MG ZS EV Review! Cold weather range test GONE WRONG!

it's just not good enough and if the uk government expect people to migrate to evs in scale like they do they need to sort that out because it's just not good enough i don't know whether i've ever been so angry on my youtube channel before hey guys and welcome to petrol ped and welcome to a very snowy west sussex it's baltic today we had a little dusting of snow overnight but today i need to drive to wales to do some filming a journey of just over 200 miles and i thought i would put this whole dozen ev's charge state and range get affected by the cold weather because it is just a smidge over zero degrees celsius and my mg only has a range of about 140 miles so today should be an interesting journey hopefully it won't be too much of a nightmare [Music] so yes today's video is going to be a little bit of a gun and run special the car's been charging overnight on my zappy home war box unfortunately this particular car doesn't have the ability to pre-condition the batteries which is what i would normally do on a cold day like today some cars you can go into an app on your phone or you can go into the car and you can basically warm the batteries up and that gives them just that little bit more efficiency and that will prolong your range a little bit so i'm gonna have to go with it as it is let's just have a quick check as i said it's been charging up all night long let me just open the car okay so we've got a range of 132 miles that's not enough okay we are on our way and how beautiful does it look with a little dusting of snow we had last night we have our first miner hitch and the miner hitch is um zap map as good an app as it is um has introduced a premium service and quite a lot of the cool features that you want to use you need to be signed up to this premium service and i've just discovered because i haven't used it for a while that if you create a route on zap map which i've done with my charge stops on it between now and my destination if you want to run that through apple carplay you need to be signed up to the premium service which i'm not which is a bit annoying so what i've done is i've still found the charge stop i want to make in zap map and then i'm navigating to that charge stop using waze the challenge i have if the range anxiety's kicking in already is that charger is 106 miles away currently and i have 124 miles of charge because i've already done about five miles of my journey now the reason i haven't done a long journey up until now in the mg which i've had now for over two months and on short journeys around the kind of goodwood area it is a brilliant thing um really really um simple we charge it up maybe once a week but with the limited top range and i know the new replacement or updated model of the mzv has a longer range this 140 miles a lot of the journeys that i do are longer than that or have a quite a tight time scale around them um and that means that it's just not been an option up till now i've either had to get somewhere within a very very tight time frame or not have the opportunity to to charge overnight those types of things this week i'm going to wales to do some filming um i've got all day to get there today so i've been able to schedule in an extra hour or so to to make a charge stop um i should be able to charge overnight or certainly tomorrow and then on the way back on wednesday again i've had the ability to have a bit more time and set in a charge stop that is annoying that's the bit about evs if you don't have the longer range if i had a 300 mile range car i wouldn't have even worried about it i'd have gone in it and on off i go but with this one you just have to do more planning so this morning i was on zap map i've had a good look at the different 50 kilowatt and above charges that i can find on route so hopefully it shouldn't be too stressful today but look at that beautiful two brief updates i did try and type in the destination into the mg sat nav in the car i didn't go much further than that because it didn't even say you haven't got enough range to get to that destination let's plan in a charge stop the second thing is i've been driving in normal mode if i go up into efficiency mode my range goes from let me do that again so in normal mode my range is currently showing 109 miles in efficiency mode it goes up to 119. so it gets me an extra 10 miles what happens if i go the other way oh sport mode 103. yeah let's do efficiency for a little bit because i am on a full-on range trip because i've got 91 miles to go to my charge stop so efficiency mode sounds like a cunning plan so now on the dual carriageway of the a34 and actually doing something that i didn't do in my review so i'm using the adaptive cruise control in this car which is actually really good and what i would say is if you're going to do one of these long-range tests in the cold it's very very good for keeping your license because you drive like a complete and utter worst you like slowly gently on the throttle accelerating away as gently as you can i've even set my adaptive cruise just to 65 miles an hour on the dual carriageway because you know the drag squares with speed right so the faster you go the more drag you get the more energy you consume so i'm just trying something out the difference between doing 65 miles an hour and 70 miles an hour in my overall journey time probably won't make a great deal of difference however the difference in the amount of energy i consume and the range that i get probably will be significant i don't know how i'm going to measure that but you know maybe that's my man maths i'm not sure range well 103 miles of range and currently 76 