My experience buying a used low-range EV a year later
A little over a year ago I posed some questions on Tildes about used electrics.
Shortly after that topic, I went put and purchased a 2016 VW E-Golf. I think that my experiences might be useful for anyone that is considering an electric but struggles with range anxiety or just wonders how practical a car with low range would actually be. When looking at used car prices, I was shocked at how cheap a low range electric car was compared to longer range EVs. I picked mine up for $10,500 out the door.
For context, I live on the outside of a small city in the Midwest. It gets cold here. I am also in a two car household, the other being a hybrid. There are two adults and children in the house.
The Golf has a roughly 20 kWh battery. Over the year that I have driven it, I have averaged 4.5 miles per kWh. That sounds like a range of 90 miles, but that doesn't tell the whole story. On cold days when resistive heating has to be run, the mileage drops by around 30%. On a nice mild day, I can get it up to 6 mi/kWh on a trip if I am off of the highway.
I did not need to install any additional charging abilities in my garage. I have the charger plugged into a random 110V outlet in my garage. I was prepared to shell out a bit of money for an electrician if the 110 circuit didn't cut it, but over a year of use I have not actually run into a scenario where I needed to use more than the trickle charge.
I work a hybrid setup. Twice a week I need to drive into the office around 20 miles away. The office does have some electric charging stations on a 220 circuit but I have not felt the need to charge there on any occasion.
The shorter range does mean that some coordination is required between the two adults in the household. If one of us needs to travel out of town for work or something involving the kids, the other has to limit their travel. In practice for our house, this annoyance ends up being more a concern for which vehicle needs car seats than a concern for mileage. Exactly one occasion this year we have had to adjust plans to deal with having a limited range vehicle.
Overall, I really have been thoroughly happy with the low range EV choice as the primary vehicle in a two vehicle household with a backup for longer range trips.
It's good to know that the 110 V was always good enough, but suppose you wanted to being able to charge up faster with a 220 V, so long as you didn't need to pay someone to come into your house and adjust your electrical wiring.
If so, you might like to know about the Quick 220. We've been charging up our Volt with the Quick 220 for three years now and have not had any problems, nor have we needed the services of an electrician to install it. It has worked well for us.
Ha. Whoa. Tell me the idea here is you plug into two distinct 120V circuits, right? And it then does some fu to grab amperage from each circuit and combine it?
I installed my own 60A breaker circuit with a 240V charger on the terminal. It's hardwired so I end up with a max of 48A. That nets out to 11.x kW on my charger.
I was scared, which is the foundation of doing good and safe work. I did a lot of homework and studying. Even asked a few Stack Overflow questions. I enjoyed wiring up my car charger outlet. I am proud of it. I would encourage others to research "as if" they were willing to try doing it themselves and determine if they're willing to go for it. If one decides they're not willing, the end result of the homework is you'll sound more informed when discussing options with the professionals you ask to bid out the work.
From the website, the device requires
So I think that your intuition is right.
Isn't that just a house wired for 220v then? The seems like a huge potential fire hazard. What happens if 1 circuit breaks but the other doesn't?
This is ultimately how all 220v appliances in your house work. Residential electrical service in the US typically provides 2x 110v inverted-phase lines from the utility. For 220v appliances, they're joining them at the panel. For this application, the device is doing the same thing for you. I would have to imagine that the device would be able to safely shut down if it loses one of the phases.
I don’t know a whole lot about the US/Canadian grid other than its default is 110/120V (I’m Australian so I’m used to 240V default) but from the limited perspective I have, it seems unlikely that a residential property already has two different phases, and seems needlessly dangerous to require two non-GFI outlets/circuits.
I understand that pulling across the phases is exactly how it gets 220V, and maybe it’s more common to have two different phases and to not have GFI circuits anyway, but it feels like a lot of compromises to get this idea to work.
I don’t want to just be left up here on my high horse of ignorance, so if anyone wants to weigh in and help me understand or tell me why I’m wrong, please do!
From my limited knowledge (as I'm European) North American power grid seems to be based on two phases that are shifted 180 degrees from each other making them exactly opposite (in Europe we use three phases shifted 120 degrees apart). This effectively doubles the voltage if you connect across the phases and is how they make voltage needed for high power appliances (like lathe, mill etc.). From my understanding two phases are (fairly) standard everywhere there meaning you ca expect each house to have two phase system.
It would require non-GFCI circuits because the power doesn't return over neutral wire and that would trip this kind of protection. Maybe there is some kind of GFCI for such two phase system that could be used between such solution and your power tool/car charger? That I don't know.
Yeah that matches my understanding of Australia’s power grid — three phases separated by 120° and 240V per phase. I know for high power industrial stuff (eg commercial kitchens with those ridiculously fast dish washer cabinets) that some devices need to be connected to two or all three phases, but I assumed most residential would only have one phase to the house. That assumption might be wrong though.
North American here to confirm residential homes have two phase coming in from the grid, but then for most of the circuits in the house it's split with a hot wire (one of the phases) and a neutral. The exception is a few circuits are usually kept at two phase for high power electronics like electric dryers (heat pump dryers are a rarity still), electric resistance water heaters, central air AC/heat pumps, and maybe one or two 220V outlets in a garage for high power tools (like u/Pavouk106 mentioned).
