In April, I got a phone call from Glyn Hopkin, Ipswich.  They asked me how we were getting on with the Leaf?

Great, I said.

Would I like them to bring some of their electric vehicles to my work place and show my colleagues what it was all about?  NIssan were doing a road show and as I worked at Adastral Park…

Yesterday, Nissan, Renault, Vauxhall, BMW and Tesla brought 18 electric vehicles to the combined value of approx. £540,000 to Adastral Park in Martlesham Heath.  Every taste was catered for, from the practical Renault Kangoo Z.E to the zany Renault Twizy, to the ultimate commuter in the BMW C-evolution, to the beautiful Tesla Model S and BMW i8.  All were greeted with interest by the people working in Adastral Park yesterday.

Test drives were made available on 6 of the cars, including a pair of Tesla’s.

A big thank you to all the manufactures who took part: the day would have been meaningless without the vehicles!

Adastral Park came to ask the questions they had about the latest technologies as well as try the cars on test drive.

The day proved that electric vehicles have come a long way in the past 6 years, there is a great deal of interest and these are now an option for the second car in a family in many cases, maybe even a first for some.  Companies like BT’s Adastral Park have helped that evolution by providing charges for their visitors.

One of my earliest memories was a “Watch” TV programme about the future of automation, in the late 1970s.  It discussed coal and gas powered generation of electricity for national consumption, petrol and diesel generation for automation and nuclear power.  It recognised acid rain and particulate pollution from vehicles and stated that we needed cleaner alternatives as population density rose.  I saw a hydrogen powered car and its “exhaust” of “clean water”.

At this time, of course, the West (Europe, Russia and America) were the obvious polluters: these were the rich countries and while car ownership was not yet cheap, it was affordable for most people with a job.

Times have changed: India and China are now recognised as producing more pollution than the West.  Smog in China is so chronically bad that cyclists often wear masks to protect themselves from the dust produced from car and motorcycle exhausts.  On internationally broadcast events from Beijing, the smog level is discussed much as the rain forecast is for a cricket match held in Lords.

Western car manufactures are being bought by Chinese and Indian firms and stretch versions of Mercedes and Jaguar models are aspiring models of lust.  It is unlikely though that China or India will be the first to bring in a ban on particulate emitting forms of transport.  That is much more likely to come from the West.

In 2003, London’s “congestion charge” was launched, quickly identified as creating a “Low Emission Zone”.  The intended outcome of the fee to ensure road users thought twice about bringing polluting vehicles into London, especially as motorcycles and “low emission vehicles” such as electric and hybrids are exempt.  The aim was to stop habitual users where at all possible.

Other towns and cities, especially in the South of England, have watched the adoption of the zone and its outcomes with interest.  In particular, East Anglia, with its sparse population, poor road design and the difficulties of providing meaningful public transport (cost benefit analysis will never come in).  Most of the intercity railway was electrified in the 1980’s which really does allow us to see that car, HGVs, buses and motorcycles are the polluters.

Cambridge has been notable in using excessive parking charges to discourage car users coming in to the city, but of course, this only works short term and drivers just add the parking or congestion charge to the cost of running their vehicles.  If you’re not careful, the outcome will be damage to high street businesses rather than benefits to the cities inhabitants.

Of course there’s more to the story than switching vehicles just to reduce your carbon footprint.  Other things need to be in place to win the heart and mind.

Heart and mind?

When I told a friend that I had bought a motorcycle, she wasn’t at all interested.  “Noisy, dirty things,” was her only comment.

Over the past four weeks, I have used my motorcycle twice and my diesel once to do the commute.  To be honest, that was the comment that came to mind with my beautiful diesel: noisy and dirty.

You very quickly get used to the lack of combustion noise with the Leaf.  Indeed, I find driving the diesel quite nauseating.  It’s not so bad with the motorbike and after the first 20 miles of a journey, I get used to the vibration again, but that effect wasn’t something I’d expected.

However, I got a bit of a shock from my 13 year old son.

Formula E had it’s first race yesterday in Beijing.  There have been big concerns that “petrol heads” would not be interested in a “quiet motor sport.”

Being part of the motorcycling community, there are many who would not want a silent bike.  I am not one of these bikers.  Not only do I wear my lid, but I have a pair of moulded ear plugs which are designed to protect my hearing from not just the bike but wind noise when travelling above 35mph.

We got tickets to see the MotoGP in 2010.  You arrive at Silverstone and signs every where point you to free ear plugs as the noise coming from the 20 bikes on the circuit is deafening.

