MattT
Member
Hi
I picked up a 2010 i-MiEV about a month ago. I recently moved offices - my old one was about 5.5km from home, while the new one is about 16km away. Not a huge difference in distance but it meant switching from my wife going five minutes out of her way to drop me off when doing the school run to an hour bus trip each way including a fifteen minute walk - not great in a rainy Canberra winter. We've been a one car family forever and I wasn't looking forward to shopping for and then funding / maintaining another petrol tank with seats, only one of which would actually get used most days.
Fortunately a new colleague had just upgraded to a Tesla S70 and was keen to offload his old daily drive. He was the second owner, having purchased it from a dealer in the Hunter Valley in 2014. At that stage it had done about 20,000 km, and he got a pretty good price (for Australia, anyway) of $16,400. By the time I bought it the odometer was up to about 53,000km, and I got it for $14k. Probably more than I wanted to spend, and slightly above the top end of dealer prices, but I knew the seller and was willing to pay extra if it meant not spending my weekends wandering car yards (not that there are any i-Mievs for sale here anyway). It also had new tyres, a full service history, all the recall work done, an extra key fob, an extra 15A Mennekes charge cable, and a 15A to 10A converter so I can charge it in my garage.
I've ordered a cheap ODB-II connector for use with EvBatMon, and it should be here in a couple of weeks. From the paperwork the cells were last checked by the dealer on 1 August 2016. At that time the cells were all reporting 4.010 volts, except five which reported 4.005 volts. Capacity was 35.8 amp hours. These voltage numbers were down on a February 2015 test showing the cells at 4.055v and 'actual capacity' at 86%, which I guess would've been about 38.7 Ah. EvBatMon should tell me more.
I'm not too worried about battery capacity, though. Almost all of the driving is between home and work which is a round trip of about 32km, most of it highway driving at 80km/h or 100km/h. The car does this comfortably in this colder weather and even hauling my substantial frame (I reckon I'm easily two or possibly three Japanese passengers). The predicted range when I turn it on in the morning after charging over 240V at 10A overnight is about 90km; I think I'm getting 80km in practice. This is more than enough for a round trip to work and some afternoon / weekend running around to the shops. The longest trip I've done so far was about 66km, most of it on the highway at 80-100km/h, with another passenger, about 10km of that up hill, and I still had 16 km to spare. The former owner says the range goes up in summer (current temps range from -2oC / 28oF to 18oC / 64oF).
I just leave it in B mode - I enjoy the one foot golf cart style driving. It's a very zippy car, has plenty of internal space (my wife and two kids fit in comfortably for neighbourhood errands), and the stereo is pretty good (it's the Eclipse with the tilting screen, sat nav, USB / Bluetooth / MMC / DVD etc). Handling is improved by being generous with the type pressure and having slightly different sized front and back tyres. I plugged in a device to measure energy used during charging and worked out a round trip to the office sets me back about 89c in electricity, which compares very favourably to $3.30 worth of petrol in our current car (it gets about 8L/100km). We have a 100% green energy offset too so it's all CO2 free. (Doesn't stop my supposedly green local government charging me the same registration as somebody driving a diesel truck, though :roll: )
I wouldn't mind getting a cheap manual timer to keep charge levels between 30 and 80 per cent to get the most out of the battery. I suspect the former owner always charged it to 100 per cent overnight, and I've been doing the same from about 50% at the end of the day, though it spends Fri / Sat / Sun on a single charge. Shouldn't be too hard to guesstimate an 'hours per bar' set up that sees me driving out with 12-14 bars in the morning and getting home with four to six. I haven't had to use public chargers yet, but if I do I'm lucky enough to have a CHAdeMO 15 minute rapid charger about 5km from home, another at the airport and a third in the city, plus a growing network of regular chargers (these latter chargers are often parked in by ICE vehicles, though the one a few hundred metres from the office is usually free). There's more info about Canberra's EV charging network here.
Anyway, just wanted to say hi. I'm sure I'll be in touch if evBatMon says anything out of the ordinary.
