The Great Electric Car Test Drive – Final Thoughts

I think that all of the cars we tested felt pretty much like ordinary cars. That’s a big change from the G-Wizs that we had at work less than 10 years ago, they only had about a 25 mile range, a top speed on the flat of about 40mph and really on fitted two people. All of these cars fitted four or five people, could keep up with motorway traffic without difficulty and had a range of at least 85 miles. One thing I did find with all of them that made them feel a little different is that the floors were noticeably higher than in most combustion engine cars. I presume that’s because the batteries have to go under there.

I’ve read a lot of horror stories about dealers being very ignorant about EVs and even trying to push people away from buying them. We definitely had the complete reverse at both Griffin Mill and Wessex Garages with there being multiple EVs at the dealership, staff who seemed reasonably knowledgeable and interested in selling EVs. But I guess both of these are dealerships that have chosen to embrace EVs. Volkswagen in Hereford seemed to have less idea about EVs and only happened to have the one e-up by chance, but they still didn’t to anything to actively dissuade us from buying an EV. It was also encouraging to hear other customers at both Griffin Mill and Wessex Garages enquiring about EVs.

Of all the cars I think the Leaf is probably the most realistic for us, the extra bit of range in the 2017 model would definitely be useful but the price difference is several thousand £s right now. The 2018 model Leaf with an even bigger 40 kW battery is definitely of interest but I think it will be a while before we can afford one. There are rumours of an even bigger battery Leaf with a 200+ mile range, although I do wonder if the price might be a lot more. The Nissan dealer offered us the chance to take the 2018 Leaf on a 4 day test drive, something we’ll definitely be taking them up on. It will give us the chance to see what the charging experience is like and to drive on the more familiar roads of mid Wales.

I still feel like the Leaf is a bit small for our needs, I do wonder if we could have got everything for camping this weekend into it. The Zoe or Soul would have been even harder and the e-up impossible. The 2018 Leaf has a bit bigger boot and it is also possible to put a roof rack and box on any of the Leafs.

On our way back from Hereford we reached Rhayader (about 35 miles from Aberystwyth) only to find that the A44 between Llangurig and Aberystwyth was blocked due to an accident. The official diversion was via Caersws on the A470, adding an extra 30 miles to the journey.

If we’d have been trying to do that journey in an EV, it would have been difficult. Hereford to Aberystwyth is 80 miles and currently there are no rapid chargers along the route. We ended up taking the Rhayader mountain road instead of the detour, its actually a slightly shorter route but its narrow (and mostly single track), windy and I wouldn’t want to drive it in bad weather or even at night. Saying that this journey was by far the busiest i’d ever seen it and that probably made it more dangerous than it would be in bad weather or at night.

This kind of put into perspective how driving an EV in mid Wales could be very challenging while they have a range of about 100 miles at best and there’s no rapid chargers beyond the motorways. Hopefully both of those things will change in the next few years. Given the current situation i’d probably stick to travelling down the coast to get to South Wales, its a bit further but there are a few “fast” 7 kW chargers between Aberystwyth and Carmarthen and a rapid charger at Pont Abrahams services at the start of the M4, which is only about 60 miles from Aberystwyth.

VW e-up! Test Drive

The final EV test drive of the weekend was a Volkswagen e-up! located at Vertu Volkswagen in Hereford. I’d really struggled to find any VW Dealers with electric vehicles and had really been looking for an e-Golf. But this was all I could find and I thought it might give some idea of what an e-Golf would be like.

First impressions were perhaps unsurprisingly that it was very small. It failed to even fit the pushchair in the very tiny boot. The back seats were crammed and is definitely not a family car.

This one was an old 2013 model and felt quite basic, I think newer models might be a bit more advanced. The car was started by turning the key in the ignition, none of the others had been like that, they’d all had some kind of key detection system. The dashboard was very basic with old school analogue dials. What felt like the gear lever from an automatic selected between reverse, park and drive modes. There was no satnav and a very basic stereo.