With the first race from Formual E, it was lovely to watch a motor sport which didn’t have to stop the noise from the track in order to hear the pundits talk about the race.

All the drama was there, even up to the end – it was such a relief to watch Heidfeld climb out from the cockpit.

My 13 year old did not agree.  He didn’t like the “whine of the engines” and “it [was] a waste of time to watch something that slow.”  It wasn’t slow: far from it.  The road circuit supported speeds up to 115mph and the cars are capable of 150mph.

I loved the drama, many of the drivers have been top runners in GP and Formula 3/Ford (although both Katherine Legge and Michela Cerruti are less familiar to those following just F1).  During the race, you could actually “hear” the gear changes.  The only smoke was from the brakes and the conversation between Prost and Heidfeld.

To get engagement, social media has been used to allow the most popular drivers to use a “fanboost” – if enabled in their car it allows the driver to access an extra bit of power which should be available to the engines: going “from 150kw (202.5bhp) to 180kw (243bhp).”  Three drivers on the circuit get this facility; those most popular with the audience.

So, you like it?

I wish I could have been there in person, I am really looking forward to the next one: 22/11/2014 in Putrajaya, Malaysia.  Though, as it is so quiet and pollutant free, I would not mind this happening outside my house.

Not sure I would ever say that about F1.

Of course, the BBC must have had a slow news day yesterday as they finally broadcast the summary from the report studying the latest state of the ozone layer.

As I hit my teens, research had shown that not only was the ozone layer thinning but it was most likely caused by the use of CFCs. Now as I enter my forties, the ban on CFC use is allowing the ozone to recover (albeit slowly).

So?

Whether or not you believe in climate change and its causes, particulate and gas pollution from the modern motor is only going to be reduced if people make different choices.

Those are

• cycle or walk short journeys.
• use public transport (which in the case of a double decker bus does pollute more than a car but can mean 63 cars are not on the road).
• use a petrol motorbike rather than a diesel car if you are travelling on your own.
• use an electric vehicle.

The vast majority of journeys in the UK are < 25miles in length.  If each of those were done differently, the UK would be a better place to live.

We do all these.  Your choice.  Do you want to make a difference? 🙂

It’s been a busy few weeks and this is the first chance I have had to sit still at the computer and write something which is, hopefully, interesting.  This is one of two blogs looking at things you can do to improve your house.

I am a huge fan of Grand Designs.  There are some amazing tools for your house that allow you to be comfortable yet save energy.  Under floor heating, solar PV cells, rain collectors, glass which cleans itself and light pipes.  Clever control systems that allow you to control the lighting and heat levels in any room of the house.

Retro-fitting these can be a complete nightmare, but some of these ideas are instantly available for any house.  In 2006, I discovered a source for one of these: a thermostat which not only set the heat for a room or zone but allowed you to programme different temperatures at different times.

Why on Earth would anyone want that?

To be honest, before Grand Designs and having a baby, I didn’t think you would.  One of the things you quickly discover with a small baby is that they will wake up in the middle of the night when the ambient temperature gets below 15°C.  In a traditional boiler, timer and single thermostat , that works out at around 2:30am every morning in October/November.

We moved house in 2000 with a very young baby to a house where we were recommended to keep the heating on all the time but use the thermostat to set the level for the house.  At night we set it to 16°C so the baby didn’t over heat and from the second night, we had much better nights.  The baby woke around 4am instead for a night time feed.

Yes, we slept better too.  It was never boiling but not freezing in the middle of the night meant we had a great night’s sleep.  We were both dreading the first gas bill.  That too was a surprise: the house never got cold, so the bill was more than reasonable.

That’s when I knew I wanted a thermostat I could set the levels to – warmer in the evening, cooler for breakfast and much cooler for the night time.  Heat miser had just the thing and I ordered one, hoping that it would be really obvious how to replace the mechanical thermostat had been fitted to our house built in 2000.  I followed the instructions and three hours (it took a bit of figuring out), it was fitted and running.
It was lovely.

So why are you talking about this now?

We moved house last year, to a self-build (not by us). It had five zones of heating, all controlled by Honeywell thermostats.
Having done the job once, I could do it again and actually why not go for a centrally controlled one.  As we all have tablets, wouldn’t a wi-fi controlled one be great?  After all, we are living in 2014.

We liked the quality of the Heat miser one, so that was my first port of call last August only to find these were “premium items” and carried a price to match 🙁

So I bought one: we could live with it and decide it that really was the way we wanted to go.  I replaced the upstairs one and compared to last time, the job was a bit quicker.

