txe4

Payment from WBAC has cleared. "You transferred your car to a motor trader" email from DVLA has come. Charging cable has sold. Huge palaver changing the insurance over - new car not registered, not in system; in the end it got done, and they decided that the premium would be increased by seventy pence(!) which they wrote off on the spot. The phone call must have cost them more than all the profit on a £200 policy.

Got £2030 net at WBAC, and kept the type1 cable (another £50 at ebay). Pretty pleased with that for such a shabby car.

Switch off, remove key, open door, close door, wait a moment, restart.

IDK, I've had two offers of £750 within a few minutes of listing. WBAC is north of £2k, with the cosmetic stuff declared...and they'd probably not notice the cables missing, which is another ebay £200 or so... but no doubt they will cut their offer in half when they actually see it, and if I turn them down then I have to limp the thing down to them and back home again. It cut out on the Mrs while turning right across an A-road with the kids in the back, which is why it's leaving the household. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/225000591235 got almost 3 grand for a broken one quite recently, dahn sarf https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/275282095818 got £1300 for one that was actually working, just had been pointlessly dumped and left to rot (grrr what a tit), but in the wilds of Scotland. My gut says £1500 is about right. Chance of £2k if people get carried away, chance of £900 if I'm unlucky. I think if WBAC comes out at £1300 or more than I'll take it, to not have to deal with dickheads, not upset the neighbours with loads of shit cars outside, and to have a nice simple "insurance ends on car 1, insurance starts on car 2" arrangement. I'll feel not-too-bad about it if I get back the £1150 I just pissed up the wall on repairs plus a bit. I'll do a Smart ForFour EQ thread in modernz once I've had it a bit. I think it's as near to a Miev as you can get new: rare, 4 seats, RWD, shit range, rear seats fold flat and you can get a fridge in even though it's tiny.

Bit of a fiasco. I had the board fixed (£1150) and then something else broke. Expensive. I've bought a Smart ForFour EV and the faithful old iMiev is here: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/334493389361 We've never had another car we enjoyed as much as the iMiev and I'm not sure we'll ever have anything as delightfully simple, honest, and efficient again. No tears - it's just a machine - but sad day.

It's broken Either the on-board charger, the DC-DC converter, or both. Fault codes for both. Drives but won't charge. This was always the risk - it's probably too tired to be worth paying to have it trailered to someone who can fix it, paying to fix it, then getting it back again. Ah well, it's been a great and faithful car for several years. Bit stuck now.

I want to move children and bring back carfuls of shit from Lidl. Not ruled out. Sadly, not available brand new, which means actually paying tax on the money used to buy it. If I hate everything else, the logic kinda suggests this doesn't it...

Hmmm, maybe. How shit are they?

Insufficient doors.

The Turkish half of Cyprus is FULL of 70s and 80s Renaults. And look at this thing of beauty: Quite a bit of not-for-sale-in-first-world-markets Chinese stuff too, like this:

Yeah thought about it, but I read a lot of forums & EV-owner Facebook groups are there are too many "some component failed and it FTP'd and cost 3 grand to fix" stories. Contrast, say, LEAF or MG EV groups which are pretty serene on the reliability of the vehicles and are all about range and charging-point rage, because nothing major really goes wrong with them. Also, as you said, clown-car doors, and insurance cost is a bit more hefty, and I'm of an age that can't ever break the mental association between "BMW driver" and "dickhead", even if it's all about the 4 rings of success (kek) now for those people.

Ugh, so...I wrote down all the non-enormous 4/5-door EVs on a piece of paper and looked at the measurements E-up/Mii/Citigo, Soul, Honda E, etc (the Stellantis things - Corsa, Peugeot, are crap EV systems shoehorned into petrol designs and neither economical nor reliable) The EUp was the only one that looked any good on paper but I went to the stealership and came away thinking "naaaah". It's bigger than the imiev but has less space inside. It takes months and months to get one and the dealers were knobs. Particularly, the imiev with seats down has a completely flat loadbed that will take a washing machine, or one of those massive rubble sacks builders merchants use, full of garden waste, and let you close the boot. The EUp - no doubt constrained by newer laws about crash safety etc - has a tiny postage-stamp-sized hole in comparison. The kids are getting a *bit* big for the imiev, but the EUp doesn't actually have any more space - and its longer range means you could, otherwise, actually do real journeys in it - except that in 2 more years time the kids' legs aren't going to fit in that space for a whole hour. All the others are wider than the imiev, and a big part of the joy of it, is the ability to accelerate towards small gaps on country roads, when almost anything else other than a motorcycle would have to stop and reverse.

Update. It's still shite. It still works. It hasn't FTP'd again. It is getting quite tired now. The battery is degrading, and I'm not sure if it will still do what we need ("go into town and back with the heater on") next winter. Rapid charging is no longer rapid - it tops out at about 7kW, so ~an hour for a "rapid" charge. In places where it's scraped and dinged, the rot is setting in. Some plastic trim parts have fallen off and now decorate the verges of Yorkshire, wherever they fell. The alloys are awful, look awful, and don't retain air - every few months the tyre place has a go at remove + clean + seal + replace, but shortly afterwards one tyre or another will be going flat. The aircon compressor is dying - it sounds like a diesel engine all on its own. The cack-brown-and-hard-plastics interior remains as AWESOME as ever. I've gone so far as to look around at other small EVs available to buy new, but they're all shit (not shite) compared to it - much wider, and yet less useful for carting stuff about because of stupidly-shaped boots/hatches. And £25/30/35k. Got some financial stuff going on which means a bought-new EV would be preferable, but I just don't want a wider car. With the price of petrol up 20% and the price of power up 300%, I'm not sure the finances *really* make sense - but both wife and I greatly prefer EV for local journeys.