Unverified Ownership My life with electric toasters (from Ioniq & Niro to Kona EV)

Awright! We have some Real Winter Usage. I had a 900km roundtrip to do this weekend and decided to take the Hyundai for the journey instead of the Volvo which waits for inspection re-show. On the first 450km half temps dropped to -10C at coldest, but remained at -7C to -8C for the most part. Result: 15.4kWh/100km according to the car. I kept the car in Eco mode just in case, but used the heat pump normally to keep cabin temps cushy at 22C. Smooth and effortless with prioritizing kWh based rapid charging pricing, did four 100km-ish stints.

Fast forward to today and .. temps dropped under -20C and we saw -27C at the coldest! Proper freezing. The same drive in the other direction meant consumption rose to 19.6kWh/100km and we got home with 11% showing, which the car said would only be good for 27km. In other words, a Siberian cold will drop the range to 200ish km from the EPA rated 270km, but a slight freeze will still retain a 240km range. I can work with that.

Some notes: I could only really get the car to charge at 34kW at its fastest, which is not great but perfectly liveable when you pay per kWh and not per minute. Rapid charging usually started at 27kW and dropped back to that soon enough. But I also had to use some minute priced chargers on the route, which is less than ideal at least as a principle, with this particular model. I also didn't pay attention to snow getting inside my own Type 2 cable, and later wondered why I couldn't get the car to charge at a small town's sole 22kW charger. Did eventually realize the cable had a centimeter's worth of ice in the socket and brought it inside to thaw.

I also accumulated the first door ding due to some careless person charging a bit too close for comfort on Friday. Only noticed this the following day, but it is what it is. Dunno if I have to use my insurance's parking cover for PDR or just return the car with the dent in the door.
 
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Oh dear, there's two of them now. Two Korean H&K EVs with the same battery pack!

Like I said earlier in the Volvo thread, I posted it up for sale after the car successfully passed MOT. In a week or so I got a bunch of calls where the person suddenly realized the car was RHD and backed out of the discussion. Around the same time, it became apparent that my GF much preferred taking my leased EV to the shops instead of anything fossil fuel powered. I checked a bunch of similar private lease deals, sent an email about a Peugeot e-208 and immediately afterwards noticed this 39kWh Niro EV with dealer demo miles on the clock.

I played around with the sliders and noticed that a year's deal with expected yearly kms was really cheap. This was based on the dealer placing a significant discount on a mediocrely specced, small-battery demo car with the old KIA logos, especially with the new Niro around the corner, compared to full sticker price. I sent them a detailed trade-in suggestion about either the Volvo or the Demio, and within the hour a guy called me back. I roughly made back what I paid for the Volvo and its import taxes two years and 50,000 km ago, and there's a very reasonable monthly sum to pay now for a year. Plus, I have a guaranteed buy-back price on paper.

So, this thing has:

- Manual seats with vinyl bits like on a Volvo S40/V40
- Range of 280km on a good day, no heat pump
- Two sets of tires, studless winters on aftermarket alloys
- A leasing white paint job
- Halogen headlights but they're auto
- Small center display but Apple Carplay
- Small 39kWh battery *BUT* optional 3-phase 11kW charger!

The car juices up from our five-pin CEE socket pretty damn fast compared to the Ioniq. It drives real well, smoothly and the studless tires certainly feel grippy, tire noise is acceptable. I think it feels a little more substantial than the Ioniq but it's specced worse but it charges faster when charging slow.

Since this is just a short-term deal and I'll probably hand it over a year from now, it's very much someone else's problem already and doesn't merit a thread of its own. But it'll be interesting to see if we can pull off 2022 with mainly only EV driving.
 
Noice! I never understood the weird placement of the chargeport in these though, the front is super dirty….

Also 39kwh seems small for a car this size,no? Especially in buttfreeze weather? Depends on whether you do longer trips or not
 
It is smallish but the car should do about the same range as the Ioniq, minus the heat pump benefits of the Hyundai. The faster 3-phase charging does help, even if actual fast charging with this is similarly slow. It'll do ~10k a year compared to the Hyundai's 25k cap, doing second car duty from town to town here in the country, so the battery will rarely be really low.
 
The spec of the Niro LX is also lowly/old enough that it doesn't yet get the Kia Connect remote app compability, which is a bit of a minus tbh for a car that's as sporadically used as this will be. It would be nice to be able to put the heater on full blast at short notice, instead of having to go to the car to set the estimated departure time for pre-heat. In turn, I pretty much know when I'll be needing the Ioniq, so I could feasibly run it with just the Mon-Tue-Wed morning and afternoon preheats in the dash. But pre-heating is at least available and the Niro thaws its windows quickly, so there's little need for window scraping anyway.
 
Someone on the road behind behind this house has a Niro, I was just reading when I heard the 'bong, bong, bong, bong' from it. Through closed double-glazed windows. Never understood why it has to be so loud.

Otherwise I like the Kia. :p
 
Someone on the road behind behind this house has a Niro, I was just reading when I heard the 'bong, bong, bong, bong' from it. Through closed double-glazed windows. Never understood why it has to be so loud.

