Just on VRM World
Ya all would remember the Hayns manuals like so:
@plonkster I can do one better for your battery powered car! BMW i3 Cost Analysis Report - 23,793 Digital Pages! Just $18
https://munrolive.com/store/ols/products/bmw-i3-reports
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MechanixGroetnis
IS this really something I want to know at this point in time? 
Ja, don’t look at the prices, just look at how this all goes together 
and apart, and what is where 
Groetnis
So, about 5 days living with an EV.
After driving the vehicle home (around 65km), and arriving with 25% estimated SOC, it took about two days to get it fully charged again (due to my small inverter, the plug in the garage being on the backup side, and lots of load shedding). We still used the vehicle though without any problems at all.
When we got the vehicle, the iDrive infotainment system reported that the average consumption was 19kWh/100km. Heavy-footed test drivers no doubt, because after 5 days of owning it we have the estimate down to 14.5kWh/100km (and this is really just driving it normally). The range estimate has naturally improved as well, I’ve seen a 95km estimate once. The estimate is highly dependent on temperature and whether you use the AC in the vehicle. The estimate will sometimes even improve after you’ve driven a few km and the battery heats up.
This might just be due to the newness and/novelty, but so far none of the other cars have driven a single kilometer since the EV arrived. If I can sum up the experience in one word, that word would be Effortless.
This car can creep at 5km/h, as low as 1km/h. In backed-up traffic (because the traffic light is out due to load shedding), there is no tickling of a clutch to close a gap.
The other car (a RAV4) additionally has hill-assist (it holds the brake for about a second when you pull away on an incline), which means that I was already in the habit of crawling as slow as it will go to match the average speed in backed-up traffic to avoid the slight jarring effect of the hill assist. The EV can crawl much slower than the Diesel… and that is awesome.
The ride is stiff. Not jarring, but the RAV4 almost feels floppy compared to this. The road noise is NOT as intrusive as many of the reviews claim.
The infotainment system is rather excellent for something that is 8 years old. It has stuff many new cars don’t have. No Apple CarPlay of Andriod Auto in this one. I am told the last models had CarPlay.
The rear hatch can open in fairly confined spaces.
OK, so that was the good stuff. The less good stuff.
The suicide doors are cool. Very cool. But you have to open the front doors for someone to get into the rear, and in parking lots it gets a little tight sometimes. Like most BMWs, the front door is quite long and swings wide, and the combo with the rear doors makes it worse.
The car tries to think for you. If you have the key in your pocket, and you open a door, it immediately thinks you’re going for a ride, and it will stop charging and disengage the lock on the charge connector. So if you want to fetch something from the vehicle (and not drive it), you must either remember to leave the key in the house, or you need to unplug and re-plug the car. The moment you touch the door handle the charge cable releases. That’s cool and all, but it takes getting used to.
The carbon fibre tub has high sills, getting into the back takes a little bit of work.
The “granny cable” EVSE’s plug was broken. I noticed this on Friday. Not so badly that it was unuseable, but the front was no longer attached properly to the handle. I glued it back together with Q-bond. In this picture my index finger is on the ring that had broken off:
The charging handle has “tamper proof” 5-point Torx star screws (you need hollow-point bits), but as it turns out, just wedging a small flat-point into them also works.
That’s it really. Minor stuff, nothing that cannot be handled.
Finally, my son made this yesterday:
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DiekurweisrealGroetnis
I am busy building a new garage for the house, this is giving me the opportunity to get it EV ‘ready’.
I have decided to put a sub db in the garage (I also plan on adding a PV inverter there in the future) and putting in a 6mm2 cable (I might even go 10mm2) from the get go to allow for proper EV charging and putting in multiple AC points within the garage to accommodate any EV charging port position on any car, and obviously in the case that there might one day be 2 EV’s parked in the garage, anyone else have any suggestions?
Wonder how long this will take to get sold out.
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The first batch of XC40 cars were 25 units, sold out in 24 hours.
Also, this car comes in at less than 10% over the Ora Cat. It makes a statement!
(Maybe GWM will consider our suggestion to make a budget Ora 
).
Whoa!
Volvo has a winner there!
I mean just looking at the would be competition, the range topping Rav4 Mild Hybrid is even more expensive at R809 000.
I can only imagine a PHEV version costing well over R900k…
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Yeah makes a much more practical car compared to the mini and the gwm. At almost the same price point, this makes much more sense.
It will probably be sold out pretty fast.
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That price is for the ‘Core’ trim level, which is really quite basic. So expect it to be very basic compared to the Ora. But also expect substantially better build quality and finish.
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I had to use 10mm^2 cable to manage voltage drop (chargers are quite picky).
To be EV ready, I would put a few 32A CEE plug points around the garage - these can be used for EVSEs when they are installed, or decent welders, if you don’t yet have an EV.
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That’s true and it’s a gamble between luxury vs performance in this case. Not sure what the specs are on the base version but the article mentions some serious performance for the all wheel drive version. 0-100 in 3.6 seconds compared to the Ora 8 second.
If I were buying, it would definitely be the Volvo for me.
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I see the single motor version has a 0-100 time of 5.7, which will also feel blazing compared to the 8 of the Ora.
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I can tell you that even the 7.3 seconds of the i3 is pretty punchy, 5.7 is downright sporty and more than good enough. Even the 8 seconds of the Ora is firmly in hot hatch territory.
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I also have another idea, I think I should pull 2 separate conductors to the garage one with backup power from the inverter and the other just grid power, I can then have separate CEE plugs in the garage and use the red 16A versions as UPS outlets and the bigger blue 32A versions for grid only charging, so depending on the conditions I can just plug into the appropriate charging port.
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Oh nice! 51kWh for the base model… does this have the option to provide power back to your house? If so this will be a no-brainer.
Looks like they listed 108 vehicles across all specs. Most of the Core Extended Range vehicles are sold already, but lots of the other specs still available.
OK - this is 1 hour after they finally added the model to the store, so that may not last long.
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