EV Voltage

We bought a Toyota Aygo as a second car just over 3 years ago, it serves as Senior Management’s Car and we tow it ( on a trailer) behind our motorhome

- it is one of the lightest cars in its class.

We are very pleased with it. It came with a 3 year warranty but, if you have it serviced by Toyota, they extend it every year up to 10 years.

For a small, basic, car, it has a number of ‘gizmos’ - eg lane departure warning, to close to vehicle in front warming.

Ours is the 2021 model but they have revamped the range since and they have even more gizmos.

Fuel economy is very good. Around town ( which is our normal use) 46 mpg. On a clear run, nearer 50. Plus, ours came with a spare wheel.

The Aygo / Peugeot 107 / Citroen C1 (all the same car) has a solid reputation for reliability too. The semi-auto gearbox is annoying though - better to go for the manual.

The new one is the Aygo X which has more plastic trim to make it more crossover-y, if that's your thing.

Theo

I wasn’t aware there was a semi- auto.

I think the Peugeot / Citroen versions ended with the version we have ( ie pre Aygo X)

Yes, it looks ‘inflated’, although I think it is essentially the same running gear.

It seems to be a trend when updating small cars to ‘inflate’ them. Smart did it. Kia did it with the Picanto. Now Toyota.

For a tiny lightweight car that’s really rather abysmal. My wife’s diesel

Tim

It isn’t that rare just not in cars, most commuter trains in Southern England and a few on Merseyside have used DC with similar voltages for decades and before them Trams and Trolleybuses. While the mechanical equipment designed for traction control would be too big to fit into an EV there were auxiliary circuits for heating and lights that used smaller switches. Fortunately in recent decades the older mechanical equipment has been replaced by solid state circuitry a process that has been taking place all over the world and developing all the time, hence now EV’s have come along it has been relatively easy to source solid state circuitry designs that are small enough for EV’s.

GH

Yes, so did our (2009 vintage) Citroen C5 Tourer (i.e. estate car). Maybe nearer 50mpg most of the time but it always made me wonder why people got tiny little cars because they were 'more economical'.

"They think they're so modern and classless and free But they're still f****ng peasants far as I can see"

The modern Liberal is morally so right, he she or it can safely ignore the laws of Nature.

Which considering what is being switched is pretty staggering. For efficiency, the voltage is chopped at a few MHz. That in itself isn't too bad because you take that straight to an inductor before it gets anywhere near a motor, and that inductor takes nearly all the HF crap out of the high current stuff.

With no commutators doing the commutation - its all solid state - there are no arcing brushes etc.

And by using permanent magnets in the rotors the moving parts don't need electricity. So no slip rings either.

Indeed. Our petrol hybrid, which weighs nearly 1500kg, can get close 60 mi/gall on a benign long run.

(Harder to work out around town as it's not trivial to separate out the electric and petrol inputs).

nib

They can be. My Smart (really tiny) did an overall average over 25000 miles of 55, and a diesel Panda (not much bigger) did 58 average over

nib

Most small diesels can get up to 60mpg. Hybrids have no advantage outside of town.

Weird. Have you owned or driven one?

After 50 years of driving conventional cars it’s only take one EV to convince me that I wouldn’t want to go back to an ICE vehicle as a daily driver ever again.

It’s largely oil/gas company bollocks being promoted to preserve their control and profits.

Tim

But then you'd need to hire something bigger whenever you needed extra space. Our C5 got to carry all sorts of quite bulky bits of furniture, washing machines, dishwasher, timber for fencing, christmas trees etc. .... all at about 50mpg. It had done over 200k miles when we sold it. It cost us £3000 some time before 2016 and we sold it last year for £1000. Big cars tend to be cheaper secondhand.

Absolutely!

It took me less than 5 minutes into my test drive to decide I want one these!

nib

Well the issue is what your 'daily drive' is.

A BEV would get me to the supermarket and back just fine, but I couldn't afford to run it and an ICE car as well, which I would need for longer trips, and the ICE car gets me to the supermarket and back just fine, too. The supermarket does have a very full car park though, and the only empty bays are reserved for electric cars. You never see them in it.

Its ALL eco bollocks. Government mandated profit machines. None of it is having any effect on the climate whatsoever. It just makes people poorer.

One project I'm hoping somebody does is to retrofit an EV battery + power system to an old electric train. If you start with an 800V battery then it's more or less a drop in to a 750V EMU. You could optionally use the inverter to power the DC motors if the original traction controls were unserviceable. Sounds like a fun project for somebody in the position to do it.

Theo

Indeed, but those aren't "consumer" vehicles, and all it would require to stop the arc is to cut the power supply which is fairly straightforward with an external source. That wouldn't be so easy with the power coming from batteries inside the vehicle.

Here is an interesting summary of the requirements for an EV contactor:

Theo <theom+ snipped-for-privacy@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:

Yes , I inherited my Mothers Aygo the earlier version and it has the semi-auto which is basically a manual box with a computer controlled electrically driven clutch.It is not the smoothest of changes and sometimes cannot make up its mind which is the best gear to be in so hunts up and down. Fortunately you can just flip it to manual selection and using that you can make them progress quite well especially uphills where the auto position leaves it too late to change down and you lose momentum. The clutches wear out like a conventional one which leaves a dilemma , Toyota charge a lot to change the clutch but a lot of small independents won’t touch them because they have a reputation of being a pig to set up. That is often because they haven’t followed the correct shutdown procedure which sets the plate in the correct position before dismantling. I had ours done at a chain called Mr Clutch , don’t normally use such chains but when I rang up to confirm the £500 quote was for the semi auto the bloke said “Yes” ,we are used to them, you just have to put them to sleep.first. They did the job successfully without drama though the car drove like a dog for the first few journeys afterwards,that is normal as the electronic control self learns the position of the clutch plate and to an extent the driver style and it takes awhile to settle down. Another reason independents don’t like them as customers need convincing this is the case and is not down to poor fitting on their part.

GH