Although at this stage, you could see the difference between the mass produced estate house to the individually built one.  Every Honeywell had had the inside of the back box filled :~  No worries, I have chisel and I am willing to use it.

The Heat miser’s protrude into the room a few millimetres: but the back box is packed with the digital control unit as well as the power and control wires.

The photo montage below shows why this is not a trivial effort.

However, once installed, the wi-fi units are a joy.  Secured with a password, we can control them from the internet allowing us to make a last minute decision to stay out longer and not bother switching the heating on as soon as normal.

We did keep two off the internet but come the winter not only will we have the right temperature in the house, but it looks bang up to date too :).

From old thermostat to new, follow from top left

There are many small jobs there are to do on a vehicle, nothing separates cars and motorbikes like replacing the “tax disc”.

Actually, the circular piece of paper that demonstrates that you have paid your vehicle excise duty not the vehicle tax, although, confusingly, the portal for paying the duty is called the tax disc site.

Anyway, whether a car or bike, the process to buy the piece of paper is equivalent.

Physically replacing the taxdisc on a car is a three second job once you have the car key 😉

This is not the case on the bike: first I get the right hex key (2.5mm) then the right socket or spanner (4mm) and take the first three bolts out from the weather proof cover holding and displaying the tax disc on the bike.

Then the holder is manipulated so I can get a further 3 bolts out and loosen a further two.  Now, fish out the old bit of paper and replace with the new one.  Now every bolt needs to be replaced and tightened and all the others tightened.  If I am lucky, I haven’t moved or lost the bit of paper displaying the legal status of my bike.  It is a legal requirement to display the tax disc on the vehicle but on the bike this is an £80 bit of paper that can be lost or stolen.

Unlike a car, checking the bit of paper on the bike is a bit hit or miss, depending on the weather.  So the police check everything via their radios.

Err…

Thanks to the increasing number of £0 rated vehicles and a final vote of confidence, the law has changed and from the 1st October 2014, this is no longer a legal requirement to display the payment on your bike, car or anything 🙂

In January, when we bought the Leaf, more money was spent on sending out our tax disc than was collected.  The abolishment of the need to display the tax disc is to save the government money.

For every biker in the country, it is going to save them valuable time.

Originally the tax disc came in to prove a vehicle was insured and had passed its MOT.

Surely, if the technology exists to automatically prove a vehicle can be taxed, further money can be saved by just performing the joint check on the fly rather than once a year with a monetary payment?

The Leaf has come into its own this summer, not least because of the heat.  Many people think high summer is the perfect time to be on a motorcycle but for short journeys through urban areas it’s a recipe in self roasting.  There are some leathers that provide armour with excellent air conditioning, of course, but they don’t offer much protection if it does rain.

Cars of course have air conditioning and the Leaf has a low powered version running off the main batteries.  In practice, this means the days I charge the car, I have the cooler on: on the days I don’t charge, I don’t.  I have found that the fan can be operated for next to no drain on the battery which means I have almost got my charging down to twice a week.

Unfortunately, though, this has coincided with a couple of Friday’s where charging at work has been unavailable and I have had to run errands on the way home from work.  Both times, I have taken extra steps to make it home.

Going the long way round

To be honest, there were alternatives but I had offered to take my son to his friends for a sleep over and was keen to do it in the Leaf.  The plan was to drive to work in the morning, charge the car and get my son before taking a trip down the other side of the A12 to get to his friend’s party.  Then head back in to town to meet up with my husband.

Charging at work didn’t happen, thankfully I had a good charge in the car, but I hadn’t been that careful getting in to work that morning and there was no time to charge it at home.  I looked at the sat’ nav’ and thought, no problem.  Any way, I could charge it at the new high speed charger in Colchester football club’s car park.

Getting to the postcode position was easy but I did manage to go past the building three times before calling for help.  I had missed it.  Parked up, dropped off the kid and headed for the A12.  To get to the charging point, I’d be heading away from my home town but I’d be coming back with a Leaf at 80% charge.  Happy days 🙂

Of course, mostly I charge the car off Source East/pod point chargers.  I have paid £10 to get a card which unlocks the charging ports and enjoy what has been power for nothing extra.  I have an ecotrocity card for use on the electric highway (these cards are currently free and there seems to be no charging for the electricity either) which is the largest network of high speed DC chargers for electric vehicles.

