Eletric cars are they worth it - do you have one

WellKnownSid

nic_c said:

A lot of the talk is new cars electric vs ICE. However its the second hand market that I'm not sure about. I tend to buy a 3 yr old car, keep for 3-5 years and repeat.

I wonder how good the batteries would be. If you have a mobile phone for a few years or buy a second hand one, often the battery can be sub-par especially if it's been on a lot of short charge cycles. Some phones you can change the batteries fairly cheaply and get many years of use out of them. If buying a second hand electric - how can you tell the life left in the batteries and it's effect on the car's range. I would assume changing the batteries on an electric car is a fairly costly option.

Unlike mobile phones, most (all?) car manufacturers tend to guarantee their batteries for 8+ years, some as much as 15 years.  This is because they are under far less stress than the battery in your phone.  Your phone runs down every single day - in a 200 mile range EV that would be the equivalent of you doing 73,000 miles a year.

There are ways to check the health of the batteries - on some cars this is available right on the dashboard.

kinger101

WellKnownSid said:

nic_c said:

A lot of the talk is new cars electric vs ICE. However its the second hand market that I'm not sure about. I tend to buy a 3 yr old car, keep for 3-5 years and repeat.

I wonder how good the batteries would be. If you have a mobile phone for a few years or buy a second hand one, often the battery can be sub-par especially if it's been on a lot of short charge cycles. Some phones you can change the batteries fairly cheaply and get many years of use out of them. If buying a second hand electric - how can you tell the life left in the batteries and it's effect on the car's range. I would assume changing the batteries on an electric car is a fairly costly option.

There are ways to check the health of the batteries - on some cars this is available right on the dashboard.

Though I wouldn't myself be confident that the information they provide is accurate.  Having previously owned three diesel Mondeos, every single one reported a very different fuel consumption to the amount calculated by simply comparing the mileage between fills with the volume of fuel needed to fill the tank.

To the point where I can quite confidently say Ford have purposely decided to lie (and we all know they are not alone).

I don't think the car manufacturers' ability to make !!!!!! up to deliberately deceive people miraculously ends once the ICE is removed.

WellKnownSid

There are plenty of 10 year old Leafs still bombing around.  They had no thermal management so probably worse possible case for battery wear, are years out of their battery warranty, but still soldier on.

If you're worried about state of health, then do your research and choose one of the many standard range cars with an LFP battery - Tesla, MG4, etc. No Cobalt, so more environmentally friendly, virtually no fire risk, potentially 5,000 charge / discharge cycles, no wear issue charging to 100%.

I guess, if you were careful - you might see up to 500-750,000 miles out of an LFP battery.  Happy Days.

Martyn1981

We got a 2014 24kWh Leaf in 2019. Bought a plug-in OBD (about £8 I think) and the free app Leafspy, and it showed a battery SOH (state of health) of ~90%. So worth checking I think. Not a bad car, we really liked it, with about 70 miles of range. Then got a 2018 28kWh Hyundai IONIQ, which is still good for 130 miles, and 150 if driven more gently.

As Sid says, the early and small batt Leaf's will be the worst case. In fact, just battery size has an impact too, since the cells in a 24kWh batt will work roughly 3x harder than the cells in a 70kWh battery, for any given distance. And harder 'driven' cells will get hotter, and cause more damage/degradation, especially in cars without thermal management of the battery pack.

For those who do a lot of driving, perhaps 20k miles plus pa, then the fuel savings from a BEV will be greater, and if you need to minimise charging issues, then that might lean buyers towards a Tesla, for the charging network. These seem to be showing roughly 90% battery capacity/range after about 200k miles. That seems reasonable, as buying older cars, normally means you expect a bit less from them.

natlie

I lease a Leaf, it has a max range of 170 miles to a 100% charge, depending on driving style. I charge it at home overnight using a regular household plug and a heavy duty extention lead https://toughleads.co.uk/collections/heavy-duty-13a-extension-leads/products/13a-weatherproof-single-socket-extension-lead-rcd-option 

It costs me about £7 for a full charge at home, out it costs about £18 to charge. My furthest regular journey is to my mum's 140 mile round trip, there is a charging station near her home we stop at if we need to. As we get used to the car  the range anxiety has decreased 

DrEskimo

nic_c said:

A lot of the talk is new cars electric vs ICE. However its the second hand market that I'm not sure about. I tend to buy a 3 yr old car, keep for 3-5 years and repeat.

