Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by white exec »

NewcastleFalcon wrote: 31 Jul 2019, 21:52 "Metrocab’s six-seater vehicle is the first taxi to be powered entirely by electricity, but it has a small petrol engine that generates power to recharge the vehicle’s batteries, meaning that it never has to be plugged in."
So, it runs on petrol? I do hope this isn't the case :shock: .
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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by NewcastleFalcon »

white exec wrote: 01 Aug 2019, 07:59 So, it runs on petrol? I do hope this isn't the case :shock: .

Just reported on BBC London News that the 2500th all-electric black cab has gone on the road.


More on Metro Cab here. Don't know if they were included in the "2500th all-electric black cab claim".
The Petrol Engine is a "range extender" and they claim 75% zero emission in actual operation.
The Key word in the blurb and on the side of the cab is "Zero Emissions Capable"
https://metrocab.com/2017/downloads/Met ... 1-2017.pdf
The Metrocab became London’s first licensed zero-emissions capable taxi in 2014 and took part in a two-year Trial in London, covering hundreds of thousands of miles with 75% zero-emissions operation, substantially enhancing air quality, reducing emissions, and delivering significant fuel savings to drivers.
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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by bobins »

My C5 is also 'zero-emissions capable'....... if I leave it parked up on my driveway :-D
Sadly no longer a C5 owner :(
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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by white exec »

So, just a plug-in petrol hybrid, then.
A real con, and ultimately disappointing.
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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by NewcastleFalcon »

bobins wrote: 01 Aug 2019, 13:23 My C5 is also 'zero-emissions capable'....... if I leave it parked up on my driveway :-D


Well on the evidence so far in July milage records declared on the FCF I think Steve (MyGlaren) is leading the way, in the C5 owners zero-emissions league table!

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=61815&start=45#p615097

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Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by NewcastleFalcon »

A definite 50 points for an unusual spot.
How much is a 10 reg MITSUBISHI I-MIEV worth?
Bit of rust at bottom of drivers door, flat front tyre.
Visible former Gateshead Council faded logo on drivers door.
MOT to 5th June 2020, last MOT showed 37557 kilometres. (consistently recorded as Kms in MOT History)
Can't be that much life left in a 9 year old battery
Got to be pretty much unsaleable surely?
At that sort of age the MITSUBISHI dealer is not going to sell it off his forecourt
and unless Auction Buyers are mad its going to fetch next to nowt.....no profit in it even buying it for £500.
just seen an advert for a 10 reg one at a buy it now for £5,500! Surely not
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Mitsubishi-i ... SweK9dQ1GH
Dont even know its for sale...might be a customers car in for a service.
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Regards Neil
Last edited by NewcastleFalcon on 01 Aug 2019, 23:21, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by Mandrake »

Someone obviously decided that a pure BEV wouldn't be suitable as a Taxi due to range and charging times, and at the time the car was being designed that would have been true at the desired price point. As a Rex (range extender) an electric only range of 80 miles is actually pretty good.

However when you can now buy something like a Kia e-Niro with a realistic 250+ mile range a cabbie could drive one all day and not have to stop to charge at all except in exceptional circumstances...

Still a step up from a diesel taxi though - a range extender is not a PHEV. Unlike a PHEV where the combustion engine can drive the wheels directly, its a fully electric car with only an electric motor for driving the wheels that just has a smaller battery and a small petrol engine that drives a generator to top up the battery if you get low.

So if you drive within the electric range or have time to stop and charge (lunch break ?) then it is truly acting as a fully electric car. But if you have to drive a lot further and don't have time to charge you can get another 150 miles or so on petrol.

Charging is a problem in London - I'm not surprised they'd be complaining. I've seen a lot of these REX black cabs in Glasgow recently - except some of them are white! When they've passed me they were silent so driving on electricity...
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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by Mandrake »

NewcastleFalcon wrote: 01 Aug 2019, 22:58 A definite 50 points for an unusual spot.
How much is a 10 reg MITSUBISHI I-MIEV worth?
Bit of rust at bottom of drivers door, flat front tyre.
Visible former Gateshead Council faded logo on drivers door.
MOT to 5th June 2020, last MOT showed 37557 kilometres. (consistently recorded as Kms in MOT History)
Can't be that much life left in a 9 year old battery
Got to be pretty much unsaleable surely?
At that sort of age the MITSUBISHI dealer is not going to sell it off his forecourt
and unless Auction Buyers are mad its going to fetch next to nowt.....no profit in it even buying it for £500.
Dont even know its for sale...might be a customers car in for a service.

temp4.png

DSC02265.JPG

Regards Neil

Image
Image

I paid £4200 for my 2011 Ion which had done 28k miles back in 2017.

