Looking back over the past decade, it’s fascinating to see how much technology has evolved.
In 2015, the Volkswagen e-Golf was one of the top EVs available, offering optional fast charging and a range of just 125 km.
Did anyone here drive an EV 10 years ago? What was your experience like?
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I had a 2015 Nissan Leaf that I bought new. Range was optimistically 115 miles when fully charged. I loved it. I have also owned a 2022 Nissan Leaf and now I drive 2023 Audi E-tron. Range was never an issue with the 2015, but I was only driving 60 miles per day. We have also owned various ICE cars for longer trips. We put many more miles on our EVs than our ICE, favoring them for errands and the like. My favorite thing is having my car charged and ready to go and not having to ever stop at gas stations. The much lower operating cost is definitely nice as well.
The GM EV1 from 1997 had a longer range than this, and it didn’t even have lithium batteries.
I still feel like, at least for urban use, that a smaller battery with faster charge times are better than a long range battery
A larger battery is easier to get to charge at higher rates. So charging for a 50 km drive, can generally be done faster on a bigger battery.
And it will last longer, because the wear is per “full” recharge, where obviously for the same amount of distance, a bigger battery will require fewer percent of a full recharge.That said, of course a smaller battery could in theory be of higher quality. But that’s usually not how it works.
Battery sizes and charging speeds correlate, I think this is one of the main reasons we see cars with almost 100kwh of battery nowadays.