Tell me about the charging options. How many kw is the built in charger? Any provisions for Level 3 DC charging, and if so what standard is the plug?

You can add 40 miles, 65 km of range in 8 hours with a wall outlet. With a 200 plus mile range, as long as your average daily mileage is under 40/65 (15k/yr) you will do just fine on a wall outlet. The only reason I got off my duff and installed our level 2 charger is that the cheap ass 110 charger that came with…

Not quite. Unless that is the (rare) plug in model, the pack weighs at most 75 kg. (150 lb)

Enjoy it while you can. As of model year 2016 or 17, all EV’s have to include a low speed ped warning system. (AKA: the growler). At least when Tesla has to include one, I expect you will get a choice of noises.

But then you have all the maintenance of an ICE, plus you haul around a battery. One of the nice things about an EV, is no annual oil change, no timing belt in 4 years, or exhaust system in 5, etc. Your ICE has hundreds of moving parts, many reciprocating, a gearbox full of spinning meshing bits, some number of…

Depends which trim level they bought. The base trim only has 3.5kw of onboard charger. The SE has the 7kw paired charger, and also the SAE level 3 port. Given the angle of the charger plug, I suspect his is one of the slow ones. (the level 3 charger adds two pins below the standard plug for the HVDC, the socket is…

The numbers should work out to the same mpg, but the golf (and any car with a 110 volt EVSE) will only draw 12 amps (1.4 KW). More than that and some cheap outlets (and most extension cords) will melt. In fact GM limits the volt to 8 amps on 110, unless you poke at a menu, as their testing showed there are a bunch of…

Indeed, the level 1 charger will limit draw to 12 amps. (1.4 kw). This is following electrical codes. If your appliance draws power for longer than some (i don’t remember) time, you have to draw less than the circuit is fused at. For a 15 amp circuit that is 12 amps. (and that is too much for some “contractor grade”…

All ready-made EV’s refuse to move when they detect a charger plug. That way you can’t yank it off the wall or similar when you forget to unplug...

VW uses the recent Panasonic Ni Mn Co doped batteries, which are a lot more tolerant of temperature. Enough that they decided to ditch the liquid cooled pack, reducing complexity and weight.

In your driveway during off-peak rates.

Yea, but a carnot cycle engine is always much less than 50% efficient at extracting that energy from its fuel. The rest you dump as heat. Electric motors are a whole lot more efficient at conversion, its why e-mpg (which is based on the energy content of gasoline) is over 100 on many of the EV’s out there.

VW (and BMW) use SAE-combo for its level 3 plug. Don’t know what the current limit is on that system.

People have to get past the model that re-fueling is something you have to go to a special place and wait while they do it. Most charging happens in your driveway at night, sometimes in your parking space at work while you are sneaking a peek at Jalopnik rather than paying attention to the quarterly results meeting.

This may depend on your tax and locale, but post-incentive prices are at par now (at least for VW). In Mass, between the feds and state chipping in, the ev golf matched price with the comparably equipped (aka fully loaded) gas engined model.

Instead of an electric pickup, I want to see electric cargo vans. Think UPS or FED-EX. No they wouldn’t suit all routes, but for the 90% of their volume that is urban, they would be wonderful. 100 miles should be plenty of range. (enough for a round trip from LaGuardia or Newark airports to NYC, plus the in-city miles)

I am going to differ with you about the regulatory special aspect of the e-golf. About the only “regulatory” aspect of the thing is the marketing plan, only selling it in CARB states. Unlike a typical regulatory special, the battery pack doesn’t detract from the cargo space, and it does have fairly fast (7.2 kw) level…

The only time you really need Level 3 charging is when you are on a long trip. Day to day you charge at home while asleep, at work while sneaking a peek at Jalopnik during that interminable quarterly meeting, etc. My snark answer to “how long does it take to charge that thing” is “30 seconds, 10 to plug it in at the…

What maintence? One of the nice things about an EV is that the powertrain is nearly immortal, they won’t be doing much, and its a simpler system anyway. The rest of the car (brakes, steering, suspension, etc) is the same sort of things they see on the rest of the fleet.

sorry, you brushed near a soft spot... One of the new memes about EV’s is that they are worse than an IC engined because of the possibility of coal sourced electricity. Pointing out that a gallon of gas has a comparable amount of electricity “in” it often comes as a surprise to the one offering up the argument.