The cheapest one for sale now at any age or price is around £5200 as demand has gone up and second hand EV's are in short supply.

As for how good the 9 year old battery is - no way to know without plugging in a diagnostic tool to check. This can be done quite quickly with the right OBD dongle and an Android app called Canion - which I use with my car.

I'm starting to have some issues with 3 of the cells in my car now that weren't there when I first got the car, however I think I've been unlucky as many other Ion's/C-Zero's of similar age still have batteries in good condition. It all depends on how it has been treated through it's life.
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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by NewcastleFalcon »

Mandrake wrote: 01 Aug 2019, 23:21
The cheapest one for sale now at any age or price is around £5200 as demand has gone up and second hand EV's are in short supply.

As for how good the 9 year old battery is - no way to know without plugging in a diagnostic tool to check. This can be done quite quickly with the right OBD dongle and an Android app called Canion - which I use with my car.


Yes I edited in an example to my post of £5,500 for a 10 reg which came as a bit of a shock. The little white thing looked quite unloved at the back of the garage lot, and my thinking was 9 year old battery scraps the car if it needs a replacement hence my initial judgement of its worth. That sort of test you mention looks like a vital tool in assessing what you might be willing to pay for a second hand EV.

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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by Mandrake »

The problem with trying to guess the battery health based on age is there are many factors playing into battery degradation. To name a few:

Cycle count - the more times a battery is discharged and recharged the more the capacity degrades. Cycle count correlates roughly with miles driven although there will be a seasonal effect to this as winter miles consume more power than summer miles by approximately 25%. Also a car that does mainly runs to the shops will be achieving a higher miles/kWh performance and this will degrade the battery less per mile than one that is hammered on the motorway ever day.

The larger the battery the less it is cycled for the same miles driven. So all else being equal a car with a bigger range and bigger battery will actually degrade slower as the battery isn't cycled as much for a given number of miles. This puts a small battery car at a disadvantage.

Depth of discharge - if you discharge the battery from 100% to 20% and then recharge it (a depth of discharge of 80%) it will degrade the battery more than discharging from 100% to 60% then recharging to 100% then discharging to 60% and charging again. So running the battery down very low and only recharging when it's nearly dead will degrade it much faster than topping up more often, even though the cycle count (which is based on complete cycles) is technically the same. This puts a small battery car at a disadvantage as to get a useful driving range you will be pushing the battery closer to running out out of necessity.

High state of charge and/or high temperatures - when the battery is at a high state of charge, typically over about 90% this causes the cells to be near their maximum voltage. This high potential accelerates unwanted chemical side reactions in the cell that cause degradation. These unwanted chemical reactions take place much faster at higher temperatures, and are cumulative over time.

So the combination of high temperatures and high state of charge over a long period of time causes degradation. If you store a Lithium Ion cell at 100% charge in a hot environment like sitting out in a hot summer it will degrade rapidly (losing say 20% of its capacity in just a few years) without even being used at all. So this is an age / shelf life related degradation mechanism. There is some evidence to suggest that this actually causes more degradation than cycle count in EV's, especially in cars that are regularly charged to 100%.

To avoid this the cells should either be kept cool, (hence active thermal management used in some cars) kept below about 80% charge or both, for as much of the time as possible. Heat related degradation is going to be worst in summer and less of a problem in winter. Opposite to cycle life.

The single biggest thing you can do to preserve the life of the battery as it ages is to not charge past 80% except when you really need the range. So if you can do your daily commute easily with an 80% charge then do so, and save the 100% charge for the night before you go on a long trip, that way it only sits at 100% for a short time. That alone could double the number of years the battery lasts.

Likewise try to avoid deeply discharging the battery - ideally stay above 30% unless you really need the range. Keeping the battery between 30% and 80% most of the time has a huge effect on how long they last, hence the habits of the previous owners of the car have a large effect on how good the battery of a second hand car will be. This of course puts a small battery car at a disadvantage.

There is no way I could do my daily commute keeping the battery between 80% and 30%, certainly not in winter. I need the 100% charge. My car doesn't have a setting to stop charging at 80% anyway - on a normal home charger it will always charge to 100% unless interrupted manually, which is not convenient.