So of course, I didn’t think to check what the Colchester’s football ground charger took.  It wasn’t a source East nor ecotricity but a Charge your car unit.  It should be added that at this point, I had just enough charge to get home if I didn’t use the A12.  But it would be cutting it fine.  I also had very little phone charge.

One of the things that really needs to be worked out is using one schemes RFID cards with different charging points: I did try all my cards before realising I was going to need to ask for help.  The receptionist was very helpful and found someone who had a card.

The thing to realise is that Charge your car is a variable charging scheme – the owners of the units have the facility to recoup their infrastructure costs and make a profit if they wish or they may be free.  Nowhere on this charge unit are any prices listed.  CFC have decided to charge for this unit: £5 for a 30minute charge.

Remember, we did the sums last week: that equates to £5 for 14 units of electricity or more than twice what I would pay if I got the electricity from home.

So, back in the car I got with a lean 17 miles on the clock and the knowledge that going the slow way home would be 19 miles.  I headed for the Nissan garage.

Nissan have installed free rapid chargers for its customers and I was hoping to get to the garage in time to get 10% or so before Glyn Hopkin closed.  No such luck and while I could physically get to the charger it, asked me for a code to unlock it (again, none of my cards provided access).

Heading further in to Colchester had taken another 2% off the battery (for 5miles driven) so I popped into the local Waitrose which did accept my source East card.  30minutes, time for a quick shop, a phone call, a coffee and a full 25% on the clock meant I should be able to get home easily.

I was careful, I had everything off that I could think of and some.  The display being off save around 2% of use for a 10 mile journey for example.  The air con was off, though I had to use the fan to keep the windscreen demisted.  I drove gently and used braking harvesting where possible.

I did the 20miles with less than 12% of the battery (that’s 2.4kW/hs or 38p) or the magic 8.3mile/kW.  I got home in less than 35minutes.

This all means I could have got home straight from the  football ground.  Mmmm.  It also means I got nearly 90miles off an 80% charged battery for the week.

A week later

Once again the plan was to charge at work.  We’d used the car the night before and it had been a while since the last charge (Tuesday).  But it was Friday and I was early enough to park up and enjoy the walk to my office and my desk.

The charge point wouldn’t unlock.  This seems to happen on the odd occasion, so I dropped an SMS to the charge point owner on site.

There were other issues on site, unbeknownst to me, so there was a major pause before I had an apologetic reply.  I had an estimated 20 mile range, so I assured him that there was no issue.  Of course it put the kibosh on the plans I had for the evening but I could get home and get it charging.  In fact I got home with 18miles left on the range and didn’t need to charge before heading out.

Lessons learnt?

Well, with some consideration and careful driving, I can do much better than my usual 4.4mile/kW and it really isn’t much of a hassle to do that.

When I was a student, I often had to make a tankful of petrol go as far as possible.  The Leaf uses many of the same principals.  And Waitrose is always a backstop if you need it.

I have also worked out how to turn off the daylight running lights.  That saves an extra 0.25kW, if I ever need it.

Oh, and I should charge on Thursdays.

Of course: how much are you saving?
Not how is it to drive, what’s it like on a long journey or how comfortable is it in traffic.

Actually, that’s not quite true, there is one other question that pops up from time to time.  The whole quietness of the experience is a major concern for a few.  I have to say I keep to the old adage taught from Road Craft and my advanced motorcycle observers: what is happening, what can happen, what can possibly happen?  You have to pay attention, but then in any modern motor car, that is the case and there is a horn if we need it and the sharpest brakes we have ever experienced.

So back to the major one: and how can we judge unless we compare the running costs.

This has not been a usual year, I spent some time not commuting due to the sinusitis, the operation and my recovery.  So our miles have been down, Jon did spend some time not travelling as much as usual.

Hot off the press, we have done 2,384 miles with 565.7 kW/h of electricity.  Given that 1 kW/h costs approx. 16p, that gives a total of just under £91 for six months worth of driving.  As I said it’s been a light year so far.

Each mile costs approx 4p or each pound buys 26-27 miles of driving.  However, 50% of the charging has been done on public charging points, so as an estimate, we’ve spent £45 on charging the car at home.  In total, that’s £7.50 a month for electricity at home and “£7.50” for charging elsewhere (although currently that’s all been for free).

This is not being particularly careful either.  We keep up with the traffic, even on dual carriage ways (27-30mph in 30mph limits, 37-40mph in 40mph and 57-50mph in 50mph limits.  Typically for the journeys we do, we keep up with the traffic and over take the lorries etc. on dual carriage ways varying between 57-70mph where the limit allows).

