A touch of frost

First properly cold morning, this morning. The perfect morning for dowsing the windscreen with a bit of hot water.

Except if you have an EV.

One of the best (and most often over-looked) features of the Nissan LEAF is that you can remotely control the heating and cooling system, using an app on your phone. The benefit of this on a cold morning is that it not only clears frost from the windscreen, it pre-heats the whole cabin so that it's nice and toasty when you start your journey (I have mine set to 23 degrees). No need to wait for an engine to warm up. In the summer time, this function can be used to pre-cool the car as well.

This, of course, comes at a price. To carry this function out, the car will use some battery power, and so will take some range away. In my experience, pre-conditioning the car for about 15 minutes (which is plenty) uses about 3%, and so takes about 3km off the range. I don't have any hard science to back it up, but my guess is that running an engine on a regular car to do the same job would also take about that amount of range from the tank. 

To overcome such losses, there is an easy fix. If you have the car plugged into a charger at the time you carry out the pre-conditioning, the energy used comes from the mains and not from the battery. That means if you have the car plugged in overnight, you can get into a pre-heated car and still have 100% battery when setting off. That's just not possible in a regular car (unless you have your own petrol/diesel pump at home).

And yes, I get the irony of having to go outside on a cold day to take these pictures which are supposed to show "remote" pre-heating. :)

Guest Blogger #1 (LEAF 30kWh)

This month, Dr. Iain McLaren has been kind enough to write a guest blog post for EV Galway. Iain describes himself as a "Scot in Ireland/astrophysicist/educator/bluffer". Iain is the Director of the Centre for  Excellence in Learning and Teaching at NUI Galway. You can follow Iain on Twitter.

I've been driving a Nissan Leaf for over two and a half years now, having traded in a Citroen which although I was fond of it, had started to acquire a painful hold on my credit card with repair after repair. At the time we were thinking of making the switch, we had lots of information sent to us on 'full cost of ownership', discount electricity rates versus petrol, 'time to break even' and the like. In truth, though, the underlying reason we decided to make the move was that we were sick of the thought of every day pumping out greenhouse gases, especially in those long traffic jams coming into town. What had put us off before, was the classic 'range anxiety' but when the battery capacity moved up to 30kwh (giving that nice psychological reassurance of distances over 200km on a full charge -even though in practice the Leaf's distance 'guessometer' is somewhat optimistic!), we decided to have a test drive.

From the minute the car was switched on and the accelerator pressed, I was hooked. It's such a pleasure to drive an electric car. Responsive acceleration, no hassle with gears and clutch (the source of a lot of our previous expense) and the added thrill of being able to sneak up behind our annoying little dog whilst in 'stealth mode' and give her a surprise as payback for all the times she barked incessantly at us and our neighbours as we drove off in the mornings.

Once we bought the car, the range worries just faded away. The vast majority of our driving was the daily commute into work and back, 20km each way, so a full charge set us up for days, and with free workplace charge points, a little top up now and again was possible anytime. If we needed a quick charge for a longer journey (say to Knock or Shannon airports) then sitting in the Topaz garage for twenty minutes was usually enough and coincides nicely with the time for a coffee and a muffin!

Of course we still have our occasional long distance drives. Some, we've done in the Leaf, with a bit of planning for charge stops, for others we've made use of our other, older (and now much neglected) wagon that's fuelled by the usual crushed dinosaur juice. Friends of ours, fellow Leaf drivers, just hire a car if they need it for a long haul or a binge shop over in Ikea.

So we've never had a moment's doubt or regret since we made that purchase. Sorry, let me just check with my wife. Oh, she says the only problem is arguing over who gets to drive the nifty little thing in the morning and who's stuck in the passenger seat!

A brief history lesson!

GMIT has been EV-aware for a number of years now. In 2012 a trial project was lead by Dr. Thomas Roche. As a result of this project, an eCars charging point was installed on the Dublin Road campus. This subsequently lay idle between 2012 and November 2017, when I became the first staff member to own and drive an EV on a daily basis.

To read more about the initial pilot project from 2012, have a look at this page.

Maintenance

In terms of maintaining an EV, there is very little required, and even less that you can do yourself. No oil change, no timing belt, no gasket seal that can break.

As part of the regular service carried out by the main dealer (around €120), the cabin pollen filter gets changed, and that's about it. Obviously, if wear and tear items such as wipers and brake pads need to be replaced, then that has to be done too, just like with any car. The service carried out by the main dealer is required mostly to get the service book stamped, as the warranty depends on a full history. The warranty with the version of LEAF I have is 3-years bumper-to-bumper and 5 years on the batteries and motor. My car won't be 5 years old until 2020, so I will get the service from the main dealer as necessary to keep the warranty in place.

But apart from that, the car is pretty much maintenance free. Top up the brake fluid if necessary (it hasn't been necessary on my car so far), and keep the windscreen washer tank filled, and away you go.