James O'Neill's blog

Here in my car / I feel safest of all … It keeps me stable for days / in cars.

I’m creating a fork of my blog to talk about my experience as an electric car owner. Gary Numan’s “Cars” is old favourite song and “Stable4Days” became the working title before I hit the keyboard… So …

Late in the summer of 2024 the repair bills to keep my ten-year old Volkswagen CC Diesel on the road were hurting. First it was the starter motor, then the water pump, finally the air conditioning needed a new compressor costing more than the car was worth. Its first owner had specified a massaging driver’s seat, and I’d said I would probably run the car until it fell apart for that seat, but with 130,000 miles on the clock it was doing just that.

I’d seen VW’s ID.7 and liked the look of it; there were launch models from the start of 2024 hitting the used market at the right kind of price, but leasing company discounts meant I could get a brand new one for a lot lower cost of ownership – and I will write something separate on the arithmetic of leasing. I took one for a drive, I loved the woomph of the 6.5sec 0-60 time, I loved the ride quality (I briefly had a VW Phaeton which wasn’t this good). I loved the silence, and I loved the gadgets I ordered the lease-car the next day.

Oh. Did I mention the ID7 is electric? TLDR The verdict so far seems to be really nice car, low costs, and hearing about “range anxiety” but never experiencing it.

To paraphrase something the head of the Asssasins Guild says in a Terry Pratchett book I didn’t go electric to go “green” or for some cause or belief… I did it for the money, there can be few cleaner motives, so shorn of pretence.
If I charge it at home, exclusively, fuel savings alone will be about £1200 a year; without a driveway and charger, things are much more expensive and less convenient. Fixing the CC’s aircon would have cost 12 month’s lease payments. The lease is £200 a month cheaper than an equivalent car with a Petrol or Diesel engine and includes car tax, and no servicing is needed before the end of the lease. It saves money everywhere.

I mentioned massaging seats and the extraorinarily comfortable front seats in the ID7 both have massage as standard. It warms up ready for departure with windows defrosted, and toasty seats and steering wheel. The car is always on-line, and tells VW where it’s parked, whether the doors are locked and windows closed, the state of the battery and some other bits. The Mercedes I had in 2015 had an app which could lock/unlock the car and told me how much fuel was in the tank, the CC didn’t; but the ID7 has caught up and VW’s app will show where the car is, lock it or start the heating/aircon - a timer puts it on in the morning. After 20 years with pretty good diesels, I would have had another if I got a comparable driving experience for similar money. For what I’m paying, and the driving pleasure I get (yes, I’m smug about jumping into a warm car and gliding past a neighbour at work with an ice-scraper), it would need to burn unicorns as fuel to put me off.

The easy way to think of an EV battery is as a stack of phone or laptop batteries arranged to give 400-Volts, or in a few cases 800. Total usable energy in the ID7’s battery is 77 Kilowatt-hours, and an onboard charger charges it from the mains; “Rapid charging” away from home uses a DC supply and bypasses the on-board charger.
Plugged into a standard British 240V AC / 13-Amp socket, the on-board charger can get about 3½kW. That’s a last resort and Volkswagen don’t even provide the “granny charger” cable to do it.
While the car was on order, I got a charger installed: there are plenty of choices, and with apologies to all of them I can’t get excited by what goes between the fuse box and the appliance using the power.
The popular Ohme box my installer recommended is controlled from an app (isn’t everything? I have app-fatigue!) but my aging iPhone wouldn’t run it, so I bought a used iPad that would. Ohme don’t provide a data feed as such, but a bit of hacking let me get the data the app sees, and I’ll write about that another time too. The Ohme has a dedicated 30-Amp circuit for 7kW charging, which is still classed as “slow” but will fill the ID7 overnight. With the right connection VW’s AC charger can charge at 11kW (“fast” but not “rapid”); a few cars can go faster with the right AC supply.

EV Drivers learn pretty soon that 22kW and even 43kW public AC charge points exist but the on-board AC charger in their car will be the limiting factor. The other key early lesson is that on the right tariff, overnight charging at home costs about a third of the standard rate; but charge at a public charger and the base price is double to tripple the domestic daytime rate, and VAT at 20% instead of 5% can bring the total to ten times what you pay at home overnight.

A few back-of-an-evelope sums: I put about 60 litres of fuel in the CC every 600 miles or so. In round numbers, I’ll save money if I get more than 10 miles worth of electricity for the price of a litre of diesel (fluctuating but £1.44 this week at Tesco). I need to put 3kWh into the ID7 to go ten miles, £1.44/3 makes the break even 48p per kWh. I was a Scottish Power customer but they couldn’t activate their cheap overnight rate for me, and in the end it was easier to switch to Octopus and now I’m paying 7p per kWh overnight and saving about 12p a mile. It took 3 months, including some charging above the 7p rate, to spend the price of a tank of diesel. A charger costs about £1,000 including typical installation - the cable run for my Ohme was a little awkward and it came in a shade more, so the payback on that is about 8,500 miles.

The CC was old enough to incur the London ULEZ charge; an electric car puts no fumes out into city air, but creates pollution elsewhere. Some energy suppliers tell customers “You get only ‘clean’ electricity from the grid and the dirty stuff on the same grid goes to other people.”, that’s daft, and in my mind every kWh from the grid is as clean or dirty as every other one. If you want 100% clean energy you need generate (and store) your own. While Britain is de-carbonizing electricity, combined-cycle natural-gas generation covers demand that can’t be met from Nuclear, Wind, Solar, and other sustainable odds and ends. I’ll write about getting carbon intensity data another time but the CO2 of all electricity going into the car, divided by all the miles driven works out at 33g of CO2/km so far. The figure was 163g for the CC. Cost-wise it’s like having a 320mpg car, CO2-wise it’s like 220mpg so far.

I’ve unlearned long held assumptions about filling up. Some days I brought the CC home with less than 30 miles-worth of diesel left in the tank meaning the next trip had an enforced detour to fill up. I’ve likened the EV experience to having a fuel tank fairy - go to bed with the tank empty and wake up with 240-300 miles of range depending on conditions; if you charge at home, going somewhere to fill up is only necessary on long journeys.

Three parties want to decide when home-charging starts and stops.

• I can tell the car “Start charging at midnight, stop at 80%” – filling to 100% only when needed extends the life of its battery, but the last 20% takes longer as well.
• The Ohme box doesn’t charge at peak times unless specifically told to and wants me to tell it “Only turn the power on to the car at midnight” and set the car to charge the moment it sees power
• Octopus want to tell the car when to start and stop so it gets charged with the cheapest, greenest power. I set a level to charge to (via an app, of course - it charges to the same level as last time if I do nothing) and I let them call a VW service to find out how much juice the car has, they do the sums for how long it needs to charge, and schedule accordingly, including lowering the price for charging outside the cheap-rate window when that’s needed. They use the same service to tell the car when to start or stop charging.

Letting Octopus have control saves money. If the Ohme thinks it is outside peak time, and the car sees power and decides to start charging, Octopus can see what’s happened and tell it to pause (or I say “NO! Charge NOW!” and pay the rate for that time of day). If I want 100% instead of 80, I need to tell them both, otherwise either the car says “I’ve got enough, thanks” or Octopus won’t schedule enough time to charge. Working all this out and getting things set up was a one-off faff. Day to day, charging a car is no more hassle than charging a phone, plug in and leave it charging while you’re not using it. And I’ll talk more about charging next time.