My comments on several subjects that passed by on the last pages...
Yep only makes sense, if you do low mileage and can either buy a used one cheaply or get one as a company car.
You could charge batteries for your house on that cheap night rate also, to use during the day.
- Upside of big depreciation is 2nd hand prices will start making them attractive. In the Netherlands I saw a prediction that soon you will be able to pick up early model 3 for as little as £10k due to so many returning from lease. If you can charge 200miles for £4-ish night rate.... Check out the LFP short range ones, batteries are supposed to be very robust on those...
- With V2L (in case of an outage) and esp. upcoming V2G you could charge your car cheap during the night and use it it your house during the day, or sell it off at (high) market rate back to the grid if the car lives at home (asuming yes, if you are at home...). At that point a car battery is much cheaper then a dedicated buffer battery. Over here we also have grid support services that pay you just for having the car coupled to the net. If the grid suddenly needs more juice even if just for a little instance during unplanned peaks or production fallouts (nuclear looking at you), it will then instantly get support from your car (either by stopping charging, or in future V2G, by putting back electricity in the grid). Apparently pays better the just selling the electricity and doesn’t age the battery.
- As for losses during charging, this is known if you in any way follow the subject, the slower you charge, the higher the losses, simply as additional heat generated is spread over a longer time. As generally charging slower is significantly cheaper, it is mostly a non-issue (in my case it's like 1£/month), but yeah, something to be aware of.
- Lastly, yes electric cars use more energy during winter, but so does my GR. Even if the GR uses only 10% more (in my use, short trips can be as much as 30% more), since it cost me 10x more to fuel my GR compared the home charging the EV during winter, the monetary hit is 3-4 times LARGER in absolutely money terms with the GR compared to the EV, like for like. But nobody complains about that at all and the EV bashing in this respect frankly is a bit silly to me in this light, especially also with part two here below on the same subject.
- For actual range concerns during winter is not at all as bad, during long trips where range matters and without the frequent warming cycles and the car remains warm/on temp, range drop rel summer range is only 10-20% depending on car model, far less dramatic then the 50%+ drops as read from the short trip averaged doom range readouts. Norwegian car mag tests this every year. And again, also ICE car drop in range say 5%, so the final difference is maybe 5-15% (GR has the similar range as our EV). For us practically, we stop every 2 hours anyway and it has no big consequences, with pre-heating we're taking about a ~3 to 5min longer charging, our restroom/food breaks usually takes longer then the car anyway if it's properly quick charing. For us long winter trips only happen when going skiing, then the issue is there can be charging queues as everyone is out at similar times, but it's only one time a year that happens.
So yes, there are downsides but not as totally devastating as it sometimes can sound in discussions...
www.ovoenergy.com