miles to my charge stop destination and then the stressful thing is is there gonna be a car plugged in or not we'll see we'll see i'm gonna make it range-wise but there is a big but if there's a car plugged into this charger i'm screwed because i don't think i've got enough range to go anywhere else so i would literally just have to wait for them to charge and people go why did you already go to somewhere that only has one charge point well actually most a one or two maybe unless you're driving a tesla that's the that's the the challenge you have this garage has probably eight fuel pumps to fill a car up with petrol probably takes i don't know four or five minutes and then the pump's free for someone else to use it's got one electric charge point and it typically takes 45 minutes to an hour to charge up a car and so therefore it can do one car an hour here we go come on keep your fingers crossed for me people keep your fingers crossed oh yes you beauty you absolute beauty got no cars in it wicked okay so uh 113 and a half miles actually and i got 13 miles of range left so i'm gonna get plugged in and then i'm gonna work out how much charge i need to put into the car to get me to my destination yes i have myself coffee uh so uh we started charging about 20 pass let me just remember that one um i'm already 24 charged 37 miles now my destination is 98 miles away so i need to make sure i've got at least that um so it is a bit of a stretch to try and get this car to do a 200 mile journey without stopping twice to charge and and that isn't something that i can get my head around planning in a one-hour charge stop on a journey but i can't get my head around having to plan into um so the really interesting thing for me so far is i i have eeked out that amount of range with the car so the the trip time already i wonder if i can i think the trip 110 miles or so so you're looking at 125 mile range in these cold weather conditions and that is driving in economy mode at 65 miles an hour on a on a dual carriage and motorway uh i'm being really really careful so you know and also having the temperature turned right down because i'm freezing my feet are cold and that's the big challenge so so this guy i am pushing it and myself to its limits at the moment but so 40 minutes in and i've added 100 miles of range i'm now at 74 make that 75 of charge state now i've i've now got enough range to get to my destination but only just and also that's assuming that the car doesn't do the magic suddenly lose 10 to 15 miles so i'm gonna sit on here for another 20 minutes or so and maybe take that charge uh up to 90 percent um i don't know what happens when you get to 80 things start to slow down and that last 20 takes a long long time but i just need that extra bit of range to get to my destination so uh it's 99 miles to my destination and i've got 121 miles of rain so i'd like to get that up to at least kind of 130 miles of range and then then i might feel a little bit more confident going off but 40 minutes to get a hundred miles not too bad i will let you know how much it costs very shortly because that's the thing that that freaks people out most the time is the cost of public charging is quite significant on the road again so on the road again 150 miles of range i've just checked my bank and that cost me seven pounds and 60 pence to put 140 miles of range into the car so while i'm cruising along the m5 and the light is fading even though it's only 20 to 3 i'm probably not going to be able to film for much longer just a reflection of that uh charge stop that's a good charge stop that that's when things go right i know i had a little bit of range anxiety getting to the stop but i planned that stop in advance it was a fast charger i got enough charge um you know i could have probably left that charge station at 40 minutes i i decided to stay on for a little bit longer i was there for probably an hour um i replenish the battery you know and the range enough to then carry on to my destination you know whilst i was waiting i had a bite to eat a coffee did a few emails and actually it wasn't too much of a pain it has obviously added an hour to my total journey time normally this journey takes me about four and a half hours so it's going to be about five and a half hours door to door but that that's when things go well but the problem for me i have as i get overtaken by a tesla and probably something that he wouldn't have the problem with is it's just that that unknown anxiety i checked with zapmap that that charge station was working it was your shell station and i'm a big fan of those i knew i didn't need an app because you just pay with a contactless payment card so it's a relatively low stress uh environment the biggest challenge would have been had there been a car plugged into that charger because the amount of charge i had when i got there i really would have then probably had to wait for whatever was plugged in to finish their charge and just plug in there because i didn't have enough range to go and find something else but anyway hopefully we'll be all right 138 miles of range 87 miles to go happy happy days uh and with a bit of luck i'll get to charge up overnight as well now i know it's dark but i have arrived i'm actually at electric classic cars visiting my mate moggy but he's now got an external three-phase charger so as they say abc always be charging i'm here for about an hour this evening and then back again tomorrow so i thought i'd quickly get a few electrons in the car i arrived with just over 40 miles of range left so a really very low stress second half of the journey but all in all from home to here actually that's pretty pretty low stress