The dealer hadn’t charged the car and it only had an estimated range of about 15 miles which rather limited the test drive. We still managed to get a bit of urban driving and open country road in though and got back without a restricted power mode kicking in, but only just. Driving was ok, but it felt like the suspension wasn’t doing much to cushion any bumps we went over, but there were four of us in the car. The wind screen had build in heating elements, but sometimes these caused a distortion to the view through the window which was kind of annoying.

This dealership clearly wasn’t as used to handling EVs as the others had been although the salesman had some experience with hybrids. This was the only EV on their forecourt, so clearly it wasn’t their speciality. I do remember the salesman saying something like “I don’t want to sell you your next car, I want to sell you your next 10 cars”, to which I thought (but didn’t say) “well you better start selling more EVs then, because i’m not buying another combustion engine car”. He also didn’t seem to know that the e-Golf existed and was only aware of the hybrid Golf GTE.

Overall it was definitely the smallest and most basic feeling of the cars, but it was also the oldest. The range was quoted at around 90 miles, which is slightly more than the older Leaf but less than everything else. Although some reviews report real world ranges of nearer 50 which would be worse than the Leaf. Despite being 5 years old the car only had 10,000 miles on the clock but they wanted £10,000 for it. I think I could get a Leaf of similar age/mileage for less, it would be a lot more comfortable, spacious and a nicer drive, albeit with a slightly shorter range. Unless you want a tiny car I can’t really see any good reason to recommend the e-up!. I’m also now wondering how different the e-Golf is or if it will suffer from the same issues and whether there’s actually any of them out there.

2015 Nissan Leaf Test Drive

After driving a 2017 Leaf (that was supposed to be a 2018 Leaf), Zoe and Soul on Saturday, Sunday’s task was to do a 2015 Leaf and a VW e-Up. The Leaf was at Wessex Garage in Newport, same as the Soul from the day before. The initial reaction is that apart from a lower range estimate due to its 24 kWh battery (instead of the 30 kWh in the 2017 model) it was pretty much identical to the 2017. I took it out with a salesman from the dealership but without my wife and child as we didn’t think we’d learn anything new about putting in child seats etc given its similarity to the 2017 model. We covered the same route we’d initially done with the Soul the day before, going out along the steel works road, along the M4 and back down the A48.

Driving along the motorway felt really relaxing, although with only around 85 miles range it wouldn’t be doing any long motorway journeys without a lot of stopping. Overall it felt pretty much identical to the 2017 model, but is considerably cheaper than the newer cars we’d seen and far more realistic for our budget.

Kia Soul EV Test Drive

The next car in the test drive was a Kia Soul EV, this time it was at Wessex Garages in Newport. Of all the cars we were test driving this is the one I knew least about in advance but was still interested enough by what i’d read to give it a go.

The initial impressions were that the car looks a bit weird, its very square and the roof is higher at the front than the back. It doesn’t look like it should have the best aerodynamics but its quite spacious. It kind of looks like somebody crossed a small SUV with a city car. The front of the car felt very roomy but the back is a little crammed.

The boot is very wide but not very long, although it has a nice flat base making it easy to load things unlike the Leaf’s deep drop. The pushchair fitted across the boot without any rotations. I think that the boot capacity is actually smaller than either the Leaf or the Zoe, but when the seat’s are laid down the car’s total capacity is more.

The dashboard and satnav seemed very high tech and I found the displays easy to read, informative and intuitive. Definitely the best of the three cars we’d tried. The satnav had a nice feature showing the range of the car as a big circle on the map so you could see approximately how far you could get on the remaining charge. It also had a built in charger database which although it had a few of the local chargers didn’t seem to be fully up to date. The air conditioning had a dual zone control so that if you’re driving the car alone the hot or cold air is only directed towards one side, reducing the power consumption.

One of the staff from the dealers came with us initially, a bit different to Griffin Mill where we’d just been briefly shown the car and then left to take it. The member of staff drove initially and demonstrated how “nippy” the car could be. He drove for a few miles out on the steelworks road that heads towards the M4. We then took over and drove the rest of the way to the motorway, one junction along the motorway and back down the A48 to the dealers.

