Ionic 5 much bigger than a Honda CR-Z so flipping off the Trump supporters this morning over the top of the car not as effective…
I need a new windshield for my 2021 Mazda 3. Any reason I should care if’s factory or aftermarket? Of course the aftermarket is like half the price.
It does have rain sensors and requires some calibration for cameras and LiDAR.
I just had my Passport’s windshield replaced by Safelite and didn’t specify the factory spec. Car is fairly techy and everything came back as new.
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So it has been 2 months since I got the Ionic 5 and I have just over 2000 miles on it so far. Here is what I think of my first all electric car:
- It is still fun to drive, it is the quickest car I’ve ever owned and accelerating hard is fun.
- Range is deceptive. To extend the life of the battery, best practice is to not drain it under 20% or fill it more than 80%, “occasionally” for road trips or if you really need the range is fine, but basically 20-80 is where the car should be. That changes my range from around 300 miles to around 200 miles. If I was plugging the car into a Level 2 charger every night when I got home it wouldn’t be a deal but if I was paying the $.57 a kWh at Electrify America that would be $29 a fill up, not as much as the 8 gallon tank in the CR-Z, but the CR-Z had a 300+ mile range. It is pretty moot though since I get free charging at Electrify America for the life of the lease.
- Winter charging is likely to be a PITA. Before it turned cold it was taking around 18 minutes to charge the car, the last charging session was in the 40’s and took 30 minutes. Pre-conditioning the car may help a little but I think it is still going to be long enough to be annoying.
That’s about it. Still happy with it, hoping Trump won’t deport it and me next week. If you have any questions about it feel free.
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The free charging is a nice perk. Are there any Electrify America stations near grocery stores or other places you go regularly? If you can charge while you go do something else, that basically makes the charging time negligible.
Any thought of getting a level 2 charger at home for winter charging?
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The charge place closest to the house is by a Trader Joes, it hasn’t taken long enough to be able to do much but walk over to it and walk back. There is a 10 minute grace period after you finish charging then they start charging you for being plugged in so at best it’s probably going to be a chance to go park and read for a bit.
We have a level 2 charger for my roommates Tesla, but I only start paying for utilities if I start using the charger so we’ll see how painful it gets this winter. I like the idea of free and have enough time in my schedule to take 40 minutes and go fill up the car once a week or so.
I have no idea, never had an ev - still rocking a 200kmi manual gas thing, but I’m EV curious. Can you program it to cut off charging at 80% - say if you leave it overnight in winter. What’s optimal? (Free charging aside).
Yeah you can tell it when to stop charging, walk away, and when you get back it will have stopped where you told it to
I suppose there could be some exceptions but seems unlikely unless very old vehicle
The Ionic 5 lets you set a max charge of 80%, 90%, or 100% which stops the charging where you want it. I’m not really sure about winter treatment, this is my first winter with one. We have a garage which is nice, but it is still cold as hell in there. I’ll probably try and start preheating the car before using it in the morning but I’m thinking I’m going to be losing 20% of my range because of the cold according to my roommate who has had a Tesla for a while…
if you are buying a car, do all the negotiating through email and just go back and forth through everyone until you get the deal you want.
I suppose you could. I’ve heard the dealer on the phone with people while waiting to talk to him so they could do it there too. I started the deal by filling in a form on the build a car on the Hyundai page and got an automatic response from the closest deanship to my house. Then went to the dealership and we finished the deal in a couple of hours on the last day of the month right before a 3 day weekend. I wish I was savvy enough to have done that on purpose… You can always walk away if you aren’t happy with the deal you get in the dealership, just know what your numbers are before you go in.
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I know Li batteries are not great starting when cold (got one in my motorcycle). Couldn’t you have a mini-heater thingy to warm up the battery first?
When it’s cold out I crank my bike a few times and/or run the hi-beam lights - to warm up the LiFePo battery enuf to properly crank the engine.
I’m assuming modern EV cars are better at this than my old bike/Li battery.
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EV batteries in cars have very advanced thermal systems to ensure they are at proper operating temperature. The energy to either heat or cool the battery as necessary comes from… the battery. So that’s where your loss of range comes in.
These aren’t just big cellphone batteries. Along with the thermal systems they also have very thorough battery management systems which ensure that all the cells within them are balanced.
Right now the average EV battery is losing about 2% of capacity per year. Which when compared to your phone is really freaking good. Yeah a 20 year old car won’t get as good of range, but these batteries are very robust. If you live in a place where the roads are salted, they are outlasting the body of your car. And will outlast their internal combustion engine equivalents.
You can further preserve your battery by actually shutting off charging at 80%. If you’re the type to charge at home, or while parked at trader joes or whatever, and don’t need the full range at the ready, not going above 80% will give the battery some longer life.
Avoiding extreme weather helps too, both for immediate range and long term health of the car. But they are very capable of surviving cold and hot climates, they’ll just come out a little worse for the wear. Which EV opponents seem to harp on, but internal combustion vehicles suffer from premature death in harsh climates just as often.
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It’s been a while since I looked, but there doesn’t seem to be solid evidence that certain charging patterns are better or worse for EV batteries.
The technology is changing all the time, so testing something that takes place over 15 plus years is non trivial.
My takeaway was that just charging the best way for your life and routine wasn’t much of a leak
Yah. My bike battery has some kind of balancing system (6 or 8 cells; don’t recall). But no warming thingy.
But the battery’s 14 yrs old and still cranking along just fine, w a little warm up procedure when it’s winter.
Modern cars have remote starts; why not a 5 min battery warm up as well. Easy peasy!
It’s unlikely you’ll notice much difference by charging as you please, I agree with this.
But we actually do know a lot about what changes in the chemistry of a lithium ion battery as a factor of temperature and charge level, and charging them fully does degrade them faster.
The more you can keep your battery low, around 20%, the longer it will last. But keeping them that low makes them pretty useless. But they do degrade faster if regularly charged to a higher %.
This curve shows cell voltage as a function of % (SOC = State of Charge = % charged to). Those higher voltages achieved as they charge more do wear on the battery over time. I do recommend keeping them at 80% if you don’t need that extra 20%.
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I’m not just talking about warming the battery, being able to warm the car up before getting into it just using my phone is going to be amazing after winter hikes.
I musta got lucky w my bike/ battery combo.
I upgraded the regulator/rectifier (cos my bike brand was notorious for a weak one). Then got a slightly oversized LiFePo battery (CCAs).
From your graph, maybe I coulda just left the original reg/rectifier in there. Kept the bigger Li battery.
This seems to be moving the question on one level.
Why does increasing the voltage increase the wear?
Are there other factors that aren’t captured here? How do those factors correlate with max charging behaviour over real world driving conditions?
I have a vague memory you work in the industry? And this is a topic I’m very interested in, so I’m absolutely open to being educated here.
I do work in the industry, my main role is tuning the software on the vehicles that converts the accelerator pedal to power at the wheels. I used to do this on combustion engines, now I do it on EVs.
We’re quickly approaching the limits of my battery knowledge though. I don’t really “need” to know that much about batteries to do what I do, although I do absorb a bit by just being in meetings with the guys that do. I did find this article which gets into a bit of the physics/chemistry of battery degradation. If you want to find some more reading on the topic, some key search terms regarding battery degradation are going to be “lithium plating” and “dendrite growth”.
One annoying thing I have found when trying to educate myself on this type of stuff is there’s sort of a learning curve gap online. After a while you just find the same high level information. The next level is some PhD thesis paper that’s 90% calculus. There’s not a lot of resources for “I need to have a more thorough and modern understanding of this concept than what’s on wikipedia but haven’t touched a math book in 20 years.”