Simon's new Xantia V6 and Leaf blog

[Skull]

A free car you say .... that's appealing .... looks nice and for those of us that do local miles is probably the way ahead. I could always hire a bigger car for any holidays out of the savings from running one of these

[mickeymoon]

Very interesting Simon. I'll be following this with interest, especially the range you get out of it and charging times. I could almost be tempted by one of these just for me to go to work in but it's a 45 mile round trip and I'd *have* to remember to charge it every night.

Sent from my SM-G925F using Tapatalk

[white exec]

Really pleased for you, Simon - a great acquisition. Look forward to some video of it, if that's possible.

Re dirty headlining and fabric, try simply washing with warm water and some biological clothes-washing liquid, with a sponge. Amazing what that stuff will remove, from both plastics and cloth. Just wear protective gloves!

On the nobbly ride, take a look at the tyre pressures; you might be able to tweak something there. There's always Michelins...

Good news on its radio, too. Smiles all round

Jim: Make sure he gets a complimentary sticker for Our First EV.

[CitroJim]

Excellent Well bought Simon and we were right that you'd be the first FCF member to go electric!

Looking forward to reading about how you get on with this new baby!

[NewcastleFalcon]

Excellent news Simon

is it too early for a proper electric vehicles sub division on the FCF index page?
I am sure your Peugeot Ion posts will generate a lot of interest and.contributions, and the Electric Vehicles thread thanks in no small part to your tremendous contributions also has a pretty decent following now.


I wish you all the best with your new car, and hope that many others follow your example and take the plunge...me included!

Regards Neil

[CitroJim]

is it too early for a proper electric vehicles sub division on the FCF index page?

We could... It's a growing area so we should cater for it...

For now we'll just call it Simon's Area

[white exec]

Where Simon treads, others will surely follow. Creating a posting area for EVs is a good idea .

[lexi]

Would you not wish the battery to go pop while under warranty? Then a new one and start again?
If the battery goes when your warranty expires, will it write the car off?
Good luck with it. Looks a good wee tool for in and out of City.

[Mandrake]

A free car you say .... that's appealing .... looks nice and for those of us that do local miles is probably the way ahead. I could always hire a bigger car for any holidays out of the savings from running one of these

When I say for free, I was paying on average £170/month on petrol alone, not counting annual maintenance for the Xantia. 95% of the mileage I do is commuting, shopping runs etc which can be done in the electric car both range and space wise. The boot is pretty small but it does have a split rear seat that folds flat, and the roofline is quite high. (I have a good 6 inches above my head in both front and rear seats and I'm 6 foot)

The same mileage in the Ion costs about £20 in electricity, (equivalent to 120MPG at current petrol and electricity prices) and cuts down my yearly maintenance on the Xantia as well as it will slash the mileage it is doing and help preserve the life it has left. (It is now up to 82k miles) If I make use of the free public charging stations in Scotland I could cut the charging cost even further, or I could go on an Economy 7 plan and charge at night on a timer.

Paying for it over 4 years is £119 / month + £25 insurance + £20 electricity = £165, so it's basically paying for itself (just) at our current mileage. However that includes continuing to tax and keep the Xantia as well as long as I keep the miles (and thus petrol) on the Xantia very low - so we get a whole second car out of it so that I'm not relying on one 20 year old car for a critical daily commute, and after the car is paid off we own it (unlike PCP) which would be an additional £120 saving a month.

All this assumes that the price of petrol doesn't skyrocket in the next 4 years - if it does we are even better off. I think it's unlikely that electricity will climb faster than petrol/diesel in the future. It also means that any additional mileage we do above our minimum "essential" mileage costs us very little. Many is the time we have been near the end of the month with a nearly empty petrol tank and a nearly empty bank account and have wanted to go somewhere and decided not to because we can't really justify filling the tank. We have often limited where we go to save money on travel costs.

Not only is the electricity so much cheaper that you don't really have to worry about it the same way, it comes off the electricity bill which is paid for over a period of time rather than immediately up front like a petrol pump - most people keep their gas/electricity accounts in credit so any cost of travel gets averaged out over a few month period rather than biting at a difficult time of month. So you never can't charge because you're short of money - you'll pay for it eventually but it is spread out over time.

Don't get the wrong idea - the Ion is definitely a second car. It isn't a replacement for a car like a Xantia, it is a replacement for a car like a C1, although it's a bit bigger than a C1 and shorter range.

