Things you wish you'd known when researching / buying your electric car

That I’d never need to use public charging and shouldn’t worry too much about it.

also not to allow smart meter be installed.

What's wrong with a smart meter? I got a letter saying I'm getting one this year, should I decline it?

And on Things etc... No regrets and couldn't afford one until 2019. Main issues with takeup are dealers still pushing ICE cars because they are often clueless and don't own or believe in EVs (at least in 2019/20 but that is changing now). Best thing I did when shopping around with my father back then was to chat to owners at the fast charging point out the back of the dealership (a taxi driver and a holiday-maker both in mark 1 or 1.5 LEAFs).

I dont have a top 5 myself but just from looking at what gets posted on the forum alot, is confusion around the home charge points (tethered, untethered, priority switches, grants, costs, features like Solar integration and app support etc).

The cost of them, I think, catches alot of people out as the charge point is usually only something they look into once they've already put a deposit down and then they come here for info on the charge point. Everyone knows what a car is and how to drive, most have no idea about electrical stuff and its a key part of EV ownership.

I know you are primarily a car reviewer and not an electrician but since everyone buying an EV needs to know how to charge it, it might make sense for you to do some home charge point reviews? Show the various types, positives, negatives, costs etc. Maybe poll the forum to get volunteers for each charge point (EO, Zappi, Andersen, Rolec etc) and do an interview type thing where they/you show it and discuss it with the owner. One for each charge point.

Just how cheap they are to run when you do mostly home charging on night rate

the myriad of apps “required”

+ a million to both of these.

to NOT under any circumstances. They do not benefit the consumer. They only allow price gouging.

Their benefits ARE primarily to the ESB network and the actual creators of electricity as they can attune to and shape demand through variable pricing. Now to the customer, I can understand this gets bagged up with the evil water meters and the pay by weight for waste changes, yet both of these have environmental objectives but the whole water thing occurred at the peak of horrible cuts and bailout demands and were just not politically acceptable.

Once smart meters are installed, and they will be to all but a handful of holdouts, there will be demand and pressure to favour consumers and avoid overly expensive peak demand costs for electricity. As a consumer, it suits me to have a moderate difference between day and night due to heavy daytime usage and no car commuting, but that might change.

OT alright, but a lot of wind power gets curtailed during the night. Partly due to nights tending to be windier and also low demand across the grid overnight. Nightrate still solves this oversupply issue - all be it it doesn't happen every night.

We don't have a constant oversupply at night anymore which is why they are pushing the smart meters so they can price electricity cheap when the wind blows/sun shines and make it expensive when the wind doesn't blow and the suns not shining. Cheap electricity from 23:00 to 08:00 during the winter isn't going to be around much longer, all new homes are going electric heating and they want thousands more BEVs, demand for electricity during winter is going to explode and they want to use demand based billing to reduce the demand.

Yeah don't disagree with all that per se, I suppose I really meant to say that there will still be periods of over supply, and a lot of them will still be at night.

Anyway back on topic!

Just bring the emergency charge port open pull cord up above the boot floor. You can just open the charge port there, while you are getting the cables out.

Ok for that I would attach a wireless relay across the switch contacts up front for the pop mechanism.

You'd probably able to make something out of a very cheap wireless door bell. Mount the wireless bell push at your charge point. :)

The fundamental issue is that car originally was developed with ICE / hybrid in mind, hence refueling was only once a week at most.

A quick back of the envelope spreadsheet off Eirgrid Dashboard shows Renewables (mostly wind) as about 36% of Energy Mix in last 30 days.

Just so you are aware, smart meters and the smart meter tariffs are not one and the same.

You can get a new smart meter and stay on the day / night tariff. You can't obviously get a smart tariff without a smart meter

The one thing I missed in my research prior to buying my EV was that AC charging is limited to the charger in the car. Didn't even realize that the car had a charger and thought I could get the full 22kw charge rate that most public AC chargers are.

AC charging needs a charger between the outlet and the car to "convert" the electricity to DC. My ID.3 has an onboard 11kw charger to do this so that's the max speed you can charge on an AC charger. I believe the Zoe has a 22Kw charger. DC charging is much faster with the charging speed depending on the car