Then we dropped off the staff member and took the car on our own the opposite direction on the A48 across the city to see how it handled city traffic.

Like the other cars it felt quite relaxing and easy to drive. The high up seating position was nice and better than the Leaf and definitely the Zoe.

The car was predicting a range of just over 100 miles on a nearly full battery but this will have been based on how it had been previously driven. The member of staff who came with us said they got a choice of cars to use themselves and he liked the Soul, given how he drove it I can imagine that the would impact the range estimates. From what i’ve read online its should be possible to get more like 130 miles driving sensibly.

Overall I really liked the Soul, it was comfortable, pleasant to drive and had a really nice dashboard setup. But its small boot is big detractor and I feel like its just not quite big enough.

Renault Zoe Test Drive

The next car in the list was a new 2018 Renault Zoe with a 40 kWh battery. The test was at the Griffin Mill Renault dealer, literally just next door to the Nissan one. But we’d taken longer than expected with the Leaf and still had the Soul booked in later in the day in Newport. The original plan was to take the Zoe on the same route as we’d taken the Leaf but given the time pressure we opted for a shorter route, this time heading into Cardiff along the A470, along the A48 through Llandaf and then up the A4232, onto the M4 and back along the A470. This gives a mix of urban driving, dual carriageway and motorway.

I knew the Zoe was going to be smaller than the Leaf but I had in my mind it was basically an electric Clio and its quite a bit bigger and in particular taller. We had a little trouble with the ISOFIX seat but got there in the end, its not the first car where we’ve found this to be fiddly. The pushchair fitted in the boot fine but at a slight angle.

It was still smaller and less comfortable than the Leaf. Driving was fine, perhaps a little less acceleration than the Leaf but still more than enough power. A couple of things I did find annoying was that the button to switch to eco mode was down in the middle near the hand brake rather than on the steering wheel or the infotainment buttons. The dashboard was very basic and didn’t really give much information, almost the complete opposite to the Leaf which felt very detailed.

Although it was bigger and generally better than i’d expected from what i’d read, I still don’t feel like its the right car for us. It would be fine for commuting in, but a lot of our driving is longer distance and its really not comfortable or big enough for that. Price wise the cheapest Zoe with a fully owned battery is about £24k, while the new Leaf starts from about £22k, although I think i’d go for the mid range Accenta or N-Connecta trim which cost £24/25k. One thing it did do much better than the Leaf was the satnav, which is a proper TomTom system that feels pretty up to date unlike the Leaf’s rather ancient feeling one. Charging is restricted to AC only, Renault say it will take up to 43 kW but that’s only if you can find a three phase AC charger which can deliver that. Most chargers are going to be 22 kW at best and often just 11 or even 7 kW, so you could be there a couple of hours to fully recharge. Compare this to the Leaf which as 50 kW DC rapid charging. This slower charging isn’t really a great idea for doing long distance trips, although it does have a pretty decent range of about 180 miles.

2017 Nissan Leaf Test Drive

We’d pre-booked a test drive of a 2018 Leaf from Griffin Mill garage in Pontypridd. When we arrived at the dealer’s there had been a mixup and it wasn’t there. There was a 2017 model available instead so we decided to give that a go instead.

There were two key tests every car needed to pass for us with a small child. First it needed to take our car seat which only has ISOFIX mounting points, there’s no option to belt it in. Pretty much any car made in the last few years is supposed to have ISOFIX but apparently Ford’s are designed to only take their own seats and we had a problem with a 2016 Fiat breakdown lorry that didn’t have ISOFIX at all. The second test was that the boot needed to fit our pushchair. I’m glad to say that the 2017 Leaf passed both of these tests. The pushchair had to go in at a slight angle due to there being two box like things that stick out into the side of the boot near the wheels. These are a bit annoying and make handling large square items a bit harder.

We took the car on a mixed drive along the A470 dual carriage way up to Merthyr Tydfil, then up to the side of the valley on the A4060, down the Cwm Bargoed, onto the A469/A468 and back to Pontypridd. The car performed pretty well on all of these roads, acceleration on the dual carriage way was perfectly adequate and comparable to most combustion engine cars i’ve driven. Handling on the windy valley roads was fine.