We run the air conditioning in the summer and during the commute, it’s odds on to favourite that the radio is on.  If it rains, dipped headlamps and front (and rear) windscreen wipers are going.

But each 1mph has an effect on the battery, so it’s really rewarding not doing the full 70mph, especially up hill :o.  Going down hill, being light on the throttle means more charging.

Now for some bistro maths…

To get what we’re saving, we are going to take the average consumption the BMW 650i reported (as this was the car we lost for the Leaf).  This is not really fair on the BMW, as the majority of the journeys we do the Leaf were not the journeys the BMW was built to do.  But we have done a couple of long journeys with the Leaf which is equivalent.  Also the BMW is not your average car, but it’s what we had, so these are our figures.

The BMW did 22mpg according to its trip computer.  So that means the journeys we’ve covered in the Leaf would have consumed approx 108 gallons in the Beamer.  To get litres we multiply that by 4.5 (to one decimal point), giving us a total of 486 litres.

Let’s be generous (as petrol prices were not that good back in January) and say a litre costs £1.30.  This gives us a total of £587 saved on petrol.  So per month:

(Please note that this is not the whole picture: we chose to rent the battery, which adds £420 for the six months- if we’d bought out right then that charge wouldn’t impact us.  It also ignores the “free electricity”.)

How are we doing compared to other Leaf drivers?

Nissan rates your driving economy in your region and we are not doing that well (though we’re certainly not the worst). The car with the best results is getting a whopping 12miles per kW/h in the UK. By my estimate that means they are managing around 190 miles per charge per 16kW/h worth of battery. Which impressive.  We get around 80 miles for 16kW/h.

We are not aiming for that.

We have a car that does have the same pull at a set of traffic lights as my husband’s 5 litre, 6 year old BMW had.  It doesn’t have the top speed of that car and lacks a couple of the creature comforts.

We’re running the Leaf for 20% of the costs of that petrol car and there are not that many petrol cars that could have done that given the performance we’re enjoying.  Not including servicing but we think we save a third on that too.

It’s good to own a Leaf.

So the DTron is no more 🙁
I’ve been coping OKish on multiple daily injections of insulin and have (touch wood) finally got a combination which almost works…

Which is why I am looking forward to getting back on a pump. My funding has been cleared (which is a relief) and it should be turning up on the 1st July 😀

I have finally got a Raspberry Pi.  There are many reasons for the delay, not least because we’re not exactly short of computing resource in this house 😉

In fact, since it turned up on Saturday, I’ve been playing with it in my office.  I am reasonably lucky this weekend: my house mates (son and husband) are focused on some game that’s coming out tomorrow and my husband is clearing the gaming decks for it and the kid also has revision.  I am left to my own devices.

Starting out with a Pi

I ordered a Type B Pi (with 512MB RAM and a second USB port) and a 16GB SD card for the OS, in fact it came with the OS images pre-installed.  The Raspberry Pi was created to allow an easy route in to programming, much like the programmers of my generation had when we started, that ’80s vibe.  Hence, the Pi is a cheap computer that doesn’t need a dedicated monitor, it will plug in to the HDMI slot on TV’s or use the composite input from old CRT TV’s (much like a DVD player).

It is powered from a microUsb port, like almost all smart phones these days.  It doesn’t come with the power supply or a keyboard or mouse, but these can be bought from supermarkets these days, so that’s not too difficult.  It has an Ethernet port for network connectivity.  Again, no cable, but in the UK, your internet provider has probably supplied a few cables with the hub for your broadband.

So by 1040, I was up and running.  Well, when I say running…

I was not expecting to have to install the operating system on the specially bought SD card. yet here I was with a choice of 7 operating systems.  For my purposes (I am using the Pi to help some 11-14 year old students learning how to programme) I chose Raspbian, a Pi port of Debian which is a type of linux.  They are using Raspbian on some Pi’s they were given by Google.

This took 35 minutes to build and install and two reboots: in the meantime, I went and bought the Pi a case.  Maplin sell a couple of a £6 and I could pick it up from the local store 30 minutes after paying for it by payPal.  If I’d been prepared to wait, you can pick up a case from Amazon for £4.

I got home, dressed the Pi and booted it for the first time to the Raspbian X windows screen.

The reason for the Pi is to teach, so there are a few sites out there with interesting and accessible projects.

I now have scripts enabling the background library and programme installs to make those projects fly.