I wonder how good the batteries would be. If you have a mobile phone for a few years or buy a second hand one, often the battery can be sub-par especially if it's been on a lot of short charge cycles. Some phones you can change the batteries fairly cheaply and get many years of use out of them. If buying a second hand electric - how can you tell the life left in the batteries and it's effect on the car's range. I would assume changing the batteries on an electric car is a fairly costly option.

I regularly drive two 8yr old EVs, both bought second hand at 2/3yrs old: 2016 Renault Zoe 41kWh and a 2016 Tesla Model S 85. 

The Zoe is on 30k miles now and the Tesla just ticked over 97k miles. 

My commute to work is 80miles round trip, pretty much all motorway and it will use 40% of the Tesla battery, giving a real world range of 200miles and 50% of the Zoe’s battery giving a 160miles real world range. Driving speed limits (+VAT..). Both are exactly the same type of range I had when they were first bought around 5-yrs ago. 

Zoe has not had a single thing wrong with it in the entire 8yrs and is still under warranty (battery is owned and runs out next year), whilst the Tesla had a replacement screen(~£800) and the rear handle is currently sticking (keeps fixing itself so not replaced yet). Very rarely even gets a service, however the Zoe has to in order to maintain the warranty at ~£120/year. 

Tesla is old enough to have the free supercharging too, but I only use that on long journeys, but costs me about £2.60 per charge at home on Octopus GO. 

ElefantEd

We did over 120,000 miles in our first (24kWH) Leaf. When we traded it in it had just its second bar, out of 12, so still had 83% of the original battery capacity, equating to a range of about 70 miles. Which wouldn't be suitable for all circumstances but if you are just pottering about locally would be fine; from what I gather from other EV owners this is a fairly typical level of degradation. Of course the actual range doesn't drop off suddenly, it's a gradual thing, though unless you use LeafSpy or the equivalent you don't have detailed info. The comparison with mpg figures from an ICE isn't very apt though, measuring battery capacity is much precise than measuring the amount of petrol sloshing around in a tank.

Bluebell1000

We have a Kia e-niro. Going to change next year when our lease is up for a new Kia Niro EV (salary sacrifice). Very good range, and no obvious battery degradation after 3.5 years use. It works very well for us. Ours came with a free home charger and we already had solar panels. We have now added a storage battery, so we can take advantage of the overnight 4 hour EV cheap electric rate in winter, and fill the battery. This means we're saving a fair chunk on our home electric bill as an added bonus 😁

born_again

nic_c said:

A lot of the talk is new cars electric vs ICE. However its the second hand market that I'm not sure about. I tend to buy a 3 yr old car, keep for 3-5 years and repeat.

I wonder how good the batteries would be. If you have a mobile phone for a few years or buy a second hand one, often the battery can be sub-par especially if it's been on a lot of short charge cycles. Some phones you can change the batteries fairly cheaply and get many years of use out of them. If buying a second hand electric - how can you tell the life left in the batteries and it's effect on the car's range. I would assume changing the batteries on an electric car is a fairly costly option.

Manufactures give a 7 to 8 year warranty on the batteries.
So expect them to last a lot longer.

Just got a 2021 e-niro p/x a 2020 niro hybrid
from 0 to 100% charge @7.5p Intelligent octopus is £4.80 to charge. Current range 300 miles.
300 miles in hybrid @ 1.40 ltr was £28. (based over average mpg over 17K miles)

Given my usage. Only need to charge once a week at worst, most likely once every 2 weeks.

https://www.zap-map.com/tools/home-charging-calculator

D123456789

My husband and I both have BMW i3. Mine does 50 - 80 miles on a charge and works perfectly for my London commute of around 8 miles each way. My husbands car does 110 - 150 miles and can do a long trip to the northwest charging twice on the way for around 30 minutes. We charge at home, and for a long trip it requires some planning to know the best places to get a quick charge without wasting time queuing for only 1 charger…..

We would not switch back from electric now. One car is a 2015 and the other a 2017 and the battery is lasting fine so far. The cars have done 63000 and 76000 miles.