Idle wonderings - SCR retrofit?

[gassygassy]

It's water under the bridge because the car has gone and one of the ten things that will prevent me having another electric car. I won't bother listing them here. Maybe it's eleven things now I have been watching John Cadogan on youtube, he's done a lot of EV spontaneous combustion videos. Dangerous things, EV batteries, they can just for no reason go up in highly toxic smoke.
Back to my Leaf: It was a good deal. I got it on a PCP, no up front deposit and no return baloon payment. £185 a month for two years and if I didn't want to keep it, just give it back with no payment. Which I did of course.
Reasons it goes below 20% which they don't tell you about:
1) Recharging stations well off your intended route so you have extra miles to do to find one and your charge drops.
2) Charging station not working: M1 J21 service station: pulled in to recharge at 6pm Friday. Charger not working. Phoned the Hi Tek company that supplies/ installed / maintains the charger. No answer. No answering machine. No voice mail. Office hours 9am to 5pm Monday to Friday. So every EV that pulls in there to charge from Fri 5pm to 9am Monday cannot charge the car, nor can they even report that it doesn't work. Head off down the motorway at 30mph with - - - showing as the range. Guess when it will grind to a silent halt? HGVs flash past violently. I expect by now that HGV drivers are used to seeing EVs in the slow lane doing 30.
3) Head for a recharging station at a Nissan dealer, only 15 miles off your straight-line route. You need to recharge. Arrive at Nissan dealer - part of the sales pitch is (was) that you can pull in at a Nissan dealer and recharge free of charge (cost). " Can I charge my car please?" 'Oh dear I am sorry sir, we would love to charge your car but last night the charger was stolen'. So off you go on your way watching the range drop and drop and drop. Turn off heating, don hat, coat, gloves, scarf and scrape ice off inside of windscreen.
4) you pull into a car park with chargers. Charging spaces are filled with ICE cars so you can't plug in. You position your electric car so it blocks the exit of at least two ICEs and go to the caff and have an egg an bacon buttie. Soon an ICE driver comes in and shouts who owns the electric car? "I do". Will you move it? " No, why should I?" Swear words. "I'll move it when I have finished my breakfast / lunch / dinner and then you can sit and wait in the car park until my car is charged and I have pumped your tyres back up"

So in fact as you can't let the battery go below 20% and you can't charge it above 80% then the real range is 60% of the real range, which like ICE cars is in turn 80% of the manufacturer's claimed range.

Anyway this is a nice friendly Mercedes forum so I'll stop before I go off thread

 

[markjay]

Just on the battery charging issue:

The battery charging instructions for my EV say that in order to maximise battery life you should normally charge it to 80%, but once a month you should charge it to 100%, to balance the battery packs, ideally before a long journey. And, you shouldn't let it go regularly below 10%. The explanation given is that batteries degrade when they are left standing for a long period of time with charge levels higher than 80%, and so charging to 100% should ideally only be done prior to a long journey that will quickly see the battery charge level go back down to 80%.

So yes you do need to know how to charge the battery on an EV, but it's no different to how you need to know certain things when driving an ICE car. If you just jumped into an ICE car, for example, and red-lined the engine from cold every morning, you'd then be upset when the engine starts knocking and smoking heavily and you'll complain that no one told you that you're not supposed to give it full beans before the engine oil warmed up to working temperature.

That been said, the manual for your Nissan LEAF should have clarified the "dos and don'ts", just as it does on an ICE car. In my view, if Nissan didn't make it clear how to correctly charge the battery, then you would have a case against them under consumer protection legislation for not honouring the warranty. To my mind, the situation you describe point more to Nissan being a cr@p company than to EVs being troublesome cars.

 

[markjay]

The above got me thinking: one day I'll get myself a little sports car as a project, say an MGB, and my grandchildren who'll all be driving EVs will be shocked to learn that you needs to drive the car moderately until the engine oil warms up - I'm guessing that they will see it in the same way that we did when our parents told us that they had to start their car by manually cranking it, and then retard the ignition while driving it...

 

[WilliamParsons]

I do not have access to official Nissan handbooks.

 

[WilliamParsons]

Yes, future generations might find old car practices surprising, like warming up the engine, just as we do with manual cranking and ignition retardation.

 

[gassygassy]

You are right markjay. I should say that I 'bought' this car on a PCP: no upfront payment, two years at £185 a month, no baloon payment at the end, if I didn't want to keep it just give it back owing nothing. I think I got it in 2016 when the idea of electric cars was new-ish. I suspect the salesman didn't know about how much / little / when a battery should be charged so I guess that is why I wasn't told.
It doesn't matter anyway, I am not interested any more except to the degree that it is just one of a dozen reasons why I won't have another EV. I think that an EV car is so stuffed full of computers that if you try to do anything rash like charge it over 80% it should warn you on the dashboard that it is OK if you are immediately going to use at least 20%, likewise if it gets down to 20% it should say so, and tell you to consider looking for a charger.
I gave it back after 2 years and 8000 miles, so there just isn't any question of having a case against Nissan or the dealer. I probably would have pursued it if I had paid hard money for the car (£32k I seem to remember). If you end up having to pay £5000 every two years for a new battery it doesn't half push the cost of ownership up to new heights doesn't it? Probably about the same as having a 6000 mile service on a Ferrari