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Myself and a load of Tesla owners went to the Elveden Tesla charger and although the power was on, none of the chargers were working. The app didn't say they were offline for whatever reason and we all had to drive, convoy-like, to the next nearest Tesla location.
Well his cars are bloody awesome, and after 40 years/1m miles/70 cars, its by far and away the best I've had in so many ways, and most of mine have been New, German, and usually with a 6-cyl diesel or performance Petrol engine, so I'm not comparing it to a clapped out Corsa/Fiesta.
Also, its not HIS car - he merely bought into a failing company and hired clever people to design/develop/build the cars, same as he didn't make a Spaceship or design X.
He only owns 13-20% of Tesla depending on your source, so its hardly HIS company either. Vanguard / BlackRock / State Street own more than him and your pension is probably propped up with a good bunch too.
I've said before, wife has an Ioniq5, one of the very best rivals, yet its so far behind in every aspect its quite embarrassing, and it never improves itself or add functions overnight like the Tez does....
By not buying a Tesla you would be punishing Musk. But only in so far as his holding in Tesla is around 20% - what about the other shareholders that have not put their foot in it so to speak ?.
They have put their foot it in, not only by not voting him out as CEO but by approving his ludicrous pay deals-the last one being worth $1 trillion dollars.
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I find people are fairly selective about which particular aspect of a manufacturer they dislike. The people I speak to at work moan about Elon "being a nazi". I'm not sure anyone believes that.
They seem to have forgotten the role German manufacturers played in WWII, and of course the disgraceful Diesel-gate scandal that VW found itself embroiled in.
Teslas are very long and quite wide and so too large for many garages and not very suitable for urban British streets. The shortest Tesla is 4.7 metres long. Most of them don't even have a rear wiper.
Teslas are very long and quite wide and so too large for many garages and not very suitable for urban British streets. The shortest Tesla is 4.7 metres long. Most of them don't even have a rear wiper.
Rear wipers are important to me, but given how many Teslas I see driving around and in my local supermarket car parks, I'd say they're fine for British streets in towns and cities!
Just look how many Range Rovers and other large SUVs there are, as well as more and more commercial vans that seem to be used as normal cars going by how many get parked up on residential streets and retail parks on weekends etc.
I recently watched a video of someone in a converted truck doing the North Coast 500 and even that got by on the narrow west-coast roads.
Teslas are very long and quite wide and so too large for many garages and not very suitable for urban British streets. The shortest Tesla is 4.7 metres long. Most of them don't even have a rear wiper.
Many garages seem to be designed for an average car from the 70s. When I was house hunting I did look at a few with garages. I had a 2005 Toyota Corolla, not an enormous car by any stretch of the imagination, but even with that I thought I might struggle to get it into some.
It's maybe time to drop my experiences in this thread. I recently got a high mileage Polestar 2 Single Motor Long Range (72 plate) and it's almost all positive. I previously drove a diesel (no surprises why I didn't want to buy another one looking at fuel prices!).
I regularly do 3-400 mile journeys and the charging is quick enough (it can max out the 400V architecture at 160kW real world speed) that I've overcharged twice already on the way home when getting food or watching stuff on my phone. All my public charges have worked first time through the Electroverse app (mainly Ionity). I do have experience charging EVs from my friend's car which probably helped.
With ~10% battery degradation over 135k miles it's getting around 260 miles on motorways at 70mph. It integrates well with the cars built in Google Maps and I tend to arrive within a couple percent of what it predicts when I leave. It even automatically removed a charging stop it previously suggested when I'd driven a little more economically at 65mph.
It's slightly shorter (15cm) than my old car and so much easier to park with cameras. However that brings me on to the parking sensors which are broken. Every time I go below 6mph I get a message on the dashboard telling me they need cleaning that needs manually dismissing. Modern technology!
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Oh, no rear wiper either but my old car didn't either. I think it's a poor design choice, especially at lower speeds when rain does land on it and there's no way to get it off. It's not an issue when going at speed.
The garages of some new houses, must be designed for the Austin 7, never mind the 70's.
In the 1990's, we were looking at some houses on a very recent new development and were astonished that the garages didn't have much room even for a 1990's model Fiesta or Polo.
It would have been a very tight squeeze to open the drivers door of a family sized car in one of those.
Luckily, the house we ended up buying (and still here) had a very spacious double garage, with plenty of width for two cars, with room to spare.