Otherwise I like the Kia. :p

I bet there's a market for some kind of OBD dongle that turns off all sorts of mandated and undesired things after startup/powerup. Lane keep assist, bonging, stop/start systems etc. Wonder if it's possible.
 
I bet there's a market for some kind of OBD dongle that turns off all sorts of mandated and undesired things after startup/powerup. Lane keep assist, bonging, stop/start systems etc. Wonder if it's possible.
Big Red Button™.

Probably very difficult these days without inside knowledge of the car software.
 
Passed the 10 000 km mark today. The indicated average energy consumption for this has been 16.1kWh/100km, which would make energy costs around the same as two trips to Helsinki and back from here. But in fact they're a bit less, because of free charging at work so far.

I'm also looking forward for warming temps so that CCS charging would become a bit faster.
 
Nearly 300km shopping trip and I only needed to spend less than 5 euros on charging in the destination town (25c/kWh CCS charging). Despite subzero temps, energy consumption stayed under 15kWh/100km and the car would have given me 270ish km full range, which matches the EPA rating.

Meanwhile, diesel and gasoline now cost nearly the same at 2 eur / l, so paying the Volvo's diesel tax would be especially galling by now. Premium gasoline is at 2.15, so touching the $9/gal mark.
 
Six months in with 12,000km on the clock. We did a 650-km or 400-mile weekend trip and thanks to temperatures warming, efficiency is up as well as charging speeds. I was able to get the car to average under 13kWh/100km, saw speeds of 42kW at 50kW charging spots and ended up paying just 15 euros for charging altogether. We mostly managed with a bunch of 20-minute coffee stops, but the trip also included a lengthy stop at IKEA (not for free charging's sake, time just flies when you stop there) :D

Anyway, in springtime temps yet with wintertime speed limits the car performs extremely efficiently and there was no strain or range anxiety to be experienced. That said, while every charging spot I needed was available, I also always took the only spot available. Four CCS stops were reliant on just one CCS spot, so I certainly hope the infra continues to improve. A big service station chain here continuously rolls out more charging spots, but not yet on this particular route which is the straightest. I wouldn't want to do the same drive in midsummer when the entire Finland is out on the road. Still, this trip would have cost 90-100 eur with a fossil fuel car, which meant we could now happily stay in a nicer hotel instead.
 
Yearly service done with 14k and change in the clock, approaching 15,000 km. Other than changing a cabin filter and giving the car a check-up, the service also included a massive update for the center display software, which now means I have a screen saver that just shows the time and the radio station along with a faint navigation needle, a tube radio skin for the radio and a weather forecasting widget. Maps were also updated so the car shouldn't think it's in a field when driving past a big town in Central Finland where they built a new section of motorway.

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It also seems you can transport IKEA flat pack stuff in it pretty handily. Who needs a truck Volvo?
 
I should really get around to changing that cabin air filter on my car... approaching 70k km, still original filter in there :| Oof.
 
I should really get around to changing that cabin air filter on my car... approaching 70k km, still original filter in there :| Oof.
Can be done DIY-style, but not fun. I've done mine at slightly past 40kkm, as I had already noticed a slight whiff of a weird smell on AC startups after some sitting time - filter change fixed those. It's kinda the only part you really need to change somewhat regularly on a modern EV.
 
Can be done DIY-style, but not fun. I've done mine at slightly past 40kkm, as I had already noticed a slight whiff of a weird smell on AC startups after some sitting time - filter change fixed those. It's kinda the only part you really need to change somewhat regularly on a modern EV.
yeah I've had a filter and a can of disinfectant yucky foam lying around for months now... I'm just too lazy to actually do it. maybe it was a mistake watching the how-to-video beforehand, since that indeed did not look too fun.
 
We had a similar experience getting a new battery for my wife's Kona so I guess it's a Hyundai thing.
They updated the software while the battery was being switched, and the car had forgotten ALL the settings, and i do mean all of them (seat positions, radio stations, home destination, EVERYTHING was gone). Dunno if thas was due to the battery disconnecting or the update, but it was something they could have told us before going all "here's your key, bye".

Had to go back a week later since the nav software had borked itself, and apparently the only way to fix it was to order an SD card (!!! physical media kidz) because downloading it didn't work. Car/Nav works fine now though.
 
Today marked the first instance of me getting anything done to a damaged windshield ever... An oncoming Land Rover chucked a big rock at the Ioniq's windshield yesterday and left a pretty decent sized mark on it, with tiny cracks to many directions. It happens! Apparently modern windshields are more prone to stone damage anyway, and after nearly 15000km the Ioniq glass does tell the tale. This was the first stone hit that merited repair, so I booked the car in first thing for Monday morning and my expensive superkasko meant the repair, which reduced the mark to a tiny chip, cost nothing. Carglass repariert, Carglass tauscht aus etc. I'm sure everyone else has had windshield work done, but finally it was my turn :D
 
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