One big difference I found between the Leaf and a combustion engine car was that the speed limiter would essentially brake the car through the regenerative braking on the motor. This was quite useful going round windy Welsh valley roads but did have the downside that the car would slow itself without putting on a brake light. I tried driving in both the Eco and regular modes and found that acceleration was certainly slower in Eco mode and that the air conditioning was reduced. As it was one of the warmest days of the year (28C I think) it certainly felt more comfortable with the car in its regular mode.

I didn’t note down the exact battery level at the start and end of the journey, but I think we used around 40% of the battery. Note that this was with the air conditioning on full and doing some dual carriage way driving at 70mph and tackling the hill up the A4060 at 50 mph, but also generating a lot coming back down the other side.

The only complaints are the slightly strange shaped boot and the sat-nav felt pretty basic and like it was something from 10+ years ago. The car was pretty comfortable and reasonable to drive. One thing I really liked was the top down view which the car creates by synthesising an image together from all its (5??) cameras. It feels a lot more versatile than a regular reversing camera. I really liked the layout of the dashboard too, its split into two screens with the main one (where most cars have the speedo and rev counter) showing battery level, battery temperature, range, the amount of power being drawn (or regenerated back) and the trip computer/odometer. But then another screen at the top stretched along the top of the dashboard displays the speed, time and temperature. Something about all of this felt very futuristic and sci-fi. The only problem with all of this is that the steering wheel blocked the view of the speedometer sometimes and the steering wheel is only adjustable up and down, not in and out and I found this made it difficult to get it into the right position.

Upon returning to the dealers they suggested we come back another time and drive the 2018 model. They also mentioned the possibility of doing a four day test drive of it, something we’re definitely keen to take them up on. That would give us the chance to experience recharging and see how it copes with driving through mid Wales.

The Great Electric Car Test Drive

I’ve had an interest in electric cars ever since I was about 8 years old. I remember my Dad explaining the concept to me along with the issue of climate change (this was around 1990!) and I realised then that we needed to change how transport was powered. I then remember hearing about the original California Zero-Emission Vehicle standards that would have required 2% of vehicles on sale to be zero emission by 1998. There were some promising cars made in response to these rules like the GM EV-1 and the Toyota RAV4-EV but obviously they never caught on. My excitement turned to disappointment by the early 2000s. Then there was a small glimmer of hope when small cars (technically “powered quadracycles”) like the GWiz started appearing in the mid 2000s. This was followed by bigger hope when “real” electric cars like the Teslas and Nissan Leaf started to appear.

So after years of hoping and watching the technology slowly emerge with several false starts I think we’re finally reaching the point where an electric car is a viable option. Now that they’ve been out a few years second hand prices are even putting them (just) inside my price range. So this weekend we’ve decided to go and camp down in South Wales and test drive all the vaguely affordable electric cars we can. We’ve managed to book test drives of the new 2018 Nissan Leaf, a Renault Zoe, a Kia Soul, an older 2015 Nissan Leaf and a 2013 VW E-Up!. I’ll write up a post on each of them and what we thought of it.

Key criteria are that it needs to have enough range to get from Aberystwyth to at least Carmarthen (about 50 miles) and preferably Newport (about 110 miles). It also needs to be big enough for a family trip with two adults and one small child and must fit a pushchair in the boot.

APRS Receive-only IGate with the Raspberry Pi and a Realtek SDR Dongle.

