11-04-2018, 07:01 AM
Brian, I also test drove the i3 and it's a lovely car. But it's fairly small car and even with range extension the total range was only 200 miles at the time. Since then it's a bit further. Great (if expensive) car to have in a multivehicle family but wasn't right as the only car in my household.
The bigger battery packs of full electrics (the i3 is effectively a full electric with an optional petrol powered battery charger) are obviously less affected by auxiliary loads like aircon etc. Can the battery be preconditioned (warmed up!) from mains on cold days if you know when you're going to drive away?
From what I've read, you can reasonbly expect 80% or so of claimed range on a full electric car so Anne's car is doing fine. If I'd got 80% of claimed range I'd have been happy. Perhaps the shallow plug-in hybrid (most of them, the i3 is an exception, possibly unique, as a deep hybrid) is a dead end. Possibly not giving much benefit over (say) a standard Prius which just uses the battery for load levelling. The CO2 figures for a shallow plug-in tend to be 30-50g/km, as against 70-100 for non plug-ins. This is clearly as much a consequence of the test methods as the design of the car. This might not matter too much except for company car tax regime, C charge and possibly other political decisions where the declared CO2 matters.
The bigger battery packs of full electrics (the i3 is effectively a full electric with an optional petrol powered battery charger) are obviously less affected by auxiliary loads like aircon etc. Can the battery be preconditioned (warmed up!) from mains on cold days if you know when you're going to drive away?
From what I've read, you can reasonbly expect 80% or so of claimed range on a full electric car so Anne's car is doing fine. If I'd got 80% of claimed range I'd have been happy. Perhaps the shallow plug-in hybrid (most of them, the i3 is an exception, possibly unique, as a deep hybrid) is a dead end. Possibly not giving much benefit over (say) a standard Prius which just uses the battery for load levelling. The CO2 figures for a shallow plug-in tend to be 30-50g/km, as against 70-100 for non plug-ins. This is clearly as much a consequence of the test methods as the design of the car. This might not matter too much except for company car tax regime, C charge and possibly other political decisions where the declared CO2 matters.
www.borinsky.co.uk Jeffrey Borinsky www.becg.tv
