Living the life electric - part 4.

(This post follows from last week's - best read that first if you missed it).
For our Nissan LEAF, we initially we decided the supplied 120v trickle-charger would be fine, but that meant the cable would never be in the car - problematic if we ever needed some juice whilst out somewhere. Realising that the LEAF has a standard J1772 charging port, I also realised I didn't need to pay Nissan $1500 for their charging station. Bosch do one for less than $500 which does the exact same thing.
At this point I also discovered 'electric car people' are very particular about the terminology. The thing you put on the wall in your garage is NOT a charger. It's an EVSE - electric vehicle supply equipment. It's designed to provide power at a known voltage and current to the car, and the charging functions are all built in to the car itself. This means I can plug in 120V at 1.3kW, 240V at 3.3kW or 240V at 6kW and the car will adapt accordingly.
The only difference in the charging methods is time-to-charge. The cost of power doesn't vary where we live, so there's no benefit to attempting to charge overnight.
For the LEAF, from an almost-dead battery to fully-charged takes 20 hours on the trickle-charger, about 8 hours on a 3kW supply and about 4 hours on a 6kW supply.
There are three decision to make when looking at an EVSE. The first is this: do you own a Tesla? In which case you can't buy an off-the-shelf EVSE because Tesla use a proprietary charging port connection. Assuming you don't own a Tesla, the second question is AC or DC charging? AC is the most common. DC is massively powerful and for most electric cars will give you a 40 minute charge time from dead. The disadvantage is a huge cost for the EVSE, upgraded electrical system in your house or garage, and a charging cable the size of Duane Johnson's biceps. Assuming then that you go with the far more common AC charging, the final question is 'will this burn my garage down?'.
The power rating of your electrical supply is very important. In our case we have a 50amp feeded to the garage, so adding a new 30amp EVSE to that circuit would not leave a lot of 'wiggle room' in the electrical system. For that reason I chose to put in a 16amp version. Shorter charge times than the trickle charger, longer than a 6kW supply. With the 3kW supply I used, for our daily driving, it literally takes 20 minutes in the evening to top off the charge. I did all the electrical work myself as it's pretty damn simple, and I didn't pay Nissan another $1500.
Perfect.

Living the life electric - part 3.

(This post follows from last week's - best read that first if you missed it).
So what's it like living with an electric car in the family? Well - it's different.
If you've never driven an all-electric car, it's weird at first. There's no engine noise, so there isn't really an 'ignition' to speak of. You just push a button and the car 'wakes up' and is ready to drive. The electric drivetrain sound is pretty sweet. Quiet, but sounds like power. As far as performance goes, our LEAF will embarass ANY sports car off-the-line for the first 50 meters. After that, not so much (obviously).
The dash display is a bit too oriented around the range-to-dead meter - giant fins either side and a huge numerical display. No wonder people get range anxiety - the dash literally screams at you. But the LEAF has an 'eco' mode which considerably dulls the accelerator response whilst increasing the amount of resistance under regenerative braking. In city traffic, this is not a bad mode to be in apart from one thing; because the regenerative resistance is so large, the car will slow down quite nicely without ever touching the brakes, meaning the person behind you is presented with a car that is slowing down with no brake lights. You have to be aware of that, so we've taken to just lightly loading the brake pedal in these conditions to ensure there is at least a clue for the people behind us.
In the suburbs or on the motorways, eco mode is a little too dull on the accelerator - you can find yourself being an obstruction in traffic if you're not careful, and you sure as hell don't want to use eco mode to turn across oncoming traffic. The snail-like acceleration means you need a gap in oncoming traffic the size of the Queen Mary to perform a turn.
Because we got the SV version with the Premium package, it has power-everything, heated-everything, 360 degree cameras, Bose audio - the works. All of these, of course, drain the range, but there is a display on the center console that shows you how much the HVAC and extras are 'costing' you.
It does change the way you drive, for sure, but I'm not getting into hypermiling or anything stupid like that. It's a damn car - just use it as a car. My wife loves never having to go to a petrol station and I love that the solar installation on our garage roof is offsetting the cost of charging it. My daily driver is still a Range Rover, but now we have an electric car in the family, I'm watching the developments in battery technology and new electric cars far more closely. We still need a car with large range and fast refuelling (I'm not going to sit around mid-road-trip for 3 hours waiting for my car to recharge - not even 30 minutes) - so going all-electric isn't an option right now. But someday - when batteries have more capacity and charging stations are plentiful and can recharge in 2 to 3 minutes? Yep - I'm all in.

Living the life electric - part 2.

(This post follows from last week's - best read that first if you missed it).
So $9,100 for a 2013 Nissan LEAF SV with 18,000 miles on it, loaded with the premium package. Great deal, but I'm not a car dealer. That's where my friend comes in. He IS a dealer - he owns a small business selling used cars, mostly luxury marques, but it means he's connected. He was curious about LEAFs so he offered to grab the red one from the auction and give me first refusal. (As it happened he also picked up a silver one that he was going to re-sell, but has now ended up keeping as his own car.)
So we went for a test drive in it. The idea was to replace our second car - a Toyota Yaris that is lucky if it does 10 miles a day. From that point of view, a pure electric with an 85 mile range is perfect. It's never going to do a road trip but as a city car it would work perfectly. I drove it - loved it. My wife drove it - loved it. So we pulled the trigger.
The best thing about a dealer friend is that wonderful things can happen. In my case, he bought the car at auction, imported it into the state, paid the auction fees and sold it to me for cost. What does that mean? It means we paid just shy of $10,500. Go look on any of the used car price guides and you'll see the price for this car varies from $12,400 to $15,800 depending on where you buy it used. As the saying goes, it's not what you know, it's who you know.
Next week: living with it.

