Any GTAM'ers own an electric vehicle? | Page 460 | GTAMotorcycle.com

Any GTAM'ers own an electric vehicle?

I owned a GDI KIA for 7 years, brakes and oil.
They weren't all awful. They had at least one that was terrible but it was used in a lot of vehicles. Like Ford with their focus DSG, they don't have a fix so they just replace under warranty until you are stuck with it and scrap the car. A well-written lemon law would make a huge difference to consumers.
 
I had an NA motor tho. Guess I dodged a bullet!

Good thing EV has no turbos! :LOL:
The NA motors were fine. The turbos had a LOT of issues as I understand it.

Work just announced 3 day / week…I’m gonna start focusing on the Bolt as I can’t find a decently priced Mav hybrid.
 
Personally still so scared Hyundai Kia quality control they can't even make gas engines that don't blow up I don't trust them with electronics

Our 2017 Hyundia Ioniq was a Timex. Yeah, we only owned it for a few years, but literally zero things went wrong with it. It just went, everytime, all the time...and we put quite a few kilometers on it in the time we owned it. AFAIK the fellow we drove it to is still driving the wheels off it as well.

My sisters 2018 Soul EV recently got a new battery however. Looks like it was one of a small batch where they discovered an issue on and hers came up in that VIN lot. All replaced with what appears to be a brand new battery at zero cost under the 8 year EV warranty. She's pretty happy.

I owned a GDI KIA for 7 years, brakes and oil.

My daughter has a 2003 Kia Soul 2.0. That thing is also a Timex, just goes and goes, and 5-6 years ago before we bought our own trailer again we borrowed it and put it through it's paces towing a rental out on th east coast.

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And then after we bougth our new-to-us first Helio but before we bought the Gen2 Volt (The Gen1 was ok for 100km radius flat southern ontario stuff but wasn't up to bigger trips much less big grades like you find out east) we had it out to the east coast another 2-3 times pulling the new camper.

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I did put a transmission cooler on it and switched everything to synthetic fluids, but many years and many tens of thousands of kilometers later, she's still going - it's somewhere well north of 300,000km now I believe.
 
Even in the combustion-engine Porsche models, I don't think there's been a correllation between the "Turbo" badge and whether or not the engine is actually turbocharged, for quite a while. On an EV it's completely illogical. Whatev ... beyond my pay grade.

Mercedes and BMW cars used to have a designation that reflected the displacement of the engine. "BMW 318i" was a 3 series that had a 1.8 litre "injection" engine. That's been out to lunch for a LONG time.
 
I don't know if that shows a lack of imagination in marketing department or speaks to the brain power of their clients. So many other terms could have been used that make more sense for an EV.

I suspect "continuity"

kind of how Ford labeled the Mach E a "Mustang Mach E"

It would have been just fined if they simply called it the Mach E. IMHO.
 
Found out that the Flo charging network (common in this area) is going to have "plug and charge" implemented for GM vehicles. There's a one-time registration process you have to go through to set it up, and after that, to DC fast-charge at a Flo station, you just have to plug in.

Aaaaand I can't get through the registration process ... because it requires logging into the MyChevrolet app, which I never bothered to use until now because I never bothered to use the paid functions of OnStar ... and setting it up requires using the email address that I used to set up OnStar when I bought the car ... and that email address doesn't exist any more because I retired. It's low priority because I almost never fast-charge anyhow; I'll pop into the dealer next time I'm in the area to see if there's a way to fix this.

But ... for those who have that app already set up, or if you buy a GM EV going forward, you won't have this problem.

 
The front fell off.


There's a pic a bit further down from a news report that indicates what happened - evidently the vehicle went off the road and hit a sign, which looks more like a low fence or high kerb, which ripped a bunch of stuff out from underneath. Can't be too critical of Tesla on this one. Hit something like that in just about any vehicle and you're going to tear up the undercarriage.

That was expensive.

It does seem like an awful lot of these are experiencing malfunctions, whether user-inflicted or otherwise, considering how few have been built.
 
For the regular owners, how are you finding the remaining range display or battery % for accuracy?


I’m one of the worst for running my vehicles down to their low fuel light comes on and use the trip display for litres per kilometre read out to give me some idea of where I’m at needing to fill up.

On the battery side, I’m also terrible with my electronics from a completely different angle. I always like to plug them in without considering their state of charge so, I start my day with 100% and of course when I’m driving its plugged in because i don’t have a modern machine for wireless carplay to display waze and take calls and shout out txt replies etc.

So, I effectively kill my cell phone and to a lessor extent my tablet batteries prematurely. And yes, I’m intelligent enough to know I’m doing this yet, dumb enough to continue to do it. At least I don't ask for a safe space from judgement of others!