really tiny bit of range anxiety before the charge but now i'm here that's all good so i won't be able to get a full charge here now but where i'm staying this evening they have a charge as well so hopefully i can get it on the charger overnight as well spring forward a day i'm on my way home after a successful couple of days here in wales and now my home journey is going to be an interesting one i got onto zap map this morning and planned my route the challenge i've got is the range of the car pretty much i i kind of i'm fully charged it's been overnight i put a charge in it it's been on a on a charger at moggy's as well this morning so it was absolutely brimming this morning and it stated just over 151 miles of range i need to stop at a charge station so that i can then get enough charging to then get home so i only have to stop once and that means that the charge station i'm stopping at um well at the moment what does my sat nav say it says 121 miles away and i've got 144 miles of range so i'm playing the range anxiety game again the other thing that's a little bit annoying is that the charge stop is a bp pulse charge stop and according to zap map i've never used bp pulse before it's one of the apps i don't have on my phone so i've downloaded the bp pulse app registered with it set up a direct debit with it so that i can use the vp pulse app uh interestingly they also post you an rfid tag to use as well and that for me that just that's the bit that annoys the hell out of me when it comes to evs is that it's not just oh i'll stop there it's okay what's the provider of that charger and do i have the app and if not i need to download it register with it and all of that kind of stuff that stuff that stuff has to stop and i know things are changing in that all charges are going to be just contactless payments eventually but i don't currently know the exact status of them all so i don't know exactly whether or not this one is and i don't particularly want to get there and find out it isn't now the other thing is i've got a contingency stop i could stop at the garage i stopped on the way here if i don't think my range is enough and i might just do a quick splash and dash and maybe stop for 20 minutes to half an hour um just put a rapid charge in and then do another 20 minutes to half an hour near a home that might be a cunning plan as well so that that's what i'm i'm thinking about okay it's complicated this ev thing really really complicated the other thing is it's not quite as cold today as it was on the way up so maybe that's going to help battery longevity a little bit okay i'm only 1.7 miles away from the charge station still got 22 miles of rain so it's not been quite as traumatic as the way down but my worry is twofold number one this charge stop guess what only has one charge bay so i've got that diamond to come am i gonna get there and find a car already parked hopefully not and then the second one because it's a bp pulse station and i've created an account on the app that i downloaded this morning and i've put in my my details for my bank so i can set up a direct debit for payment um although the direct debit has been cleared what i haven't got uh is uh a notification on the app saying that my account is fully active so i don't know whether my app is going to work so i'm i'm mildly worried that i'm going to get there and the app's not going to work and then i'm not going to be able to pay with just a normal contactless debit card come on fingers crossed fingers crossed empty charge stop please charge stop please no tesla what's he doing parked in there gutted oh man he's a tesla he doesn't need to be parked in here damn it that that dude in that model 3 uh was still charging i think it only got to 64 of his of his charge state so there is another uh charger literally a mile down the road that's currently according to zap map unoccupied so i'm gonna go there i only need 90 miles of range to get home and i've got currently got 18. the thing that's really annoyed me okay is that dude that's my car going boom recharge that dude in the model 3 was in a tesla he should be using tesla charge stations i can't go and use a tesla charge station but he can so that's not fair so you know he should stick to his own charge network if it's so amazing instead of going on to the networks that we need so i know that there are in the uk sorry in europe there's a couple of countries i think it was belgium that have just opened up the tesla charge network to non-tesla vehicles but that's not the case currently uh in the uk and what that basically means is i couldn't rock up a tesla supercharger uh network now and plug this car in yet he can clog up the charger i needed to get home the other worry i've got is when i get to this one obviously the worry is that what if there's someone plugged into it so let's fingers crossed this has a charge stop and there's nobody plugged into it come on lady luck shine on me oh you oh no hold on that's not that's not an electric car that is not an electric car plugged into that that is someone doing their tires awesome right this means i could get some charge wicked right i think i might need to use an app though um i haven't got this one right this is not this is not happening so it's now not charging downloaded the app says it's charging car won't talk to it connected come on i am fed up with doing drives like this in electric cars and not being able to be totally positive about it this is nothing to do with this car i know that this car has a limited range it was affected on the way down by the cold weather for sure by i don't know five or ten percent something like that had i had the option to pre-condition