Thoughts

I have used Fedora linux for a number of years which has denied me some of the cooler programmes accessible to Debian users and the Pi opens that all up to  me.  From that point of view, I have already had a lot of fun.

And for straight programming it comes with a suite of languages, including Java and Python.

Some of the cooler projects require preparation.  I have now scripted these, including one to build a lamp environment (linux, apache, mysql and php) so I can teach web design and programming.  I have scripted this as otherwise each student would need to enter in 10 lines to install the right programmes and install them.  Given the 30 minute slot once a week, with 8 Pi’s to prep: that would be time consuming and is it what I want to be doing with the high school students.  My thoughts are, for a computer scientist, that is a great introduction, for a high school students it may be difficult and potentially put them off.

But everything seems to run and just work.  For a £40 outlay for the case, the motherboard and the OS, that’s pretty impressive.  You can buy a USB for £7 and a mouse for the same.  That’s cheap and capable computing and if you have problems, there are enough forums to get you over any difficulties: eventually.  Which was really hard to do in the 1980s.

On the subject of the ’80s, of course you can buy a combined case and keyboard making the Pi look a bit like Commodore C64…

Charging our Leaf

To be absolutely honest, we were not seriously looking to buy a car in Nov 2013.  We’d moved into the largest town in our area and found that the journeys I was doing every day were not great for the cars.  I have a 5.4 mile journey to work now and 97% is in a 30mph limit.

In our cars that meant we had a 1.5mile section to get the engine warm before turning it off.  This type of driving is not great for petrol or diesel cars: even with modern cars, this is the hardest driving for the engine that’s possible to do for the average driver.

Logically, then, we were looking at a different vehicle for me.  I’ve never been a fan of hybrids, for me it always seemed a shame that the weight of carrying round an engine, with all that complexity which you are not really able to get the most from: the hybrids are automatic, the electric motor could be used to help acceleration but none of the current vehicles are set-up that way that I’m willing to buy (let’s face it the McLaren P1 and Porche’s 918 Spyder are not within budget).  That’s fine for the average commute, but what about the other types of driving you do?

Electric cars didn’t look any more practical.  The possibilities of the technology were promising but the cars were expensive, range degraded over time and they were odd (at least the ones we were willing to take the risk on…)

So we looked at a Fiat Panda 4×4 from Glyn Hopkin in Ipswich.  Which is also a Nissan garage.  We drove up in a BMW 650i, which is a 361bhp V8 5 litre engine.  We were realistic, we’ve both driven small engined, low powered cars.  But the experience was not great.  Good car, 4×4 drive, etc, but a bit of a culture shock.  Terrific fuel economy but no, what do Renault say, “Vavavoom”.

So, was a Leaf available for a test?  We were expecting no, but there was one and we filled in the test drive forms and took it out.  The Leaf was strange: high torque throughout the driving range, quiet, controllable, reasonable suspension, traditional controls, all round cameras for parking and slow manoeuvring, great satnav, heated seats all round (even the back) and a heated steering wheel.  It had the toys the Panda lacked and the controls were much easier to use than our quirky beamer. Interesting.

We went home and did some homework and thought about it.  Mid-January, I borrowed one for the commute to work.  We have charging points at work, so I had some tests figured out.  What would the commute be like, could I charge it while I worked, would I like it in January?

The first shock after getting back to my house was hitting the first 30mph zone.  I am passionate about 30’s – you have no excuse to break them and you should do everything you can to keep it slow around non-powered road users.  So I am heading up the road, pressing the accelerator as normal and thinking, what am I doing?  It wasn’t 30!  Quick release of the accelerator and I am back to where I should be (thankfully no-one was behind me).  Reasonable engine breaking but then I was in high powered mode.

OK, let’s just get to work. I had borrowed a charging card to allow me to plug it in to charge during the day. Not trivial and being January, it was cold and wet out but I got the plug connected at both the car and the charging end and headed off to do a day’s work. Because I was borrowing the car, I couldn’t make use of the communications technology and check on the progress of the charging, but when I got back at the end of the day, it was fully charged.

I took it home and Jon, my husband, tried it and it looked like a reasonable solution.  So we bought one: actually a Leaf Techna with a 3KW charging harness and a boot liner (seriously, most of the toys where completely standard).  We were exceptionally lucky we my husband’s trade in – if it had been registered 23 days later, it’s VED per annum would have been £480 instead of £220 which meant it was worth more in trade-in.

Our Leaf on the day we bought it.