The longest car I've parked in there, was my Mk2 Mercedes CLS at just a couple of centimetres short of 5 metres long, with only about 300mm or so to spare at both front and back.
However, it has always been very tight driving through the door openings.
A few years ago, we took the plunge and had the double doors converted to a large single door opening.
With hindsight, we should have done it years ago.
By contrast, about 15 years ago, a one-off large house was being built just around the corner, on a secluded plot down a private track.
Having a sneaky a look around the deserted site one Sunday afternoon, I was surprised at the size of the double garage.
It wasn't very wide for a double garage to start with, but the front to back depth looked unusually short.
Sure enough, when the people moved in, they couldn't get a car in at all, so they just used the garage for storage and their son's motorbike.
A couple of years ago, they had it completely knocked down and a larger replacement built.
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........Oh, no rear wiper either but my old car didn't either. I think it's a poor design choice, especially at lower speeds when rain does land on it and there's no way to get it off. It's not an issue when going at speed.
It makes me laugh when car reviewers or designers excuse the lack of a rear wiper, with some guff about the aerodynamics carrying the rain away.
No mention of a stationary car, moving forward at urban speeds or slower, or reversing in the rain.
Who do they think they're kidding?
On garage sizes many local authorities set quite reasonable minimum internal sizes, what's fairly standard for new builds is 3m wide and 6m long.
To put that in perspective parking spaces being designed in a 2000's supermarket car park would have been 2.4m wide and 4.8m long, although again many councils will now require that to be 2.5m wide and 5.0m long.
Either way, garages should give enough space for many cars to fit in them, as long as there's not too much stuff stored in them (which might be as little more than 4+ cycles for a family with older kids, especially if that includes teenagers).
The majority of single garages, in my local experience, are not used at all for storage of a car; rather for bikes, garden tools and other "storage". My double garage serves as space for our one and only car, alongside bikes, lawnmower, hedge trimmer, DIY tools etc. And, of course, there are many that have been converted into an extra interior room.
It's maybe time to drop my experiences in this thread. I recently got a high mileage Polestar 2 Single Motor Long Range (72 plate) and it's almost all positive. I previously drove a diesel (no surprises why I didn't want to buy another one looking at fuel prices!).
I regularly do 3-400 mile journeys and the charging is quick enough (it can max out the 400V architecture at 160kW real world speed) that I've overcharged twice already on the way home when getting food or watching stuff on my phone. All my public charges have worked first time through the Electroverse app (mainly Ionity). I do have experience charging EVs from my friend's car which probably helped.
With ~10% battery degradation over 135k miles it's getting around 260 miles on motorways at 70mph. It integrates well with the cars built in Google Maps and I tend to arrive within a couple percent of what it predicts when I leave. It even automatically removed a charging stop it previously suggested when I'd driven a little more economically at 65mph.
It's slightly shorter (15cm) than my old car and so much easier to park with cameras. However that brings me on to the parking sensors which are broken. Every time I go below 6mph I get a message on the dashboard telling me they need cleaning that needs manually dismissing. Modern technology!
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Oh, no rear wiper either but my old car didn't either. I think it's a poor design choice, especially at lower speeds when rain does land on it and there's no way to get it off. It's not an issue when going at speed.
Thanks for this, it's always good to hear real world experience of recent EV buyers. You did say "almost all positive", could you elaborate a little on what hasn't worked out well, or you don't like? Is it specific to the car, or the infrastructure, or something else?
Yes, no rear wiper on the Tesla, a bit annoying., but if it was good as the automatic front wipers then I wouldn't miss it anyway. I noticed the new Jaguar didn't have a rear wiper, but it didn't have a rear window either!
Thanks for this, it's always good to hear real world experience of recent EV buyers. You did say "almost all positive", could you elaborate a little on what hasn't worked out well, or you don't like? Is it specific to the car, or the infrastructure, or something else?
It's the broken parking sensors (hopefully I can get these fixed soon) and the Polestar software is a bit buggy. I've had the speakers stop working twice. The software problems are well documented online, some bits fixed and others not.
Nothing about the public charging infrastructure has come as a surprise, on the contrary I've been impressed as I've been comparing to my friend's Fronterra which is a horrible electric vehicle* with almost half the range and 3x slower charging.
