargers became free super busy. Now it's been fixed, I can usually get a charge without needing to ask people to move their cars.

I think some sort of per-minute pricing need to be introduced for rapid chargers. This is what was suggested on speakEV: per kWh normally up until speed drops below a kW value, I think 7 is reasonable. from then on, a per-minute surcharge is applied until the car has been disconnected Have AC chargers available nearby for people want to slowly charge the last bit Tesla does similar at busy locations. They auto applies 80% charge limit and notifies via mobile notification. When charging stops, you get billed for every minute car has not been moved. I also dislike people who don't centre their wheels......

That's typical of the government, very bad at adopting to change. Clearly someone missed last Friday's news. But at the same time, it's very difficult to predict EV running cost. It ties in with house leccy tariff and percentage of public charging. If someone were on EV tariff and use limited public charging, 5p is borderline reasonable.

Covered chargers, very nice. But what's that Ioniq doing using AC?

That Mercedes A class PHEV is capable of CCS rapid charging IIRC. So should have used CCS. It's a totally stupid decision by Mercedes to provide that capability for the tiny PHEV battery and dealers to never educate users on the idea of different charging speeds. I sat through an hour of Tesla owners club new-owner presentation a few nights ago. I was there to get my questions answered, but it is great to see charging explained to new owners in such detail. Most dealers won't bother with this level of knowledge transfer, leaving new owners to figure out for themselves. Also, I think Chargemaster/Polar/Pulse are the only ones still doing triple head chargers. It's about time to only install dual-head DC chargers and provide a 22 kW AC charging post for Zoe's. If it doesn't fit, uninformed won't use it.

I have to say I don't know the details. But I would have thought this is similar to parcel service last-mile costs, where the cost to ship thousands of parcel from hub to hub is much lower than cost to ship a few parcels to a group of households in a village miles from big cities. The non-linear cost scaling and infrastructure problem is understandable, the unit cost somewhat reflects that. Though I'd expect London to pay more and have more time-of-use price swing in a non-averaged system. But grid transmission losses are way less than any form of storage conversion losses. So it's always best to send excess renewable supply out and lower the unit price to create induced demand. According to this publication, only 1.7% is in transmission losses, 5-8% for distribution losses. https://www.nationalgrideso.com/electricity-transmission/document/144711/download#:~:text=Citizens Advice suggests that about,voltage causes lower network losses.

London unit costs are most expensive, looking at that table. Only cheaper for standing cost, which makes sense if you think about population density and resulting lower cost of providing service per household.

What about sums comparing the same car?

Speaking of electricity storage. I've just signed up to Indra V2H trial. I only learnt about it last night. That hopefully means paying £1600 for the Chademo V2H kit, then I'll effectively have a 18kWh home battery and shift vast majority of my energy use to off peak or free solar. Home only uses around 10kwh each day. The Leaf is only going to be used for school run or going to shops, so can let it be runned down by late evening. Wife is happy with another second hand Leaf in 3-5 years time, probably a 40 kwh Tekna being sold this year or next.

Standard range rear wheel drive Model Y is now available to order. It's suspected that this will be LFP battery. Very good IMHO: it's safer, it doesn't use questionable materials and you can keep it charged at 100% daily. Only question is, where will it come from? The estimated delivery range is exactly the same as the Performance. Latter is expected to come from Berlin factory. My ideal Model Y had always been: LFP battery, Berlin built, 7 seat capacity with aero wheels. But I think my £56k for Blue LR is excellent value at £3k more vs this standard range rear wheel drive version. Not sure I'd order a LR with current prices vs SR. Also, thanks to that video referencing a blobfish. I changed my order from Grey to blue.

The problem is peak demand and managing demand vs supply. Currently there's no renewable that can be turned on/off at will. So in a world where the excess supply cannot be stored by "smart" load (EV batteries) or storage (home battery, other large scale storage) renewables must turn off and get paid. In a world where demand cannot be met by stored cheap renewables, biomass will be better than coal/gas. This is why it is absurdly stupid to have a fixed price for electricity throughout the day when its price changes greatly based on demand. Free market need to come into effect here and allow energy prices to go into extremes, so that people who can be flexible have the power to cut their own costs. This in turn reduces peak time demand and helps everyone.

Passed MOT without advisory today. Almost 13 months until MOT expiry. I’m picking up my new car in 1 week’s time. I’ll give it a month or so before selling via Motorway or the likes.

The running cost benefit is a side effect just like the solar panels on my roof. No matter electric generating source, EV will always produce less pollution. Even majority coal powered grid will see a fleet reduction in pollution if they were all EV’s.

If I were to visit Scotland spring next year, what cards/membership do I need to access those free charging? Reading about tourist visitors made reminded me that I need to get prepared for charging further afield compared to Leaf. I've been wanting to do the NC500 for a while now. Would be good if I can do it whilst there's still free charging.

Thanks. Nice to see it directly from the source. But I can't grasp how those prices can translate to the headline 80% increase. Electricity unit price is 85%, gas is 100% increase, on top of that, standing charge has also increased.

The 52p came from here I presume? https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/utilities/what-are-the-price-cap-unit-rates-/ That is a prediction. 80% of current 28p is at 50p. Not much difference, but the prediction was saying almost 100% increase (vs 80% that was announced today), hence pretty much double unit rates on both gas and electric. I signed up to Octopus Go around July time, my electricity is fixed at 7.5p 0:30-4:30, 35p other times, 37.65p per day standing, fixed for 12 months. I'm on standard variable tariff for gas though. I see Octopus Go tariff haven't increased, still at 7.5p/40p when I checked earlier today, might be worth signing up to that ASAP (you must be already with Octopus). https://octopus.energy/go/new/

80% price increase, that's going to be around 50p/kWh for electricity. If you are not on EV tariff, you'd be paying around 16.6p/miles assuming 3mi/kWh. As many here have already observed, this pricing no longer makes EV cheaper to drive. Of course, if you are on EV tariff (Octopus Go 7.5p for 4 hours is still open to sign up, tariff fixed for 1 year). It is 2.5p/miles at same 3mi/kWh, still waaaaay cheaper to drive EV. This also makes it cheaper to heat bedrooms and hot water tank with electricity than gas overnight. This is what I'll be doing using smart plugs and room thermostats. So if you are driving EV, be sure to switch while deals are out there ASAP!

Depend on lease company, it is unlikely you can purchase the car outright and sell it on to capture any possible higher residual value. I think EV's will hold their value quite well as we are ramping up the mass adoption curve and public perception changes and demand for second hand cars rises. My company introduced salary sacrifice scheme start of 2021, I considered a Model 3 through this. At the time it was £500 per month. But I looked at residual values for Teslas and decided to buy one instead. (then wife veto'd the Model 3 due to the beam across rear area, so Model Y it is) Though I think lease also includes insurance? Insurance on the Tesla is as eye watering as my old Mercedes coupe years ago, one of the reason why I got rid of the Merc and I bought a Skoda.