Seven weeks on…

Writing a review after a few miles didn’t seem to offer much benefit, so this is our review having achieved 660 miles between us, charging it in town, charging it round relatives and general use.  My husband also used it to get me to my sinusitis operation mid-February, so it has been used as a family car.

Driving

Mostly we drive in the regenerative braking mode (B-eco) which allows the engine to charge while the driver is not pressing the accelerator pedal.  The weirdest thing when driving is not necessarily the fact you take your foot off the accelerator it stops, but that it doesn’t change gear.  At all.  Which means while the 0-60mph is not impressive, you catch ICE (internal combustion engine) cars off junctions and round-abouts really quickly: they all have a pause while either the driver or the automated gear-box changes gear (obviously there are drivers out there who can do this quicker than the electric car can accelerate, but they are few and far between).

The second thing is how quickly the car is able to go: there is no turning over the engine.  You press “On”, you put the driving mode selector in the direction and mode you want to use and go.  Actually, it has a number of “bongs” it will happily chime if the parking brake is still engined or the driver and/or passengers are not wearing their seatbelts but these are the only noises apart from the radio.  The first few journeys were a bit stilted for that as both of us waited for the car to say it was ready.  You get over that pretty quickly.

The direction mode (for want of a better word as the car has no gears) switch is laid out like a slightly unusual gear automatic stick: you press the centre button to put it in park and move it to the right to choose reverse (right and up) or forward is down, in either drive (mode D) or regenerative drive (mode B).  I get why, this is the convention used for automatics, but it seems very strange that forward isn’t forward and backward isn’t reverse.  My instinct here is that the Leaf doesn’t really feel like a normal car, the dash is more like a computer simulation and few programmer’s would make a joy stick pull backwards to move forward.  Thankfully, you get the hang of it in the first five seconds of driving.

It then has accelerator pedal for the right foot and brake pedals both operated by the left foot.  The brakes can feel very sharp and need only gentle pressure although it does an emergency stop amazingly well.

The parking brake follows American convention and is operated by the left foot.  Again, something we are now completely used to though I wish it had an electronic parking brake – it’s obvious that having a purely mechanical device to holding the car in position is necessary, but it seems a missed opportunity.

The steering is really light (after all there no ICE sitting above the front wheels) and for a car which sits four comfortably the steering feels pretty sharp.  At low speeds it has a camera which builds an image of all around the car as well as either the front or back depending on which direction you are heading.  This is great for parking up next to a charger as the connector is sited at the front of the car.

The past 6 months, I have had chronic sinusitis or been recovering from an operation to alleviate or fix the issue and the Leaf is beautifully quiet.  Getting it when we did meant that when Jon drove me home from the hospital, I didn’t get my usual “journey home after general anaesthetic nausea” – the car doesn’t shake while moving (understandable in an ICE powered car as it generates forward motion by exploding an oil based liquid).  Many new cars cut the engine when stationary, but the shudder when the ICE is running is completely absent and that is such a boon.  Since the operation I haven’t done anything more than a 10 minute drive, but it’s been lovely either as passenger or driver.

Comfort

Some weird things are done to save power.  All the passenger seats are electrically heated as this is more effective than warming the cabin air, but this is a great extra for the back seat.  Climate control is standard.  There’s a power efficient in car entertainment system and LED lights both externally and internally.  The steering wheel is heated.  All to save power.  There are front and back fog lamps, and the setting one down from the automatic headlamps setting is off (which is annoying when it is foggy).

The front seats are manually adjusted, but the mirrors do fold, although only when the car is “switched on”.  There’s no sun roof and the parking brake is very manual.  There are cameras instead of parking sensors (again more energy efficient).  The cameras actually give a top down view too which takes a lot getting used to

The seating position is very high but it is comfortable.

Charging it up and range anxiety

I don’t miss getting petrol.  For most of our use, we get to charge it up most journeys: Waitrose has installed many charging points and there’s one at work (just as I have been either away or working from home).

There was a deal for us to get a charging point fitted for free at home (one of the reasons we didn’t upgrade to the higher power public charger) which gives a full charge from zero in less than five hours.  The thing is, it is not like a petrol station, it doesn’t have to be open and I don’t need a reserve to get to it, so for everyday driving, I typically have more than 50miles charge available to me, including 20 minutes at 70mph.

The first weekend we had the car, we took it 46 miles to see my parents.  Getting there only used 55% of the battery, but being winter, we wanted to make sure we could get home so we charged it at my parents using the AC charger.  In two hours (and two short journeys) the car hadn’t got beyond 55% (it takes longer to charge when cold).  It was going to be touch and go, but a frost was likely, so we didn’t want to wait around too long.  We also reasoned that if we could get within 5 miles of home, we could always pick up the diesel and tow the Leaf home.

