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

Ioniq approaching 17000km and the Niro is at 6000km. I'm a little behind with the km accumulation with the Ioniq, as I should probably have a couple thousand more on the clock already, but WFH and the recently acquired family expansion package have meant I haven't driven it to the office as much as I could. I plan to catch up, and at the very least I can do some summer driving without looking at the odo too closely.

And related to that: I have another Hyundai EV on order for next summer. After mulling it over for a week or two, I ended up signing the forms for a 64kWh Kona in the fully loaded Style trim. The other option would have been the Ioniq 5 with the 2023 upgrades, but it would have been a bit more in every respect and I'll rather drive a frugal pocket rocket to the office than an RWD SUV that cannot match the efficiency - plus the winter tire package for the Ioniq 5 would have been considerably more expensive. I should be handing the Ioniq 38kWh over and getting the Kona around late spring/early summer 2023, if the wait lists stay as is. By that time, the Ioniq should have around 40k km.
 
Congrats! I see the love for Hyundai EVs is strong? My wife has a petrol Kona and lives it. I drove (and liked) the Kona EV a few tears ago, although 200+ hp and FWD and instant torque was a bit much at times
 
Oh yeah, I've gotten so used to the controls by now :D Also, the Kona should match the consumption figures of the Ioniq while having a comfortably longer range. The downside will be that it'll be smaller and louder inside, but as we haven't put the child seat in the Ioniq once, it's obvious that whatever is the other car in the family will do the hauling (Niro now, e-2008 later) and the other car will just be my commuter, and I want to do my yearly 25000km paying as little for electricity as possible. As for the road noise, I'll probably just stuff the spare tire well with insulation and see if it improves things.
 
Honestly, the noise wasn't that bad to my ears (was used to an eGolf at the time, which is sooooper quiet).
I'm still comparing it to my wife's petrol Kona though, which has the 1.0 3 cylinder, which is on the loud/raspy side?
My EV6 feels a bit louder than the Golf was too, mostly wind/road noise because bigger, heavier car, and 20" wheels as opposed to 16"

I guess road noise is a thing in Scandinavia? I hear/read roads are a lot rougher there because they need to withstand frost for longer?
We have pretty smooth/quiet roads but potholes everywhere though, I dunno which is worse
 
I guess road noise is a thing in Scandinavia? I hear/read roads are a lot rougher there because they need to withstand frost for longer?
We have pretty smooth/quiet roads but potholes everywhere though, I dunno which is worse

Our road surfaces are constantly worn down and coarse, partly because of the climate I guess but also because almost everyone drives on studded tires all winter long.
 
Yeah they usually have very coarse ruts and ridges. Steer a little to the right and the car quietens down a notch. It's good that I'll be moving from the Ioniq to the Kona and not directly from the well-isolated Volvo, so my ears will have accustomed.

Also, I ordered the car on studded tires as well. :neutral:
 
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.

Six months later (almost to the day), 20 000 km. Indicated average is exactly at 15kWh/100km, thanks to warmer months in between.

Also, I've seen 47-49kW charging speeds during warm days, which was excellent :cool:

Free charging at work has been over for quite some time, though, as we have 22kW chargers that cost 20 cents/kWh. I still tend to charge at work often because it's very convenient and not that much more expensive than home charging, and it's claimed to be all windpower.
 
I'm at 32ct/kWh at work and consider myself very lucky to get that... but then again, Germany is a bit "different" regarding electricity prices nowadays. You'd struggle to find a new home contracts for much less than 50 ct/kWh currently... o_O
Still, PV guy came by our house last week and was pretty confident he could get us a system up and running by the end of the year. And even with the elevated prices for PV parts because of high demand currently, we'll probably end up somewhere around effectively 10-12 ct/kWh (considering cost and lifetime of the system, plus the damn taxes I have to pay on my self-made electricity (wtf?)) if I manage to use exclusively that for charging (ugh, already dreading having to fiddle some energy management system for that).
 
Yeah, our current electricity contract is 5.5 cents /kWh for most of the time and something like 6-7 cents for the winter days, plus taxes, grid fees and other fees which bring it somewhere near 15 cents-ish/kWh in total. The contract runs out in Oct 2023, and like everyone else in Finland currently, I am hoping our new OL3 nuclear power plant will save us by that time :D Right now you'll be lucky to get a 25c/kWh contract (plus fees), some of them are touching 50c, and the coming winter will be interesting to say the least. Compare that to last winter where I could charge for free at work (which I did do yesterday because the chargers were unreachable due to paving work)...

One of the semi-sensible ways is to have a market based electricity contract and try to schedule all possible electricity usage for the nighttime hours when electricity is near free, but that takes a lot of effort and isn't foolproof.
 
One of the semi-sensible ways is to have a market based electricity contract and try to schedule all possible electricity usage for the nighttime hours when electricity is near free, but that takes a lot of effort and isn't foolproof.
Yeah, it does take some getting used to and in the current situation these contracts are prohibitively expensive during the high-price times, because they only use the spot-market to cover their needs... which is currently the only way to really get hourly tariffs, but actualyl quite dumb from a purchasing perspective, since you could (in the past at least...) get much better prices, if you actually knew your consumption well in advance (that's basically what the usual "flat price" tariffs make use of).

