Hi Redline, a great thread!
As much as it would be great to own an EV, for someone in my situation, and there must be many, it is totally impractical.
I live on a main trunk road, double yellows both sides, the car park is 20/30 metres away on opposite side of the road. No way of charging the vehicle from home, no way the Council would dig up the car park to put charging points in, even if they did the car park is a 'free-for-all', so if you are late home the chances are you would not be able to get a space with a charge point. Pointless putting 'Parking for EV's only' signs up. People ignore the 'Disabled Parking' signs so an EV parking sign would mean nothing!
Maybe this will all change in the coming years, but not in my lifetime!
By the way, on a frosty morning how does the car warm up inside? A normal ic engine only takes a few minutes, but surely taking the power from the battery pack to electric heaters to warm the inside sufficiently would drain off quite a percentage?
Look forward to hearing how you get on in the coming months/years.
All the best, Colin.
Colin - the technology here starts to be helpful. It can be a bit bewildering to understand some of this. Documentation describes the features without real world examples. I think car manufacturers are way behind on this compared to some other technologies.
Anyway - If you just jump in and drive heating is instantaneous. Of course if you’re running in battery mode that reduces your charge and hence distance.
You can set a departure time for when you want the car charged by. The car is set up with off-peak tariffs so will use both to ensure it is charged in time for minimal cost.
In fact you can set up two departure times. Can’t remember how it works in detail but it works for 5 days but is suspended if the car doesn’t move for several days.
Alongside the departure time you can set heating preconditioning for the same departure times. If the car is plugged in it draws from the external supply.
Separately you can use the app to tell the car to charge or to precondition the cabin at any time.
The app will not do the battery though. Using the predefined departure times and invoke that more than 3 hours before leaving and the car is plugged in then the battery is preconditioned too. In winter that means it is heated so should take or hold more charge. Typically the range is reduced when cold. Not sure how effective it is. There’s quite a few posts indicating that it makes little difference.
Having said that the system could be flexible. Eg set which days and times you want with a single use override. Currently when you charge a set up it stays changed until you put it back. It smacks of engineers doing the programming without talking to users using the app and in-car config in real life circumstances. Am sure controls will become more flexible over time.
It is great getting in to a nice warm car in a morning. The Disco had an auxiliary diesel burning heater. That could be timed or remotely started using a fob, but obviously used fuel and battery at about 15A. It did however heat the engine so the effect of cold on wear was much reduced. The battery load often prevented it from running so it was a lottery as to if it worked.
On the 330e (and I presume other i and I-Performance cars) it only does the cabin and battery. Having an option to get some heat into the engine could be helpful I would have thought. Running up the cold engine directly to 3k+rpm is a worry. If it’s cold I expect using Save mode from the outset will be kinder to the engine.
Having to park away from your home must be frustrating. There is talk of putting charge points on lampposts but I don’t think the power distribution to those would sustain the demand from car charging without full recabiling.
. I would image that yours may be the same.
ideally it would be a lightweight lotus 7 style car or maybe even a Z3 powered by say 150kw motor (even 100kw would be ok), then it would be called an EZ, in the states you could say - hey just going for a spin in the EASY
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) They didn't do anything to heat the interior of the car, but at least the oil in the sump was warm enough to make starting easier.