It's not that uncommon two have outlets on both phases in the same room on different walls so this product isn't outrageous in that regard. However, having to run longer cables if the one of those outlets is 10-20ft from the other would be my biggest safety concern. It does seem like a really cost effective way to get 220V power if you need it even if it's a bit hacky. Fundamentally it's no different than what you do to give yourself a 220V outlet as it can be done at the panel by combining two neighboring breakers together onto one circuit. Still, I'm a bit surprised if these are actually legal to use in the US in most states. Seems like the kind of things many utilities would lobby against due to safety concerns.
I believe a 220v circuit breaker should take up two slots and they need to be joined together like this example product. I believe if you combine from two circuit breakers and one of them trips but the other doesn't is a potential fire hazard. Maybe this magic box they sell has some sort of protection against that?
From an electrical standpoint the box could have a protection. From getting-money-out-of-it standpoint I wouldn't be surprised to find just wires going from input to output. So having joined breakers for this would be definitely better.
I don’t know what it actually looks like inside the actual distribution box, but I do know a number of manufacturers make a “mini version of those breakers that take up just one slot, so I know that the width of them doesn’t necessarily matter.
In any case it wouldn’t be hard to make a functionally equivalent breaker into the device in question.
The mini duplex breakers are a single phase 120v breakers for two different circuits. You'd use them if you need the space. The way the breaker panel is designed, you're only getting a single phase per standard breaker slot. And the phase you get alternates, so any two adjacent breakers are on different phases. And any 240v circuit would have a double pole breaker. As another poster above said, you have to cut both phases of a 240v circuit at once, so using two single pole breakers for 240v would be bad mojo.
I'm a bit scared of that device and curious how it works.
I don’t see any problem as per safety, but I do think that it’s a needlessly hacky approach that will only work in very specific situations. If you have two phases in your garage, it would probably be 240v already. The part where it gets dangerous is when the power goes through a very long cable, which means more resistance and more heat. Heat means fire risk.
For what it's worth, the power feeding the Quick220 from two cables don't overheat and the cables going out to the car are rated for the current. Also, I don't have a garage or driveway. The cable runs to charge the car at the curb. Anyway, the Quick220 is ETL Certified and it does auto shutoff if either of the circuits loses power (old houses don't have great wiring). I've used it at work and home without incident. It is hacky, but it's... on-brand for me.
I am a bit late to this thread, but here is a fantastic video that explains the entire thing.
Basically US houses aren’t wired for 120v, they are wired with center tapped 240v. So from the utility, they have 3 wires, not 2. One is neutral, one is positive 120v, one is negative 120v (it’s AC, so it isn’t really negative, but thinking of it as negative works). Most circuits are one of the 120v wires as love, and the center tap as neutral, giving 120v circuit voltage. But you can easily wire a device between +120v and -120v, giving an effective voltage of 240v. It’s actually quite a well designed system. Adding a 240v circuit (common for clothing dryers, stoves, ranges, or car charging) is as simple as using a breaker that uses 2 slots in the breaker panel. The item linked uses that fact to build a 240v circuit out of 2 separate circuits, just like what happens at the panel.
A house I lived in for a bit had a NEMA 6-20 installed in a room next to the garage, for what I assume was a tanning bed. It's a 240 20A line and can commonly use many pre-existing wires in a house as long as its the only plug on the circuit. I went from getting 1 kW to 4 kW (~4 miles an hour to ~16 miles an hour), a pretty significant difference, and was almost always enough charge.
It's not an uncommon recommendation and can be pretty affordable!
I got a 2022 EV6 and it’s the best car I’ve ever had. It also had the craziest depreciation I’ve ever seen. It was like 55k off the lot. You can get them for 22k now. A bonkers deal. There is zero maintenance on this car until 40k miles. 0-60 in 4 seconds. 280 range. 22k. :(
But great for people hunting for a deal!
There's been a lot of downward pressure on used EV sales to qualify for the 4k rebate, pushing them down to around 25K. It's a crazy time to buy a used EV, so many great deals.
This is a stupid question, but what sites are you finding cars at those prices?
First kagi hit for used ev6 https://www.carfax.com/vehicle/KNDC34LAXN5072995?no_ul=1
Bonkers
That is crazy! Thanks for sending, I actually just reached out to them.
And they’re only going to get cheaper as newer models with NACS, better battery tech, etc hit the market, not to mention all the cheap leases ending in the next 18-36 months spilling in.
Thank you for posting this - I am happy to hear you are enjoying it. If you had a do-over, would you choose the same model? What other cars did you consider?
I would choose this one again in a heartbeat. The value would be hard to beat. For a ICE Camry in the same price range, I would need to go back to around a 2012 model.
I considered some of the Nissans from the same year (give or take) but I really liked that this was not just an electric car, but the Golf was an offering from VW that they just threw a different motor into.