*if you have to regularly charge away from home
This afternoon I'm going to do 430 miles (!) with a starting battery of 92%. After 166 miles I'll stop for an hour. There's a convenient car park with 50kW chargers that the hour or so I'm busy should bring me from 19% to ~90%. Then 261 miles with a suggested 18 minute stop adding ~40%, arriving home on ~18%.
I'd want to stop anyway on the 261 mile stretch for a coffee so driving an EV has maybe added 10 minutes to my day. Probably close to none if me or my passenger needs to stop twice as I can do a 10 min charge twice (but this might be a bit more expensive as I have an IONITY Power subscription through Electroverse - so I'd pay more if I charged elsewhere). Google Maps on the car lets you select preferred charging networks it uses when auto planning.
I also don't have a 7kW home charger installed (rental property; I know there are grants available) so for my mileage I hang a granny charger out the window for ~30 hours a week.
It's the broken parking sensors (hopefully I can get these fixed soon) and the Polestar software is a bit buggy. I've had the speakers stop working twice. The software problems are well documented online, some bits fixed and others not.
Nothing about the public charging infrastructure has come as a surprise, on the contrary I've been impressed as I've been comparing to my friend's Fronterra which is a horrible electric vehicle* with almost half the range and 3x slower charging.
*if you have to regularly charge away from home
This afternoon I'm going to do 430 miles (!) with a starting battery of 92%. After 166 miles I'll stop for an hour. There's a convenient car park with 50kW chargers that the hour or so I'm busy should bring me from 19% to ~90%. Then 261 miles with a suggested 18 minute stop adding ~40%, arriving home on ~18%.
I'd want to stop anyway on the 261 mile stretch for a coffee so driving an EV has maybe added 10 minutes to my day. Probably close to none if me or my passenger needs to stop twice as I can do a 10 min charge twice (but this might be a bit more expensive as I have an IONITY Power subscription through Electroverse - so I'd pay more if I charged elsewhere). Google Maps on the car lets you select preferred charging networks it uses when auto planning.
I also don't have a 7kW home charger installed (rental property; I know there are grants available) so for my mileage I hang a granny charger out the window for ~30 hours a week.
I had heard from a colleague at work (Dale Charman, YouTube sensation!) about some small technical issues with his Polestar infotainment system. I guess updates will sort them out eventually.
Good to see you are using that car! 460 miles a day is way above what most people will do, so it's good to read real world experience.
It's good to have a charging plan, and the best thing about EV software these days is if something doesn't go to plan, it just replans everything for you!
I was chatting to someone yesterday about charging on long distance travels and he said "I don't want to be told when to stop and for how long". And of course, you don't have to do exactly what the screen tells you to do, you can simply carry on past the suggested charging site and it redirects you to another one en-route. It seemed like a revelation to him.
Chicken and egg situation? Perhaps because the garage is so small that the owner can't get their car door open far enough to get out easily, so they gave up.
I have an older house with a detached garage added by the previous owner around 1980. Despite plenty of room for it, it is minimally small. I suspect the houseowner just told the builder to "Build me a garage", not specifying the size, so they did it using the least materials they could.
Somehow I suspect that it's more to do with modern(ish) properties not having enough interior space for such stuff, nor a garden big enough to erect a suitable alternative shed etc.
Somehow I suspect that it's more to do with modern(ish) properties not having enough interior space for such stuff, nor a garden big enough to erect a suitable alternative shed etc.
We converted our garage into a spare room/home office, with a smaller section kept as-is for storage and a second freezer.
Since moving in to the new-build house in the early 2000s, I probably parked a car in the garage about 20-30 times max.
The car did fit, albeit with rubber mats on the wall to stop marks on the door which would touch the wall, but it was the time to open the garage door (manual), reverse in and make sure I hadn't left anything out that I'd have to move. There was just no point when modern cars can sit outside in the rain and snow just fine.
Today, with the ability to pre-heat the car while I'm in the shower, even frosty or snowy mornings aren't a problem as it will have all melted away by the time I step outside. Obviously there's a hit on the battery (if it isn't currently charging), but it's well worth it for the convenience.
Its 40 years since I parked my car in a garage at home. That was a Mini, so it was a bit easier.
My EV3 has a 360 degree camera, although some of the cameras are on the wing mirrors, which means they don't work so well if the mirrors are folded in. To get out of a tight parking space, there is a remote control, so I don't need to be able to first get inside. I don't think I would trust that to move into a tight parking space though.
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I noticed the new Jaguar didn't have a rear wiper, but it didn't have a rear window either! 