I would likely adjust my behaviour for an EV but, I do rely on my fuel use and gauge and have concerns about state of charge and changes in range and don’t want to beat up the battery either.
 
For the regular owners, how are you finding the remaining range display or battery % for accuracy?


I’m one of the worst for running my vehicles down to their low fuel light comes on and use the trip display for litres per kilometre read out to give me some idea of where I’m at needing to fill up.

On the battery side, I’m also terrible with my electronics from a completely different angle. I always like to plug them in without considering their state of charge so, I start my day with 100% and of course when I’m driving its plugged in because i don’t have a modern machine for wireless carplay to display waze and take calls and shout out txt replies etc.

So, I effectively kill my cell phone and to a lessor extent my tablet batteries prematurely. And yes, I’m intelligent enough to know I’m doing this yet, dumb enough to continue to do it. At least I don't ask for a safe space from judgement of others!

I would likely adjust my behaviour for an EV but, I do rely on my fuel use and gauge and have concerns about state of charge and changes in range and don’t want to beat up the battery either.
Use batteries from about 80% to 20% without DC fast charge and it's hard to hurt them. For most ev's, 80% is good enough for most people most of the time. Tesla guess-o-meters are often abysmal. Every other manufacturer seems quite reasonable.
 
For the regular owners, how are you finding the remaining range display or battery % for accuracy?

Very accurate as long as your driving style doesn't change drastically between drives.

If you drive like grandma 95% of the the time and then 5% of the time you suddenly become Mario Andretti, well, it's not going to be accurate. If you just drive your normal self consistently, every car we've ever owned learns that pretty well and then estimates accordingly.

They all keep a few spare kilometers of slow speed turtle mode for oops emergencies. Our ioniq had an actual turtle indicator on the dash that would light up lol

It's really not a big deal. You get into the habit of plugging in as soon as you hit your driveway and come out to a full car every morning.
 
For the regular owners, how are you finding the remaining range display or battery % for accuracy?

I’m one of the worst for running my vehicles down to their low fuel light comes on and use the trip display for litres per kilometre read out to give me some idea of where I’m at needing to fill up.

On the battery side, I’m also terrible with my electronics from a completely different angle. I always like to plug them in without considering their state of charge so, I start my day with 100% and of course when I’m driving its plugged in because i don’t have a modern machine for wireless carplay to display waze and take calls and shout out txt replies etc.

So, I effectively kill my cell phone and to a lessor extent my tablet batteries prematurely. And yes, I’m intelligent enough to know I’m doing this yet, dumb enough to continue to do it. At least I don't ask for a safe space from judgement of others!

I would likely adjust my behaviour for an EV but, I do rely on my fuel use and gauge and have concerns about state of charge and changes in range and don’t want to beat up the battery either.

Every EV has the ability to set the upper limit that it will charge to (for additional battery preservation over and above what the manufacturer has built in). Early Bolts only had a choice of 100% or "hilltop reserve" (which set it to 88%) but that's long gone, on the newer ones you can set it to anything in 5% increments and there is a separately adjustable global charge limit and a "home" charge limit (provided, of course, that you have set a "home" location so that the car knows it is home). If you want to change the home charge limit because you know you have a long trip the next day, it's really easy. So, you basically find out what charge limit results in you using the middle of the battery's charge range on a daily basis, and set it to that. Mine is at 75%.

The "home" charge limit also allows you to set up a preferred departure time, which I have set to the time that the overnight charging rate ends. You can also override this really easily if a special circumstance arises - "charge now". It can also be overridden outside the car by plugging the car in, unplugging it, then plugging in again. This overrides the delayed charging and starts it charging now.

With that set up, you just plug the car in the last time you get home for the night, and unplug it the next morning when you go out, and it figures out when it needs to start charging so as to achieve your set charging limit by your departure time. This way you're normally only paying the overnight power rate.

This allows you to use a "dumb" Level 2 charging unit (EVSE) that just switches on power when you plug in the car. It is also possible to buy fancy ones that include features for starting and stopping charging and monitoring them online, but you don't need any of that.

The next step is going to be smart-grid integration with bidirectional charging, so that the car's battery can be used to buffer the power grid. Then you need an EVSE that is designed for this purpose and integrated into the building's electrical distribution. There are some EVs that are capable of bidirectional charging. The Ford Lightning is one of them. The Hyundai E-GMP cars are another. I believe the VW ID... cars are hardware-capable but it may not be implemented yet in software (don't know if this has changed recently). Older-design EVs including mine are not capable of this.
 

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