Most other models besides the Leaf were trying to get longer range. I wasn't going to put down twice the money for more range when the short range covered better than 90% of my trips.
Something about this post made me realize that I had range anxiety when I bought my small ice. My previous car had been a hybrid and i would get half again as many miles out of a tank of gas.
A used VW e-Golf was on my list of considerations when I was looking into getting an EV a few months ago. Aside from its short range, by all indications it’s one of the nicest cheap EVs one can get with a very good interior, smooth ride, great handling, etc. That it’s a “normal” car that just happens to be electric and works with all ICE Golf accessories is nice too.
In the end though, I was scared off by some stories I’d seen with repair troubles. Seems like e-Golf’s fall into one of two buckets: no problems at all or a constant stream of problems, and I didn’t want to risk ending up with one of the latter.
I ended up leasing instead, which is a bit more expensive than the Golf would’ve been in the long run (total for 18mo lease is around $7k), but I worry less about maintenance, have a much longer range, and have AWD.
I also qualified for lease incentives where I don’t for buying (used or new). I might’ve been pushed over the line for buying used if I could’ve taken advantage of the incentives for doing so.
Out of curiosity, do you mean something like a dealer incentive, or the federal tax credit for EVs?
Federal/state tax incentives, but it’s also not unusual for manufacturers and sometimes dealers to run their own lease-specific incentives, often filling in for federal/state incentives for cars that don’t qualify (e.g. not manufactured in the US).
Forgot that states might have incentives too. Mine doesn't, but in researching that I found out my electric company does so I'll look into that. Thanks for the info.
Might be a dumb question, but would it be viable (and relatively simple) to charge an EV outside of the garage every night? (Like the driveway next to the garage, I mean)
I've never had an EV before, and your mention of trickle charging it from a 110v outlet made me think. For some reason I had the impression that I would need a 220v outlet, which I would have to install regardless since I don't have one in the garage. But I have multiple 110v outlets in the garage and outside of the house that I could use. I just use my garage often for other projects and would prefer to not have to store a vehicle in there most of the time.
I don't park in my garage.
I have a 120V outlet inside the garage, and run the charging cable under the garage door to my car. The length of the charging cable limits how far away from my garage door I can park, but otherwise, I have had no problems in the 5 years and two houses I've lived in while I've owned my EV.
If you need to use an extension cord (as I did at my old property), use a high gauge (at least 12 gauge) extension cord.
If you're actually getting a charger installed, it can be installed outside. I sure I will do that someday, but I really haven't had the need for faster charging speeds.
That's helpful, thanks!
I trickle charge my car with 110. It works fine, it’s just slow. Takes something like 35 hours to get from around 30% to 100%. I might get a 220 EVSE installed but with my driving habits as of now it’s not strictly necessary.
I do it in my garage, but during waking hours on the tiny chance that something goes wrong so I can respond. Don’t see a problem with charging it outside overnight as long as the charger getting stolen for its copper isn’t a worry.
Wow, thanks for the insight about charging times. What's the capacity of the battery?
Spec sheet says 91 kWh.
Gotcha, that's quite a big larger than the eGolfs I browsed (thanks to this post). So if their batteries are around 20-30 kWh then overnight charging sounds like it would be plenty.
Yeah, the 110 is practical specifically because it's a low range.
Makes sense. Thanks for making this post, really opened my eyes to a lot of things relating to EV charging. Good to hear a regular person's opinion and experience rather than some seo-filled article online.
(Side note but this is the thing I miss most about Reddit. It's pretty much the only thing that I use it for nowadays. Searching online for reviews and opinions from actual human beings seems damn near impossible nowadays unless I add inurl:reddit to the end of every search, unless it's a somewhat niche topic with a niche forum to go along with it.)
I do that. I have a 240V/50A circuit in my garage that my EV charger is plugged into, and I just run the cable from it under the garage door to the outside. It is rated for use outdoors. The charger I have came with like 20ft of very heavy gauge cable to the J1772 plug. I don't see why the same thing wouldn't work for 120V/15-20A.
Makes sense, thanks.
I’ve traded in my e-golf after 6 years for a BMW iX.
I’ve always been happy with the golf. It had enough range to get to work (~100km highway) on any day, and have enough left to get to an emergency quick charger if charing at work was not possible. I got 160km on avg with my driving style.
It was the goto car in our household for everything besides long trips or big groceries. We also have a vw Tiguan.
We’ve considered trading in the Tiguan over the egolf, but the Tiguan is more practical for my partner. It seems to hold value better as well.
The iX I have now is a bit overkill, but the kids are old enough to start doing road trips. We did a 5k road trip through Italy and Germany last month with it and it was a pleasure.
How long does the battery on an EV last, what "stats" do I need from the sale ad to tell? Do batteries get replaced or do the cars just get tossed at that price?
I want one too now
Unfortunately I can't help on that front, but there are relevant responses in the thread that I linked that you might find valuable. I took a gamble on mine that the battery was not shot.
It varies depending on the battery chemistry, the climate it is kept in, and the drivers’s charging and driving habits. Even then, the problem is less battery failure than it is battery degredation.