the batteries that might have been a little bit better the journey down to cornwall was a tacoma where am i going the journey down to wales was okay it wasn't too bad i got to the stop there was nothing there i charged for an hour i put the amount of you know there was a little bit of range anxiety before i got there but that was all good coming back planning my journey i did that as it was let me turn the light on a little bit i wonder if i can just get some lightness a little bit better coming back i planned my journey i checked on zap map i looked at a number of different options for charging the charge stop i was going to stop at by harvester i wasn't a member of that club so i downloaded the app registered with it put my credit card details in and registered for direct debits got there bloody tesla parked in there i mean and i would have had to stay there for a long time get here different charge network now genie point guess what different app i've now got 10 apps on my phone from different charge networks and people go oh that everyone we're going to have contactless payments and you'd just be able to use your debit card well i tell you now people that is not the case right now you rock up to a charge stop like this if you've not got the right app you need to download the app put your credit card details in give them your name address date of birth and it's absolutely pointless it is data capture why they can't just have a contactless payment system on there like shell did on the way up i've got no idea and then i plug it in and it doesn't work to start with so i then get the heebie-jeebies thinking oh no i've only got 17 miles and i need to get home this evening and i'm starting to think what if i can't get home it's just not good enough and if the uk government expect people to migrate to evs in scale like they do they need to sort that out because it's just not good enough i don't know whether i've ever been so angry on my youtube channel before i am a i love my cars piston cars petrol or diesel love them hybrids don't mind them electric cars i've driven some amazing electric cars i actually love this car on a day-to-day basis i've loved our last couple of months with this car it's brilliant around town and as long as it stays there and it stays within that kind of journey profile of maybe up to 50 to 100 miles a day you are absolutely golden plug it in in your wall box at home fantastic want to take this a bit longer want to take any tesla or non-tesla vehicle a bit longer good luck to you that's all i will say because it's not good enough and i took an extra hour i planned an extra hour in this journey today thinking okay i'm gonna have to stop for another hour i've lost at least half an hour of that maybe 20 minutes of that fannying around waiting for a tesla who shouldn't be parking and charging on that network to move and then downloading all the different apps right gonna have a coffee and chill out now then i doubt you can even see me because it's now dark but i've been on charge for i don't know actually i don't know how long i've lost the will to live i've got 81 of charge 131 miles that's 40 miles more than i need to get home i'm going to unplug get myself home and then we need to have a discussion when it's daylight for me to summarize my trip the good pretty much the journey to wales the bad coming home nightmare i need to get home right unplug see in the morning so it's now the next morning i got back safely last night with enough range left so that my range anxiety didn't kick into overdrive again and i went inside and i sat down and i chilled out and all is good in the world but a really interesting test the car itself performed faultlessly on the way to wales it was a really good journey good charge stop nothing really went wrong managed to charge up while i was there it was the journey back that kind of opened up all the potential issues you have when you want to charge your car in public however i've had that car over two months and that is the first time i've needed to use public charge infrastructure because we use it within the journey profile that the range of the car gives you it's charged on a wall box in the evening and it's never a problem and i'd argue probably 70 to 80 percent of electric car journeys are like that the problem is if you want to go beyond that range and you need to use public charging infrastructure then there is a potential for things to go wrong and there is much work to be done in the uk to make that better there needs to be more charge stations at each charge stop there needs to be less fragmentation just contactless payments please and and and things will get better i'm sure but for now i'm going to draw that one to a close because it's an incredibly long video i hope you enjoyed it i'd love to know your thoughts put in the comments below but if you've enjoyed that one give me a thumbs up and don't forget if you haven't done so already please subscribe to petrified for plenty more content to come and i'll see on the next film guys you take care drive safe you

Channel: Petrol Ped

Views: 786,427

Keywords: petrol ped, ped petrol, petrol ped youtube, youtube petrol ped, ev, electric vehicle, electric cars, mg zs ev, mg, mg ev, mg zs range, mg zs ev battery life, ev 2021, mg zs ev 2022, mg zs ev review, mg zs review uk, mg zs review, mg zs ev charging, mg zs ev price, mg zs ev range, ev charging, ev cold weather test, mg motor zs, ev charging stations, ev charging in the uk, best ev car, best electric car, best cars 2021, ev charging station, range anxiety, mgzs ev

Id: qxR9b-ZPoaY

Length: 27min 6sec (1626 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 10 2021