Cheers
Matt
I picked up a 2010 i-MiEV about a month ago. I recently moved offices - my old one was about 5.5km from home, while the new one is about 16km away. Not a huge difference in distance but it meant switching from my wife going five minutes out of her way to drop me off when doing the school run to an hour bus trip each way including a fifteen minute walk - not great in a rainy Canberra winter. We've been a one car family forever and I wasn't looking forward to shopping for and then funding / maintaining another petrol tank with seats, only one of which would actually get used most days.
Fortunately a new colleague had just upgraded to a Tesla S70 and was keen to offload his old daily drive. He was the second owner, having purchased it from a dealer in the Hunter Valley in 2014. At that stage it had done about 20,000 km, and he got a pretty good price (for Australia, anyway) of $16,400. By the time I bought it the odometer was up to about 53,000km, and I got it for $14k. Probably more than I wanted to spend, and slightly above the top end of dealer prices, but I knew the seller and was willing to pay extra if it meant not spending my weekends wandering car yards (not that there are any i-Mievs for sale here anyway). It also had new tyres, a full service history, all the recall work done, an extra key fob, an extra 15A Mennekes charge cable, and a 15A to 10A converter so I can charge it in my garage.
I've ordered a cheap ODB-II connector for use with EvBatMon, and it should be here in a couple of weeks. From the paperwork the cells were last checked by the dealer on 1 August 2016. At that time the cells were all reporting 4.010 volts, except five which reported 4.005 volts. Capacity was 35.8 amp hours. These voltage numbers were down on a February 2015 test showing the cells at 4.055v and 'actual capacity' at 86%, which I guess would've been about 38.7 Ah. EvBatMon should tell me more.
I'm not too worried about battery capacity, though. Almost all of the driving is between home and work which is a round trip of about 32km, most of it highway driving at 80km/h or 100km/h. The car does this comfortably in this colder weather and even hauling my substantial frame (I reckon I'm easily two or possibly three Japanese passengers). The predicted range when I turn it on in the morning after charging over 240V at 10A overnight is about 90km; I think I'm getting 80km in practice. This is more than enough for a round trip to work and some afternoon / weekend running around to the shops. The longest trip I've done so far was about 66km, most of it on the highway at 80-100km/h, with another passenger, about 10km of that up hill, and I still had 16 km to spare. The former owner says the range goes up in summer (current temps range from -2oC / 28oF to 18oC / 64oF).
I just leave it in B mode - I enjoy the one foot golf cart style driving. It's a very zippy car, has plenty of internal space (my wife and two kids fit in comfortably for neighbourhood errands), and the stereo is pretty good (it's the Eclipse with the tilting screen, sat nav, USB / Bluetooth / MMC / DVD etc). Handling is improved by being generous with the type pressure and having slightly different sized front and back tyres. I plugged in a device to measure energy used during charging and worked out a round trip to the office sets me back about 89c in electricity, which compares very favourably to $3.30 worth of petrol in our current car (it gets about 8L/100km). We have a 100% green energy offset too so it's all CO2 free. (Doesn't stop my supposedly green local government charging me the same registration as somebody driving a diesel truck, though :roll: )
I wouldn't mind getting a cheap manual timer to keep charge levels between 30 and 80 per cent to get the most out of the battery. I suspect the former owner always charged it to 100 per cent overnight, and I've been doing the same from about 50% at the end of the day, though it spends Fri / Sat / Sun on a single charge. Shouldn't be too hard to guesstimate an 'hours per bar' set up that sees me driving out with 12-14 bars in the morning and getting home with four to six. I haven't had to use public chargers yet, but if I do I'm lucky enough to have a CHAdeMO 15 minute rapid charger about 5km from home, another at the airport and a third in the city, plus a growing network of regular chargers (these latter chargers are often parked in by ICE vehicles, though the one a few hundred metres from the office is usually free). There's more info about Canberra's EV charging network here.
Anyway, just wanted to say hi. I'm sure I'll be in touch if evBatMon says anything out of the ordinary.
Cheers
Matt