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

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Captain Slow Charging
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Nov 26, 2007
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Causticity
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Atomic toaster
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So, uh … welcome to the future?

Yes, it’s me! With a factory new car! One that’s even (accidentally) specced to my taste.

How can it be?

Well, as I outlined in the Volvo thread, I need a good, reliable car to get to work. Work is almost 50 miles from where I live. Sometimes I work from home, but I’ve agreed to visit the office three times a week. That’s a lot of driving, and diesel costs a lot more now than it did a year ago. The Volvo is great, very reliable and comfortable, but there are limits to its fuel economy. Especially without block heater, especially with cold starts. I love driving it, but it’s also done 300,000 km by now and … I’d like not to have to pay for repairs. The solution: a private short-term lease from Autovernkouppal.

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Rather than buy Yet Another Car that would probably have to be crappier than the Volvo just to use less fuel, I clicked through a webform that ended up with me agreeing to pay the Hyundai importer a set sum of money every month, and in return I get to rack up miles in this thing. No emotion, only compensation. In the end it’s only about how much I have to pay to reliably get to work, and I figured I’d rather pay for the use of a brand new car than pay oil companies to get to use my beater car. It’s not 1:1, but fuel costs and road tax (for being a diesel with full seating) are not insignificant compared to lease costs,home charging and EV road tax. Insurance is about the same for both. The lease price also included winter tires. I get to do 25k a year in this for an extra 50e a month. I think geeman had a similar setup with a white Twingo, come to think of it.

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Anyway, the car! It’s a MY2021 Hyundai Ioniq with the full-HD electric drivetrain. 38kWh battery pack in these facelift cars, yet it only does 1-phase charging. I can charge at home from The Red Socket though, so the car juices up with 16A and 3,4kW according to its dashboard display. Eventual full charge is good for 311km, which means 230 and change in wintertime. I should be able to get to work and back, then, even with heating on. And I can heat the steering wheel, which is a huge bonus.

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The car has a lot of gadgets I’ve never had before, like Carplay, wireless phone charging, keyless go, ACC, and I actually think I have use for them. Conversely, this has probably less than half of the Volvo’s soundproofing and it also doesn’t do the same laid-back, aloof “going sort of straight forever” kind of highway driving that you get with a Swedish car that looks like a work boot. But you get what you pay for, and I think this has a chance of being really good at being an EV. The interior doesn’t throw me off, nothing about the car looks gimmicky, and it is very energy efficient. Of course in various ways it's more 2015 than some other EVs you get by now, but that suits me.

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And still, even if it’s not mine-mine, it feels good. In the speccing form I could choose between white and “Amazon Grey”, so I obviously chose the grey. Other colours were not available for the simplified private lease deal, just these two. And I was pleasantly surprised that the grey colour’s in fact greenish! In some lighting it’s not that far from a kind of dark green. Inside it has grey cloth that’s just the sort that’s to my taste. Sadly, no fake wood anywhere. Handles and trim are satin finish metal, which is certainly OK too. Wheels are some aero jobs that look acceptable, but the best thing is that they’re only 16-inch and have 60 profile tires. Comfort!

I’ll probably drive this for a year or so and then see what the importer has on offer. I can drive this for five years straight with an option to buy, but I can also return this after 12 months. The other option is that if I turn out to really like Ioniqs, I could get a used one for half the price of a new one, so consider this a test run of sorts. I don’t think I’ll make a separate thread for any other lease adventure car, but I guess this one is special enough to merit posting.

I’ve always wanted to have a new car, one that has zero wear and perfect condition components everywhere inside it. This is the first occasion when I’ve been able to afford to drive one, and even if it's strictly for commuting, it feels like a treat. I guess it’s a sign of the times that it needed to be an EV to make sense, but so it goes.
 
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A P-P-P-R-I-U-S clone? Are you ill? :LOL:

Joke aside, of course this makes sense when the rest of your fleet consists of project cars.
This really is the next few years for most of us car people: A to B in a bland electric thingy, C to Z in hobby ICE cars.
 
So I read an article about running costs of used diesel Vs. new electric that was surprisingly close to your use case, and the diesel came out cheaper...
 
So I read an article about running costs of used diesel Vs. new electric that was surprisingly close to your use case, and the diesel came out cheaper...

For sure, but when you factor in things like repairing the AWD... :p
 
So I read an article about running costs of used diesel Vs. new electric that was surprisingly close to your use case, and the diesel came out cheaper...

A used diesel can have many things go wrong with it that can throw the budget off. Injectors, turbo, EGR, urea injection, etc etc.

