Random EV thoughts.....

Yes, but the Minister for Finance hasn't. 😂

Its based on internal EV uptake projections (links in the article @innrain posted)

As an observation, in my experience of travelling around all parts of the country for the last 3.5 years in an EV all throughout the year, I think those stats are pretty bang on wrt Ireland.

I've been planning a long UK trip and looking around on Plugshare. One thing that struck me is the large amount of 7kW points. I've rarely seen them here. Where I have has been mostly an old almost domestic style installation that happens to be public, stuck on the side of a hotel or bar. But over there, 7kW is very widely available. Not necessarily a bad thing either. One location I may use is a large hub at a train station park and ride, which is mostly 7kW*, which makes sense for people taking the train into town for hours.

*

150kW CCS x 2

100kW CHAdeMo x 2

22kW x 8

7kW x 24

Pretty sure would be popular if it would have existed in Dublin. From the Dublin LA EV strategy document in Dublin City only 56% of residents have access to off street private parking.

This means that the remainder of 44% would be nicely served by some form of AC charging. People would feel confident to buy an EV instead of an ICE. Whatever they say in that document you cannot cater for 44% of the population with one or two DC charging hubs. BTW the said policy was released June of 2022 and nothing happened since.

Or money to install 100 and they'll install 20.

I agree, but unfortunately Ecars and the Dublin councils don't and are focusing on DC charging in the short term

Basically Ecars said AC chargers don't make money here and so DC charging is more likely to pay for itself

I've always maintained that the reason AC chargers don't make sense is because Ecars insist on having dual 22kW units with a meter connection per pillar, which means you only get two charging spaces at most

Since most EVs on sale today don't charge faster than 11kW your utilisation almost never goes above 50%. Only on the off chance two Zoe's plug into the same charger do you use the full 44kW

Whereas if you had 6x 7kW chargers on the same connection your utilisation would be closer to 100% and sell more kilowatt hours (the stuff you make money on) over a given day

Interesting article on the reliability of EV batteries.

They have gotten alot more reliable over the last 10 years, going from a 7.5% failure rate to 0.1%.

https://insideevs.com/news/717187/ev-battery-replacements-due-failure-study/

The most common failures were with the 2013 Tesla Model S (8.5%) and the 2011 Nissan Leaf (8.3%).

So to clarify, these aren't failures due to age related degradation. This is for cars with batteries that had manufacturing defects and thus lower capacity when delivered, or degradation beyond what the manufacturer guarantees

Have I got that correct?

One thing they seemed to leave out was the age if the car at replacement time. For example the cars from 2011 were much worse, but how many got new batteries in 2011 versus the following years

I guess the majority of cars from that year were Leafs which had a 5 year battery warranty IIRC. So they wouldn't have replaced any batteries after 2016, plus that was when the 30kWh pack rolled out so Nissan wouldn't have had many replacements anyway

Yes, any well designed car can last for a very long time once you keep on top of servicing and maintenance. Many a car are sent to early grave for pretty small issues if maintenance is let to slip earlier in their lifetime as fixing it all in one go would be too much money.

In case of the Model 3, the upper control arms have been mentioned as potentially a weak point. The issue seem to affect mainly early builds, the design was changed sometime before 2021. We shall see what happens with ours when it ages, but in case of this particular model of car they are quite firmly sprung and I'm in opinion that stiffer suspension results in less wear and tear in the shocks and joints as there is a smaller range of movement. But I have no hard data on this and I may be totally wrong too.

Incedentally, I just changed the front wishbones in the 2016 leaf last weekend as the bushings were pretty bad at 108k. The front was wandering and when the car was jacked up there were visible cracks starting to appear in the rubber joints, and in general what causes that apart from aging is when the joints are streched to the extremes of their movement. NCT will be in June and I thought I'll be ahead of the game for once. As of other wear, apart from this known issue in Leaf all the rest of the suspension still feels tight.

Carwow

You'd wonder are they actually engaging at all with that mileage before replacement. They're supposed to wear.

Said with such confidence. First he says it's "criminal" because of the mileage then moves on to "completely unsafe" because of age and water. In actual fact, you have no idea what age the pads were as I didn't state it. You also have no idea of the effect of water ingress and obviously, no idea of the condition or remaining friction material thickness. FYI the pads (and discs) could have gone more than 325 kms, were in fine condition and nowhere near the NCT thickness limit of 1.5 mm. Their replacements are in situ for over 200 k kms and are in excellent condition.

Do you, as a habit, go around accusing others of criminal behaviour when they do something you don't agree with? How does that work out for you?

What we have here seems to be a case of EV fan Butthurt that it isn't just EVs that can have very low friction brake use. I'd suggest improving your driving and learning how to read the road.

So in other words it's unsafe because you say it is. And you still don't know the age of the pads.

I'm aware that you work on your own vehicles and only recently got an EV. I recall a post from not too long ago where you mentioned cutting a brake disc off with an angle grinder. Given that I also work on my cars and despite infrequent pad and disc changes, have never had to do anything like that, which of us needs to examine our approach to brake maintenance?

Also I have a different 25 year old car family owned from new that has never had the brake fluid changed or topped up and is on original brake lines, calipers and cylinders. Have had many confident individuals tell me over years that not changing brake fluid was going to cause all manner of problems including rusting the brake lines. Bollocks - brake lines rust from the outside in.

And to bring this back to the topic of EVs, if not changing brakes often enough (by your definition) is unsafe, then there goes one of the maintenance advantages of EVs that fans like to boast about. So the car isn't wearing its brakes - but it'd be criminal not to replace them anyway.

Well if you were doing 900km every single day you'd get that milage up in a year. Maybe that's what happened? And they had a Flintstones Flap so they could drop their feet through the floor to stop.