We were careful heading home.  It was dark, so dipped and main beam headlamps had to be used, but there are 20 miles of 70mph dual carriage on the route and that meant we had to go at least 50mph on these sections.  The radio was off, but hot air was required to keep the windscreen clear (though the back stayed demisted right from the off).  Everyone was over taking us on the A47, but we held our nerve and reached the A140 with 46% of the battery charge remaining.

Within 15miles from home we hit the 50mph limited dual carriage-way linking the A14 and A140.  It’s a bit of a upward slope (more than I’d appreciated) and we hit the 8% and a range of less than it was going to take to get home.  We took the back route, hitting the A14 at Claydon (most of this road was 40 or 30 mph respectively and I was 10% under the limit in each case).  Thankfully, there were no other cars around so nobody was made to over take us, though it did mean on the 4 miles of 60mph we had to use main beam headlamps.

We reached Norwich Road in Ipswich with only 2% of charge left.  At this point, our route home took us past three petrol stations and none with a charging point.  It was also up hill most of the way home.  We all held our breath (which was good for keeping the windscreen clear without the heater going).  Few cars were about and we didn’t have to wait at any of the junctions (green lights all the way down Norwich Road :)).  We got the big 0% as we were 1.5 miles from home.

We made it, with enough residual charge to get the Leaf in the garage.  But it felt pretty fraught.  We think in practice we could have travelled for another 5 miles as the Leaf is very conservative in its estimation of range, but I’m glad we didn’t need to do that.

Ironically, if we had done the journey on any day but a Sunday, there is a fast charging DC point (0-80% full in 30 minutes) in Norwich at the Nissan garage.  Being a Sunday though, everything was shut.

Of course, with the operation and everything, we haven’t done any thing like this and Nissan do actually include 2 weeks free hire of a petrol/diesel to all Leaf owners.  But I’d have no qualms about doing the Home to Norwich journey on a week day, but unfortunately I have gainful employment.  Heading south to London, there are a stunning number of quick charging points, but in East Anglia there are far fewer.  Waitrose is amazing (every Waitrose seems to have a charge point offering  3KW or 7KW points), but there are not Waitrose’s everywhere.  Nissan have promised to offer free charging at all their dealerships: there are three Nissan dealerships in Suffolk, 1 in Norfolk and 1 in Essex and one in Romford/London.

The DC charges are amazing, the nearest one to us is at a Nissan garage in Colchester (the picture at the top shows the car plugged in), as per zap-map, although not all points are created equal.  It hums while charging, 50KW providing approximately 3% a minute charge.  These points provide their own cable which fits in to a different charging point on the front of the car.  Before you attach the cable to the car, you need to specify either the length of time you wish to perform the charge or a limit on the battery.  As a standard charge, the charging point is set to 80% and if the car has 20% left on the battery that happens in 18 minutes.  Looks wise, the fast chargers look much more like traditional petrol pumps.  The first time I used it, I did need to be walked through the connection procedure, but it is pretty straight forward.

In Suffolk, many charging points are attached to offices.  A great example of this is the Suffolk County Council car park.  This is not used by office staff at the weekend yet there is no access to members of the public (is there a business opportunity here?).

We do a lot of our shopping in Waitrose now.  An hour’s shopping time (and coffee) gives us 20% charge.  Cards are needed, the same Source East ones which are the ones I use at work.

Work has a pod-point too, using the Source East card.  Now I am using the charge point often, it normally works though I do find people use the charge points as normal parking.  If I’m at 15% when I turn up to work at 9am, I am back to 80% by midday.  I do this a couple of times a week.

Home charging point

We also charge the car at home with our charging pod installed by British Gas, shown to the left, which has a permanent cable and charges at 16A unlike the normal AC charging cable which charges at 10A.  Either way, a charge from 0%-80% is circa 16 units of electricity, so costs around £2 and takes around 3 hours.

So?

Yes, we like it and we’re happy we have one.  In fact given the power delivery and the economy, I love it.  I don’t know of any diesel or petrol focus sized cars that can give a weeks worth of commuting for less than £2 today.

It’s just different.  I actually find the diesel we also have a bit annoying, having to go somewhere periodically to fill it up.  In the Leaf, the petrol stations on my way home are always busy and I just don’t need to do that with the Leaf.