Ownership Verified: Fuel? Where we’re going, we won’t need fuel! ==>NooDle’s eGolf

you can only measure current when the meter is wired in series in the circuit between battery and motor. I highly doubt a handheld multimeter can handle anything that high.

You can get a clamp on attachment for a multimeter to measure it,
 
You can get a clamp on attachment for a multimeter to measure it,

Right, the amp clamp! I still need to get one of those to measure 3-phase motor current...
 
An amp clamp won't tell you anything useful - when the car is neither moving nor charging there are no meaningful currents flowing, but the wires could still kill you.
 
An amp clamp won't tell you anything useful - when the car is neither moving nor charging there are no meaningful currents flowing, but the wires could still kill you.
Wouldn't current be flowing via the multimeter?
 
The current flowing through a voltmeter is negligible. If you attach a 10MΩ voltmeter to a 400V car battery you get a 40µA current.
 
The clamp on meters are for active circuts. Any ammeter needs an active circuit to measure the amprege being drawn through the circuit.
 
I did an upgrade of sorts. Since it's coldish and I don't really have a good heater, I've got myself one of those heated seat cover thingies. Will report back when it gets colder bur seems to work just fine.

Hope it doesn't drain my 12v battery as it's needed to use the big battery, but I'm not worried
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The heater isn't very good, in a Golf? Electric or not, there's no excuse for that. It's this kind of thing that worries me about electric cars, I don't see why I should compromise to suit the power delivery technology. Hopefully the heat pad works well for you.
 
The heater in a Model 3 is stupidly powerful - pre-heating from -5° to comfortable 20° inside within 3-4 minutes. However, it takes a lot of power to run at full blast and chews into the range quite a bit. Tesla themselves recommend using heated seats instead of heating the whole cabin volume, as it's more power efficient.
 
The heater isn't very good, in a Golf? Electric or not, there's no excuse for that. It's this kind of thing that worries me about electric cars, I don't see why I should compromise to suit the power delivery technology. Hopefully the heat pad works well for you.
Let me correct myself. The heater is very good if you put it on full blast, but it does use like 50 kms of range if you do. Since heating the seats has a much faster effect (you only heat the area in contact with you, and not all the air in the car) this takes up a lot loss energy. Sometimes you simply have to choose between getting there and being warm....(admittedly this has only happened twice, but still)

Preheating works well though, and uses just a few kms, but sometimes you're in an area with no coverage or in an underground parking and you cant remotely heat the car...


Any EV should come with electric seats as standard IMO but there you go.
 
Hmm, I had never considered how power hungry heaters are when you don't have an engine generating heat as a bi-product. I'll have to research this if I ever come to looking at an EV because I'm not giving up comfort. Pre-heat is certainly a redeeming feature of not having an engine.
 
Hmm, I had never considered how power hungry heaters are when you don't have an engine generating heat as a bi-product. I'll have to research this if I ever come to looking at an EV because I'm not giving up comfort. Pre-heat is certainly a redeeming feature of not having an engine.

Electric heating is highly inefficient.
 
Electric heating is highly inefficient.

There's a nit to pick :D

Electric heating is 100% efficient, all the incoming energy is converted into heat... the confusion comes from ICE drivetrains being so inefficient, and thereby providing so much waste heat from propulsion.
In other words, to move a BEV you need much less energy in the battery than you need in the tank to move an ICE car. If you then look at heat output you sort-of suffer the gained BEV drivetrain efficiency in reverse.
 
Hmm, I had never considered how power hungry heaters are when you don't have an engine generating heat as a bi-product. I'll have to research this if I ever come to looking at an EV because I'm not giving up comfort. Pre-heat is certainly a redeeming feature of not having an engine.
It's the main reason why winter and summer range is so massively different for ev's. That, and that batteries don't like extreme cold. I'm getting 'only' 180kms on a full charge compared to 220-250 in summer. Not a massive difference, but noticable nonetheless.

Fyi the exact same thing happens in ICE engines but since ICE engines are already very inefficient, the higher fuel consumption is much less noticable
 
pre-heating has been around for decades. it’s not exclusive to EVs.

Using the 'normal' car heater, available from the factory in every car of a certain make and model, in every country and without additional cost? I think not.
 
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