Then again you wouldn't have to worry about any of those things if you bought a new Korean diesel with a warranty. Hyundai does five years unlimited km, Kia 7 years or 150.000km. Pick your poison.
 
Oh yeah, I just don't know what diesel will cost by the time those things are out of warranty ? Even if our electric bill doubled it'd still be quite cheap. Mainly I want the care-free feeling when I can just drive past the ghost Subaru dealership's fuel station signs on my commute and never pull in.

I plugged the car in last night at 19% or so and got a notification over the Hyundai BlueLink app that it had finished charging by 4AM. That bodes well for my commuting needs, so even if I didn't top it up at all at work I'd still have the car ready to go in the morning.
 
One of us! One of us! One of us!
Interesting to see they even offer 1 phase chargers only….but as long as you charge it everyday from home you can probably get to work and back with the heater on full blast with zero issues.

Also, you’ll probably find yourself using the car for far more and longer trips than you intend to, because it’s just so simple to use and damn comfortable
 
I do have a 25k yearly cap to keep in mind so I'll have to adhere to my usual routes :p I also still need to get the Type 2 cable that the dealer didn't include in the car and which will arrive later, so I can charge at the nearest Lidl. We did a 100km drive today to assist in some furniture buying, and decided to take the Hyundai to break it in softly.

And while the car is really convenient and loaded with nice features, it'll never be as comfortable as the Volvo. No contest! The Volvo just wafts along, isolating me from road noise and road imperfections, while the Hyundai is clearly a "40,000 euro Corolla" when it comes to soundproofing and comfort. It's fine, it's acceptable, but real comfort is in the 300,000 km Volvo.
 
As someone who just drove 900km in a 300000km Volvo for some assisted furniture buying, I agree.
 
First commute this morning and the car seems OK for the job. Used 11kWh over 74km (89% to 59%) averaging 90ish km/h (limits 100), with some heating on due to temps already being as low as 5°C. ACC is great due to a lot of slower vehicles on the road, and overtaking is a non-issue with enough power. Road noise is acceptable on my route, the seats could have a little more leg support and the left foot rest isn't really well positioned, but I can make myself comfortable in the cabin. There's a lot of adjustable lumbar support in the driver seat, too. Currently the car is slow charging off a company parking lot socket next to a bunch of PHEVs and I should be able to get it back to 90% during the day.

Edit: checked the traffic authority database and yearly road tax is just 162 euros. It seems I got in just before the tax change: with the upcoming removal of car import tax for EVs, yearly road tax is in turn raised by 50 bucks or so. As the Ioniq was registered before that, I'll get to pay less road tax than owners of newer cars. And since the import tax was just 1000 eur for this particular car, its effect on leasing payments would probably have been minuscule anyway.

In any case, keeping and charging and driving the Ioniq is cheaper than merely keeping the Volvo, as its road tax is 779 eur.
 
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Good for progress, sad for the Volvo.
 
Sounds about right to me. If you factor in fuel/charging costs this switch will make a lot more sense. Are the work chargers free? That’s a big help aswell
 
Do you feel it was worth the price?
 
Yes, it feels like it's an expensive car that costs nothing to run, compared to having a cheap car that costs a lot to run. And since I'm only in the hook for monthly lease payments, I can sleep better.
 
Sounds about right to me. If you factor in fuel/charging costs this switch will make a lot more sense. Are the work chargers free? That’s a big help aswell
They are for the time being, but I bet that's going to change with wider electrified car adoption. A sister company of my employer charges something to the tune of 60-70 eur per year for charger access according to a co-worker, which would be fine too, especially if that meant faster charging instead of slowly leeching 10A power from a block heater pole. But then again, speed is a non-issue as I'm stuck at the office for a whole work day anyway.
 
Thats still only 1-2 tanks of fuel for year round access so no biggie. And yes, having faster charge speeds is nice but you don’t have that big of a battery so even on 10a, one work day is sufficient to charge the car enough to get back home.

I have the other luxury problem : chargers at work are so quick that it only takes 4 hrs to charge my car up, even from completely empty. So once everyone back in the office this’ll mean a mandatory switch of cars over lunch break (because I hate finding all stalls occupied with cars that are not/no longer charging. Also I’m a nice guy)
 
Another commute with near-identical power consumption, meaning the car averages just under 15kWh/100km with an average speed of 95 km/h in 5°C weather. Will have to see how actual heating in freezing conditions affects power usage, but I still think the car should be able to regain 90% charge level during a regular work day.

One thing I noticed yesterday when driving to the shops in very windy weather is that the car is noticeably susceptible to head-on and side winds. Maybe it has something to do with the optimized aero, but gusts of wind really made it zigzag a little.
 
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