Very interesting Simon. I'll be following this with interest, especially the range you get out of it and charging times. I could almost be tempted by one of these just for me to go to work in but it's a 45 mile round trip and I'd *have* to remember to charge it every night.

45 miles would be possible but a bit close for comfort for an Ion. Although the nominal range is about 60 miles it depends a lot on the speed you drive and whether you use the heater. Putting the heater on full blast for the entire journey can easily wipe 10-15 miles off the range, although in practice you wouldn't do that - you might put it on for say 5 minutes to get the insides warmed up then turn it right down for most of the trip. You'll also get a lot less than 60 miles if you travel at over 60mph or do a lot of hard acceleration and braking. On the other hand if you travel under 50mph and drive and brake smoothly you'll actually get more mileage. Wind resistance is a big factor on range second to heater use.

Even though I've read a lot about the Ion I'm still in the early days of experimenting with driving style, heater use etc to see what I can and can't get away with. A general rule I'd say for an EV used for a commute is that unless you have guaranteed charging facilities at the destination (such as in a car park) you wouldn't want your commute to be more than half the nominal range of a full charge - that gives you leeway for heater use, unexpected detours and so on.

There's three charging speeds for an Ion -

Level 1 ("slow" charger) is using a household 3 pin 13amp plug using the provided charger. It actually only charges at 10 amps (2.3kW) to minimise the strain on the ring main that the socket is connected to (most ring mains only have 16 amp breakers shared among 4-6 sockets) and would take about 7 hours from dead flat to 100% charge. This is all I have at home at the moment.

Level 2 ("fast" charger) is what you'll find from a dedicated EV charge point installed outside your house, or a public charger in a car park or shopping centre. On an Ion this will charge at 16 amps or 3.6kW and will fully charge it from nothing in 4 hours. I'm considering getting this installed at home - if you apply within 6 months of buying the car the Scottish Government will subsidise 75% of the cost of the installation up to a maximum of £500.

Level 3 ("rapid" charger) is what you'll find in many motorway services and some car parks. The Ion uses DC Chademo with a big round plug the size of a fire hose It will do up to 50kW (240v at 200 amps) and this will charge from nothing to 80% in 30 minutes and automatically stop at 80%. It stops there because the charging rate has to drop way down above 80% and it would take a further 30 minutes to do the last 20%. (Which you could do if you restarted it, but you're better to just drive to the next charger)

Obviously charging times are shorter when the battery is only partially discharged.

I actually tried a rapid charger today for the hell of it, to test my new Charge Place Scotland card and become familiar with operating the charging machines:







A couple of minutes after I started charging a Zoe pulled up and plugged into the same machine - it is able to charge from the Level 2 AC side while I am using the Level 3 DC side of the charger, however it can cause the charging to slow down a bit if the total power to the charger unit is limited to less than the sum total.

It took about 20 minutes for me to charge from 40% up to 80% and was a matter of just plugging the plug into the car (it looks big and cumbersome but the plug is surprisingly light and easy to attach) waving my RFID card at the machine then pressing Start on the DC side. Then I sat and read the internet on my phone for 20 minutes. After charging to 80% I had a reported range of 56 miles.

Thanks to the Scottish Government run Charge Place Scotland, this cost me exactly £0.00.

Really pleased for you, Simon - a great acquisition. Look forward to some video of it, if that's possible
On the nobbly ride, take a look at the tyre pressures; you might be able to tweak something there. There's always Michelins...

Tyre pressures are 36 psi all round. I think they're Dunlops, so Meh.... when they eventually wear out I'll probably fit Michelins! There is quite a lot of tread left though so I think it will be a while. They're supposed to be special EV grade tyres which are basically just very low rolling resistance, as rolling resistance is the major energy consumer at slow speeds in an EV. (With wind resistance being the major factor at high speeds)

Excellent Well bought Simon and we were right that you'd be the first FCF member to go electric!

Actually I'm not the first! I spotted steelcityuk over on speakev.com the other day - he has apparently had a Zoe for a couple of years now, although last I saw in his posts he was doing battle with Renault for a problem with A/C charge leaking unusually fast that they claim is normal!

Fortunately A/C and heater both seem to be working fine on my Ion, although the heater is what I would call adequate, not fantastic.

Would you not wish the battery to go pop while under warranty? Then a new one and start again?