Last year I finally decided to take a foundation and intermediate level amateur radio course. One of the reasons I got interested in amateur radio was APRS (Automatic Packet Reporting System), a system designed to track the position of radio amateurs, provide two way text messaging and alert messages. APRS is a digital mode that uses AFSK1200 encoding that’s very similar to the old Bell modem protocols used by early 1200 baud dialup modems. APRS is often used by radio amateurs who are out in cars or on foot to report their positions, although it can do a lot more than this. APRS packets can be repeated (or “digipeated” in APRS terminology) by other stations that receive them and one option is for these digipeaters not just to repeat the packet over the air but also over the internet. A system known as APRS-IS (APRS Internet System) captures these packets and makes them available to anyone on the internet. Several websites such as aprs.fi, openaprs and find-u will show you raw packets from APRS-IS. The gateways that bridge APRS to the internet are known as IGates and some just receive packets and relay them to APRS-IS, while others will relay packets claiming to be nearby over the radio as well. In the UK setting up a station to repeat packets from the internet onto the air will probably require a notice of variation (at least for unattended use), which in turn requires a full license that I don’t have (yet). Although there are a few people interested in APRS in the Aberystwyth area we have no local IGates or permanent digipeaters anywhere nearby, as my house is reasonably high up and has views over much of Aberystwyth, a few of the hills and mountains to the east and a bit of the Rheidol valley I thought i’d try and set up a receive only IGate.

I have been looking at various ways to setup an IGate using cheap Realtek RT2832U TV tuner/Software defined radio dongle running on a Raspberry Pi Model A. Although these devices are designed as TV tuners, they also work as software defined radios capable of receiving any signal between 22 and 1700 MHz with a channel width up to 3.2 MHz. There’s a lot more information about these devices on osmocon wiki. The rtl_fm program included with the rtlsdr software from osmocon allows the decoding of FM audio transmissions including both wideband broadcast FM as used by radio stations and narrow band FM used by most walkie talkies and often used by radio amateurs in the VHF and UHF bands. The audio output from this can also be piped to other programs for them to process the audio stream.

I tried a few different programs to decode APRS. The first one was multimon-ng, which is capable of decoding many formats including AFSK1200 that’s used by APRS. I struggled to get multimon-ng to decode anything produced by my hardware TNC, although on a few occasions I managed to get a partial decode of a packet. Next I tried to use Soundmodem combined with an ALSA Loopback device that essentially created a virtual soundcard with the audio from the APRS frequency. However this gave me problems with it either working in the configuration mode but not when actually deployed or even failing all together. I found that when I didn’t select a transmit modulation type (its not like I needed one as I only had a receiver) the whole program would crash. Selecting one made this problem go away, but it still felt like an uphill struggle to get working.

Somebody at work had mentioned a program called Direwolf (https://home.comcast.net/~wb2osz/site/) so I thought i’d give it a try instead and had a lot more success.

To get Direwolf running on the Rapsberry Pi I had to build it from source on the Pi itself (a cross compiler would have probably worked as well). To compile it, I downloaded Direwolf onto my Raspberry Pi, compiled the source by running make to compile the source using the command “make -f Makefile.linux”.  Before it would run successfully Direwolf required some changes to its config file, to set the callsign, APRS-IS passcode and beacon settings. Below is my config file. The MYCALL line sets my callsign, the IGLOGIN sets my login and passcode (its not my real passcode!) to the APRS-IS server and the PBEACON line sets the parameters of the beacon packets which are sent to APRS-IS. The TXDELAY and TXTAIL options are transmit settings which are irrelevant to this receive only setup, but Direwolf didn’t want to start without them. The AGWPORT and KISSPORT settings specify port numbers to allow other devices on my LAN to connect to Direwolf and bring the data into another APRS client such as Xastir.

ARATE 44100
ACHANNELS 1
CHANNEL 0
MYCALL MW6SZE-10
MODEM 1200 1200 2200
TXDELAY 30
TXTAIL 10
AGWPORT 8000
KISSPORT 8001
FIX_BITS 1
IGSERVER euro.aprs2.net
IGLOGIN MW6SZE 123456
PBEACON sendto=IG delay=0:30 every=60:00 symbol=”igate” overlay=R lat=52^24.0N long=004^04.0W power=0 height=0 gain=0 comment=”Receive only iGate”
IGFILTER m/50
IGTXLIMIT 6 10