Once I have PV i'll be in the same boat, having to move as much of my consumption as possible into the daytime hours to get my feeding back into the grid as close to 0 as possible, because we don't get the dutch / belgian (i think?) model, where the grid is sort of treated as a "battery" and any surplus is netted against the rest of the consumption. no, any feeding into the grid, I'll be getting a whopping 6ct/kWh in return. nice :|
 
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no, any feeding into the grid, I'll be getting a whopping 6ct/kWh in return. nice :|
Wow, what an incentive to install PV. A work colleague has had PV installed earlier in the year and still doesn't have storage or a grid connection yet, he's complaining about how much he could have made from selling to the grid. This site shows the variable Octopus rate for our area in GBP, it's very strong at the moment.

https://www.energy-stats.uk/octopus-agile-outgoing-export-east-midlands/

As he can use the PV power but has no EV (don't ask), I only semi-jokingly suggested he puts the power into producing hydrogen and storing it.

Sorry for the slight OT away from the car, my interest in the PV systems of others is 100% based on jealousy. :razz:
 
Unteresting! Our prices are more around the 0,35€/kwh now, but PVs only make sense if you can use the electricity generated immediately (or store it in a battery) since injecting it back into the grid only pays out some ridiculously low number like 0,05€/kwh.... so this ends up with people having their AC on full blast and the windows open/electric heater on and windows open since using the electrity beats the measly couple of cents you get back. The solution, of course, is plugging in your EV when the sun is shining... (or getting a huge home battery, but that's not very cost effective unless you get a huge one)
 
Ah cool, so it is only the dutch who do net metering and in belgium it's basically the same as over here. they changed the legislation recently, which is utter bollox: now, if you commit to ONLY feeding into the grid, you get about double the rate. but then you're not allowed to consume any of that yourself. so yeah, as noodle said: it really only makes sense to use as much as possible for yourself and it'd basically be prudent to just dump any excess you have into hot water or something (since 6ct/kWh is cheaper than gas or any other form of energy you could get for heating your shower/bath water).
 
Six months later (almost to the day), 20 000 km. Indicated average is exactly at 15kWh/100km, thanks to warmer months in between.

Also, I've seen 47-49kW charging speeds during warm days, which was excellent :cool:

Free charging at work has been over for quite some time, though, as we have 22kW chargers that cost 20 cents/kWh. I still tend to charge at work often because it's very convenient and not that much more expensive than home charging, and it's claimed to be all windpower.
30 000 km yesterday, without any problems. I had one service done recently and it was still quite cheap at 150-ish, including brake fluid change.

I also returned the Niro at New Year's, with a little under 12 000 km on the clock. Used EV values have sank a little here so I was happy to have the agreed buyback price in writing instead of having to sell it on my own dime. It was a good, cheap deal and we really didn't have any issues with the car except for the charging port freezing.

Edit: Also, due to temporary VAT changes our home electricity costs less than 5 cents during night-time off-peak hours (plus grid fees and base fees) for the winter months, so it's even more enticing to charge at home.
 
Quick question, because my brakes look like utter shite: what do your brakes (rotors) look like? Do you ever use them at all? I can imagine the Finnish climate to be a bit worse on the brakes than our mild stuff, so I'd be interested what 30kkm (or rather: time, salt and wet) has done so far :D
I've now incorporated a switching to N and braking down manually from the Autobahn at least once a week (plus a few more times on the last 3 km home after that), but I fear I might be too late to save my rotors :|
 
Front:

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Rear:

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Normal, I guess, with a little glazing in the front rotors. I should use them more instead of relying on regen like I drove on hand-control, but it's just so dang convenient. There are a few places where I usually regularly use brakes, though, but maybe a few spirited stops would not go to waste. The scheduled services include brake inspections, but if these went to shit I'm not sure if they would be replaced on the manufacturer's dime or mine. Car should go back in the summer, anyway...
 
Approaching summer tire time soon, nearing 38k km. I'm in schedule with the km accumulation and that's great, since I contacted the importer today and heard the Ioniq's replacement is already at the Hanko harbour in Finland. Might not even crack 40k before I'll hand the Ioniq back.

There haven't been a lot of updates, but despite my parental leave we've kept using the car a lot, as it's just so cheap to run. No issues with anything, and I hope my future EVs will be as smooth to use.
 
I now know the plates and VIN to the car so I could arrange insurance for it. Usually somebody from the dealer would call me to choose a provider, but I preferred to use a broker I've dealt with earlier to get some better discounts. I wanted to include some better cover this time in case the car's out of use due to parts availability issues, as I've seen that to be the case with a bunch of EVs either due to crash damage (Mégane) or on-board charger failures (Peugeot). First year is -40% off, which means I'll only pay 100 euro more per year despite getting better coverage; second year the discount lowers to 33% or so, judging from how it's been with the Ioniq.-

I also just heard of a deal that would have worked out for me as well: there's a shipment of 39kWh Kona "Limited" cars in the Finnish harbour, offered for 349/month (15k km annually) which would have driven the cost to exactly on par with the Ioniq 38kWh I have now, if arranged for 25k km/yr for an extra 50 bucks/month. It's a smaller car and crucially also with only one-phase charging, meaning the benefit would be to get into a new car again for the same money... Good spec otherwise, though, with Bluelink. I've found that to be very handy.
 
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