If you now compare a small 16kWh battery car like mine with a 67kWh battery car like a Kia e-Niro it's not just about the range you get.

The 4x bigger battery will only go through 1/4 as many cycles for a given mileage, so in theory should last 4x the mileage all else being equal just due to cycle count. Where my battery might be starting to show signs of concern at 50k miles, the Niro battery may be fine up until about 200k miles even all else being equal - by which time the car itself may be worn out. With a 250+ mile range you can easily charge up to only 80% (still over 200 miles) for daily use and also avoid going below 30%. So you keep the battery in the Goldilocks range most of the time. It also has a setting in the car where you can tell it to stop charging automatically at 80%, which makes it very easy to do so.

By staying below 80% heat is not really a problem for degradation and the car has active thermal management to cool the battery anyway. In short a battery in a car like that will last far longer than the one in my Ion!

One final factor is that individual cells can go faulty for reasons unknown at pretty much any random time. Up until about 40k miles all my cells were OK then over a relatively short period of time three cells have started to degrade rapidly while the other 85 are fine - for a failure rate of about 3%. What happened ? Hard to say. Maybe there was an inciting event like overheating on long motorway trips (it doesn't have any active cooling while driving, only while rapid charging) or repetitive deep discharges in winter put strain on them (I tend to go with this theory) and it was too much for these specific cells that maybe started off a bit weaker than the others, so their flaws were uncovered.

I tend to think that it's a hidden manufacturing flaw due to quality control issues - if it was overheating that was the cause or vibration etc you'd expect more than 3 to be affected. The fact that 3 are faulty and 85 subject to almost identical temperatures and identical charge and discharge rates are absolutely fine really does seem like a quality control problem, and thus it's "bad luck" for one or more of these poor quality cells to be lurking in my car.

Maybe some of the cells in my car were made on a Friday afternoon ? :twisted:

For all the reasons above plugging in a diagnostic tool to get a reading on the state of the battery is really the only way to separate the good batteries from the less than good ones. Age and mileage is only a very, very broad measure of whether the battery might be any good.
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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by NewcastleFalcon »

Thanks for that Simon, top quality well researched information as always.

I can only think of one other FCF member who has an EV other than yourself, but you would be hard pressed to find a "mainstream" car forum with a better store of information and discussion on EV's than our own FCF thanks to contibutions by yourself and others.

The true bargain basement used EV hasn't quite come along yet. I thought for just a minute that an unloved ex-council small EV with an old battery in a far corner of a garage may be worth £500 to play around with, but the market clearly is still there and if they are managing to sell them for over £5,000, then the cliff edge depreciation hasn't quite kicked in yet in the second hand market. Yours has probably appreciated!

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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by old'uns »

old'uns wrote: 26 Jul 2019, 20:47 i'll be spotting 5x Ocado 'leccy delivery vans ( Fiat's i think?) next Thu / Fri in Hull.....Blackberry livery if i fit it OK [-o<


well that went well....not :lol:
side livery 30mm too short, bodybuilder gave us an old drawing ](*,)
so no livery, no pics and a Friday off.
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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by NewcastleFalcon »

old'uns wrote: 02 Aug 2019, 17:32
old'uns wrote: 26 Jul 2019, 20:47 i'll be spotting 5x Ocado 'leccy delivery vans ( Fiat's i think?) next Thu / Fri in Hull.....Blackberry livery if i fit it OK [-o<

......not even a peak at the 'gubbins', only external giveaway is the BD logo in place of the FIAT one on the grille
Yes BD/FIAT wouldn't have got a look in in the 60's and 70's with Smiths/NCB and Morrison attending to the Electric Vehicle Needs needs of Ipswich Co-op.....

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PS The NCB bit isn't the National Coal Board but Northern Coach Builders.
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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by old'uns »

you're all aiming too high price wise.....
a quick once over and an overnight charge
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Crompton-Ley ... 0005.m1851
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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by NewcastleFalcon »

old'uns wrote: 02 Aug 2019, 21:20 you're all aiming too high price wise.....
a quick once over and an overnight charge
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Crompton-Ley ... 0005.m1851


Bit of an epic drive home for me from Ramsgate!
There's a £7995 one listed by the side of that advert! That must be the quirky catering van market they are thinking of appealing to at that price.

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