Living the life electric

So that just happened. I'm the poor-man's Jeremy Clarkson. I love petrol. I love the smell of it, I love the internal combustion engine, I love the power, I fix things with hammers, and I just bought an electric car.
Wait, what?
So I need to backtrack a little bit here. This spring we had a 4kW solar panel installation put on our garage. Spendy, yes, but this year, in this state, the Federal and State rebates add up to a whole lot of win, which is why we did it.
In parallel, I'd asked a car dealer friend of mine to keep an ear to the ground for an electric Ford Focus, Nissan LEAF or Fiat500e, with the thought that one day we'd buy one and use the solar electric to charge it. Last week, in one of the California car auctions, 92 Nissan LEAFs suddenly appeared. Yep - a whole crapload of electric cars, and they were going cheap. I mean really cheap. These were all lease returns, all appearing at the same time, so the sheer number of them meant they were literally a steal. Bear in mind the LEAF is $27,000 plus taxes when new. The SV version is closer to $34,000. The auction prices started at $7,000. That's not a typo.
My dealer friend had his eye on a 2013 SV model with the premium package installed, registered in May 2013, with 18,000 miles on it. It was rated 4.7 out of 5 for condition, which in auction terms basically means "new". And it was metallic red (yes! not monochrome!) Price? $9,100. The exact same vehicle, new from our local dealership is $34,520. Sure you get $5,000 back from the Fed but that's still $29,520, or to put it another way - $20,000 more than the one in the auction.
Next week : what happened next.

Grip - let your tyres do their job.

Modern tyres are marvels of chemical and physical engineering. They are more resistant to punctures, have better grip, smoother ride and stronger sidewalls than anything we could produce 20 years ago. But it is still quite possible to overwhelm them when you demand too much. Misreading the road conditions, poor judgement, inappropriate maneuvers or use of speed can all cause issues. It all boils down to one simple rule though, and if you live by this, your tyres will thank you for it. Plus, you'll have a lot more fun in corners - even turning into your street off the main road can be a fun couple of seconds. The rule is this : don't brake and corner at the same time. Get all your braking done in a straight line, then turn, and start to accelerate when about half way through the turn as you begin to straighten the wheels again.
By doing this, you afford your tyres the best chance of gripping for both situations. Braking in a straight line gives you predictable, safe behaviour. The initial half of the turn (without braking) allows your tyres a good opportunity to grip as you turn the wheel and the car begins to come around. As you begin to straighten the wheel, start accelerating again - the tyre is dealing with less cornering force and can provide more front-to-rear grip again.
The explanation for this can be complicated but I'll try to simplify it. Tyre treads and construction methods, coupled with rubber compounds, mean that modern tyres have very good grip in two axes - forwards-backwards (linear), and side-to-side (transverse). The linear grip is used for most driving - accelerating and braking. The transverse grip is used when cornering to help stop the tyre skidding sideways in the turn. If you attempt to brake and turn, or accelerate and turn at the same time, the thrust vector on the tyre's contact patch is moved into an area between the linear and transverse areas of performance, giving you diminished performance in both. This results in 'understeer' whereby your car's wheels are turned, but your car (and you) are not going in the direction you want - you're going wide in the corner.
Understeer is most often caused by two things - a slipperier than normal road surface (ice, snow, rain, oil) or a driver who goes into a corner too fast for the conditions and thus keeps trying to brake whilst cornering.

Understanding the limits of your vehicle.

Depending on where you are in the world, driving lessons and exams range from stupidly simple and easy (America) to thorough and expensive (Sweden). But driving lessons can't teach you how your specific car behaves and reacts to any given situation, and that's something most people don't seem to want to learn. It's why we have so many crashes in the winter months. Roads aren't inherently less safe when they're covered in snow and ice - it's the drivers. People won't use winter tyres and will insist on driving like they do in the middle of the summer. Drive in a manner fitting the conditions and any time of year and weather can be just as safe as any other.
But it goes further than that. I think a great many people are afraid of their cars, because they believe the movies, or the police, or their friend Ted down at the local watering hole. Contrary to many depictions in pop culture, cars don't flip over and explode when taken around a corner at anything above walking pace, and speed is not inherently dangerous (remember - hard facts show that speed is the contributing factor in less than 5% of accidents, irrespective of what the police say).
What is inherently dangerous is drivers who don't know their vehicles, and thus don't understand the performance characteristics and limits. It's dangerous for them, and it's dangerous for the rest of us. I'll give you an example.
There's a huge motorway intersection near where I live, where three lanes peel off the right side of the southbound motorway, and loop down and underneath in a huge, banked, perfectly-tuned arc to join the eastbound motorway. The road has perfect drainage, great line of sight and is regularly maintained so the surface grip is tip top. In any vehicle, this turn is achievable at 70mph in any of the lanes. In a car, or a grippy, 'sporty' SUV like a Range Rover Evoque, it's easily do-able at 80mph. In a sporty car with good tyres and suspension (or any motorbike), it's a breeze at 90mph. Yet in reality it's a swarm of brake lights and 45mph timidness. Ugh.
I've been whipping around that corner at well over 70mph for over 10 years in every vehicle I can and I've yet to explode in flames.