Quote:
Originally Posted by You Need a Thneed
The Bolt is really going to depend on how much it’s going to sell for. It’s a great car, and if it’s significantly cheaper than other options, it would be a great option.
I don’t know if they have sped up it’s DC fast charging speed from 50 kW, which is slow for a EV these days. It’s not going to be an issue if you just use it to commute, but if you are ever intending to do road trips, something like an IOniq 5 with its 200+ kW max charging speed is going to be much better.
I don’t know if I’d be too worried about battery technology advancing to a point where a new EV down the road is going to be so much better than current cars.
Current EVs are capable of doing anything without much change to current habits. Maybe you have to rest for 20 minutes every 3 hours. It probably gets hard to deliver power fast enough to improve the charge times significantly anyway. Batteries may become lighter, but that doesn’t make current vehicles less capable.
That said, I’d definitely want a car that can charge at 150-200kW, and even with that, not all cars have the same charge curve. Vehicles that have the same max charge rate may have significantly different chrage curves, effecting how long they take to charge. Some vehicles slow down more than others above 80%, or with the battery mostly discharged.
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Yup. My only issues with the Bolt is it's really small and as you say, the 50kW charging and it's charging curve makes any long trips impossible. I like to tell people who aren't as used to this stuff as you and I to think of it like this:
You get about 6 km/kWh in the battery. At 50 kWh you're getting 300 Km per
hour of charging at maximum rate which already seems awful. But that's not the worst part. No car charges at max power the whole time it's plugged in. As you get closer to full charge the rate goes down significantly because excess heat is produced. Specifically for the Bolt, it stays around 50 kW until a little after 50% charged. By the time you're at 75%, you're down to 30kW. By 85% you're at 20kW, and so on. Having to stop for an hour or more every 240km just does not seem realistic for any sort of trip.
Contrast that with the Ioniq 5 like you suggested that not only charges 3-4 times faster, it also holds the higher charge for longer. If you do any sort of trips that is going to be massive. Then you're stopping for 15-20 minutes every 350-400km. That's a massive difference