Not really. The battery failing outright is an extremely unlikely and rare event. About as likely as putting a conrod through a cylinder on a modern petrol engine - theoretically possible but nobody looses any sleep over the possibility of it happening and it is considered very unlucky!

The failure mode for EV batteries is capacity loss. They keep working, but the usable range might shrink to a point that the car no longer meets your needs as it can't go far enough between charges. So far the battery on this car has about 83% of its raw capacity left after 5 years and 28k - that is considered pretty good, especially for a basic design like this which doesn't use liquid cooling for the battery. (It does blast the batteries with the A/C when rapid charging though!)

Not all of the raw capacity is made available for use when new - the bottom and top end of the charge range is made purposely inaccessible both to prolong the battery service life, and also to avoid any loss of usable range during the initial loss of raw capacity. At least until the hidden raw capacity is gone and then the usable capacity and range will eventually start to shrink too.

So even though the raw capacity is only 83%, the usable capacity (and therefore range) is still over 95% of what it would have been new. Eventually it will start to reduce but nobody really knows what mileage they will do without significant range loss. I guess I'll find out at about 10k per year!

As far as I know the battery warranty for the Ion does not cover capacity loss only failure. On some other models of EV's the warranty does cover capacity loss - below 70% springs to mind for one, however they do not guarantee to replace it with a new battery with 100% capacity - only with a battery which has higher than the threshold capacity eg over 70%. So not actually that useful.

If the battery goes when your warranty expires, will it write the car off?

With the limited supply of wrecked EV's to salvage parts from at the moment - yes. The cost of a new battery from the dealer is uneconomic, but the same could be said of buying an entire engine for a 10 year old petrol or diesel car from a dealer - nobody does that. You'd go get an engine from a scrap yard or pranged car. One day when there are sufficient wrecked EV's available this will be possible, but not today. So it's a gamble, but a gamble where the worst that is likely to happen is that the usable range will shrink over time. If that happens then depending on your needs you might want to flick it on while it's still saleable.

At least with an Ion you always own the battery and there is no on-going battery lease - on all EV's with a battery lease the resale value of the cars has absolutely tanked when they are a few years old as nobody wants to buy an old EV that isn't worth much that has a perpetual battery lease that is the same as it was when it was new! Battery lease only makes sense for the original owner and only if they sell quick and makes no sense at all for a purchaser of a second hand EV, especially when the likes of Renault won't even let you buy out the battery lease.

[Skull]

When I say for free, I was paying on average £170/month on petrol alone ......

Mandrake I totally get the mentality ....the fact that you also get a free fast charge in your area is a major bonus ...I can see supermarkets using that as a magnet for customers .... charge for free whilst you shop (probably with a minimum spend).

Free charging points would be a serious positive [pun intended] for owners.

[Mandrake]

The situation is very different down in England, but in Scotland about 90% of the public charge points are currently free to use, both Level 2 fast and Level 3 rapid. I don't expect that to last forever and I won't be relying on it staying that way, but I will certainly make use of it while it is available!

[Zelandeth]

Will be really curious to see how this goes long term. If it's positive, it may well have a strong bearing on whether one of these is considered as a replacement when we come to move the 107 on to a new owner.

[CitroJim]

Will be really curious to see how this goes long term. If it's positive, it may well have a strong bearing on whether one of these is considered as a replacement when we come to move the 107 on to a new owner.

If the majority of your running is in and around MK Zel then it's a no-brainer given the plethora of charging points dotted around our fair city

If I had serious need of a small car again then it's precisely what I'd go for... For me the economies do not stack up... Yet...

[Mandrake]

Will be really curious to see how this goes long term. If it's positive, it may well have a strong bearing on whether one of these is considered as a replacement when we come to move the 107 on to a new owner.

Funnily enough, I was parked next to a 107 this morning:





It's somewhat narrower than even a C1/107 (it looks hilariously narrow in car parks compared to "normal" cars. ) but is both taller and longer. And when you consider the bonnet is almost non-existent and the wheels are right at the extreme corners, I think there is more overall space inside albeit slightly narrower.

Here is one from the front:

[CitroJim]

Simon, is the Ion based on a Japanese Kei car by any chance? It's width and height suggests it might be...

Just like the C1 it'll be so easy to park... You can take advantage of all those marginal spaces the V6 would never fit into