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Showing content with the highest reputation on 11/08/23 in all areas

  1. It's not simply braking, your engine/transmission is contributing lots of drag too. There's a charging station in practically every garage or on every drive - it's called a wall outlet. We quite happily used the little box that came with the car for over a year, and could still get by without the 3-phase wall charger. But it's nice to know that we can head off on a long trip at max capacity at very little notice, and that we can offer destination charging to visiting friends. I got an extra long Type 2 cable so that it will reach under the door onto our back lane: one day someone will thank me for this! People have been fed the idea that you must have dedicated fast chargers everywhere, but the reality is that all you need is to adjust your mindset away from your expensive dinosaur juice addiction. My only wish is that our wall charger and the car could agree to a slower charging rate, as even the minimum setting (5A of 3-phase) generally tops up the car in little more than an hour of cheap rate power when actually I want to extend this over much more of the cheap rate period. So IMHO too much is made of charging times. Very rarely have we ever been ready to go from a stop before the car was, and not having to queue to pay at service stations is an extra bonus. You can be taking on power within a few seconds of arriving, and it's simply pull the connector and go. In fact, there have been occasions when a short charging time has been a bit of a pain: getting to the top floor of a hotel and flopping down on the bed to almost immediately get a message that the charge is complete, and you're expected to remove the vehicle from the charger within ten minutes! Always best to find a hotel with a reserved destination charger that tops you up overnight for free. We arrived at one posh Italian hotel in the early hours to find the manager - no less - standing ready to remove the reserved sign right outside the main entrance to enable us to plug in for a free overnight charge. No lugging our bags from the car park, and very satisfied customers who will definitely revisit. PHEVs are a bit of a joke when they park up at public chargers in an attempt to bolster their tiny electric range, and actually annoy other EV owners. There's a usage case for people who do short commutes and can filch power from an employer, but generally they are the worst of both worlds: none of the maintenance savings and very little fuel saving to compensate for all the extra complexity. I convinced one of our neighbours here to wait for an affordable proper EV, and I'm sure that's coming fairly soon now. I agree that you've a special case there, but in a different way we were "way out in the styx" in the first year or two. We didn't even have any service available this end of Italy, let alone fast public charging. Any concerns we had were very easily overcome, and we'll never buy another ICE vehicle. I will bet you are going to see some Cybertrucks locally in the next year - 18 months max!
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