To start the whole process I had to pipe the audio from rtl_fm to direwolf. For some reason I can’t figure out, Direwolf requires a soundcard to be present on the system and my Raspberry Pi image doesn’t seem to have drivers for the Pi’s actual sound card. However my previous experiments with soundmodem had taught me a bit about the ALSA loopback and simply loading the module (snd_aloop) for this made everything work, i’ve now got this loading on boot by adding the line “snd-aloop” to the config file /etc/modules. To run the whole thing I found I have two different options, the first is to run rtl_fm with its default sample rate of 24 KHz and tell Direwolf to use 24 KHz. The command to achieve this is the following:

rtl_fm -f 144787300 | ./direwolf -n 1 -r 24000 -b 16 -t 0 –

The other option is to have rtl_fm upsample the data to 44 KHz and the command to do this is:

rtl_fm -f 144787300 -s 44100 | ./direwolf -n 1 -r 44100 -b 16 -t 0 –

Note that the APRS frequency is specified as 144.7873 Mhz, despite actually being 144.800, this is due to a small offset that the RTL2832U seems to suffer from. I arrived at 144.7873 through trial and error from listening to the output and using the graphical output of GQRX on my desktop PC. The -n 1 option to direwolf specifies that there is only 1 audio channel, -b 16 specifies that its a 16 bit sample rate and -t 0 turns off Direwolf’s horrible text colouring that I find makes it almost unreadable.

The downside of using a 24 KHz sample rate is that Direwolf has several decoders and the best of these (decoder F) only works with a 44 KHz sample rate. Both configurations seem to work reasonably well, although the in 44 KHz Direwolf uses around 20% of the CPU time and rtl_fm another 20%, in 24 KHz mode Direwolf’s CPU usage drops to less than 10% but rtl_fm remains at around 20%. This is probably mostly due to the different decoders. I haven’t extensively tested the performance difference between the decoders,  both seem to work reasonably well and i’m normally running in 44 KHz mode with decoder F.

All this runs on a Raspberry Pi model A with a powered USB hub to let me plugin both Wifi and the Realtek dongle. A new model B+ and or B2 would probably work without the powered hub, but the model A only has 1 USB port. The antenna that comes with the Realtek dongle isn’t great, so using a couple of converters to give me an SMA connector i’m using a cheap ebay clone of a Nagoya NA-771. This still isn’t optimal and I do intend to replace it with a better antenna in future.

Here is a photo of my setup showing the antenna, powered USB hub and Raspberry Pi.

Slow Scan TV pictures from the International Space Station

This weekend the International Space Station was transmitting slow scan TV pictures. These are low bandwidth pictures which can be transmitted in an audio channel and take about 3 minutes to receive. You can pick them up with a cheap handheld radio, modified USB TV dongle or a webSDR station and decode them using free software. I’ll do a separate post on the details of how to receive and decode SSTV pictures.

I received this image using a webSDR station in Cadiz, Spain and decoded using QSSTV. There was a local station transmitting on the same frequency as the ISS and this is what caused the interference and wavy look to the picture.

This image was received using my Baofeng UV-5R handheld radio, just standing in a car park at the National Library of Wales (which has a good open view to the South, where the ISS was) and I recorded the audio on my phone, just by holding it up to the radio’s speaker. The decoding was done by playing back the audio on my laptop and using the robot 36 Android app to decode it.

Here is another decoding of the same image using QSSTV. This gives a cleaner image than Robot 36 did as the audio isn’t playing through a speaker and into a microphone, but is being fed through a loopback device and doesn’t get any interference or echos. But, for some reason QSSTV doesn’t want to decode the bottom part of the image.

I received this image on my UV-5R handheld while sat in my car and using a magmount Tram 1185 antenna. Again I just recorded the audio on a phone and decoded it with QSSTV.

I received this image using the Southampton University Wireless Society webSDR station and decoded it using QSSTV.

Introduction

I’ve been meaning to start a blog for a long time but never seem to have got round to it. I find myself doing a lot of random technology projects involving amateur radio, robotics, electronics, Raspberry Pi’s, Arduinos etc and I never seem to write any of them up on the web. Yet somehow I end up doing presentations on a lot of them, talking about them to people or even writing them up into scientific papers but I never end up publishing anything about them on the web. This blog is an attempt to change all of this!