Random EV thoughts.....

...unless its a Tesla :P

....Or an editor of the property section trying to come up with this week's copy of the same old thing.

It's probably more of an issue for older houses where the wiring might have needed upgrading. Having the work done for you might bring some peace of mind

Just hope the seller doesn't decide to keep it, I've heard some strange stories about house sellers ripping up garden decks, taking dimmer switches out and even ripping the alarm system out to bring with them before the house was even sold

They probably wiped €10k off the selling price because the house was wrecked just to save half that in the new house

In theory, good idea. In practise who wants a lump of a unit like that at the front of your house to be near where the car will be parked.

US is scheduled to start receiving deliveries Q2 this year. No word on the RHD market yet for the UK, but given the old model is no longer available to order (excepting any existing stock dealers may have), its reasonable to assume we will see pre-orders open up in the couple of months with deliveries probably taking place in the second half of the year - best guess from what Im reading on the interwebs.

The best part that a heat pump will dump out cold air when heating the house and hot air when cooling the house, and the exhaust will probably be pointed directly into your car

So your car gets precooled in winter and preheated in summer 🤦🏻‍♂️

I'm in this program. I figured I drive the length of M50 at least twice a day, it could be useful to someone. I had to install an app and it looks like a navigator without a route. The info which is visible on the overhead displays appear on the top of the phone screen as well. There are some other info they push, one of them being the proximity to EV chargers. However, they announce even the AC chargers which are kinda useless for a motorway drive. Petrol stations are not shown. I think the idea is that in the future it should be integrated in the car so message like "Drive with care" will pop up every time it rains in Ireland.

In fairness is not everyday the traffic is bad. There are days when J13-J4 is 25 mins, days when is 1h+. Yesterday was relatively bad. I think there was a breakdown and rain. Repeating "Drive with care" every 200 m makes the messages redundant and people stop paying attention to them.

Today they announced left lane blocked at J10 NB (a first for M50 usually they wouldn't say which lane is blocked), and some people were avoiding the lane, while others finding the lane emptier, were rushing to overtake the whole pack only to find themselves facing the emergency vehicles and the blocked lane. This is only slowing down everyone. Maybe if they had that message in the car they wouldn't have rushed so much to the left, although it was an illegal maneuver (disputable by some) to start with.

Interesting to see that in the UK this week the car registration data shows the split in EV sales (and ICE too obviously) between private sales and company/fleet/lease/tax deductible cars - and only 35% of all EV sales are fully private sales.

”Demand for electric company cars grew by 42% in January 2024, compared with a 25% slump in private demand for EVs.”

https://www.carmagazine.co.uk/electric/ev-sales-figures-uk/

I wonder what % of Irish EV sales were fully private? Most people I know use it as a company car for lower BIK or whatever it is, or it’s tax deductible, or it’s a taxi. When I actually think about it, not that many friends with EVs are fully private buyers

That's what we're planning/hoping to do at some stage this year, should the other half's public sector employer ever get their finger out. It's been on the cards ever since she first raised it - which is about 18 months ago at this stage, but the timeline for introducing it kept being put back ("it'll be January/April/July/September/April"). The new timeline is always soon enough for us to hold back from committing to any other, less desirable used option, as the loan repayments for something like e.g. a 7 year old Ioniq (which would force us to retain a diesel car for the longer trips we take regularly) would be comparable to the monthly leasing cost on a brand new EV which could serve as the sole car in the household. It's probably because we're in NI and this was very likely one of those decisions that civil servants felt unable to take without a minister in charge, even though it's cost-neutral to the employer. Hopefully there might finally be some movement on that now, but if not then we're looking at a back-up plan - a leasing company which has started offering used EVs (3-y.o. ex-company cars etc) under the same salary-sacrifice scheme. Some of the options they have could meet our requirements for having just the one car. There were a couple of Model 3 LR on their site recently which were well under £400 per month for a three year old car with less than 15k miles on the clock. Those were snapped up in less than a day, as was an I-Pace for similar money (but triple the miles), but I think more like those will start to appear as the year progresses.

I'm guessing the average speed cameras don't adjust for the variable speed limit in the tunnel

People seem to generally obey the variable limits on the M50 in my experience.

They often don't get a huge amount of choice since the limit is usually there due to a traffic jam ahead, so cars are starting to slow down anyway

It’s a real case of beauty being in the eye of the beholder - or “if I had €575 per month to spend on a car I’d spend it on a ….”

€13.5k in rental payments for at most 30,000km on a car first released in 2018, from an ailing manufacturer