The Falcon - One year on

A year ago today, my wife drove me to an industrial unit outside Edinburgh to pick up a new Tesla Model 3. Up to that time, it had been a long wait filled with anticipation. From March 2016 when the Model 3 was launched, I watched for over three years; the hints about its features, the changes in its specifications and the initial reviews by bubbling-over Tesla fans.

Charging at Broadford, Isle of Skye.

The first few cars that came out in 2017 were praised and slammed in equal measure depending on the biases of the reviewer. The fanboys lauded its exceptional styling, minimalist interior and its friendly UI and super-quick performance. Those outside the Tesla bubble found easy targets in wildly inconsistent panel gaps and shoddy paintwork. Two years later and I had my own example sitting on the driveway.

I'm a bit of a fanboy. I'm not uncritical but I think the car and company deserve it. In this essay, I want to discuss some plus and minus points that I have come across while owning 'The Falcon' for one year.

Let's be up front about this. I think the positives far, far outweigh any negative feelings I have towards the car. It is quick, comfortable and capable. It is a tech wet dream. It is clever, cheeky and knowing with software written by a company of people with a sense of humour. I delightedly grasp any opportunity to take it out on the Scottish roads and when I do, I'm not poisoning those around me like some Russian dictator. My first year is full of 20,000 miles of very pleasurable motoring.

Black marks

My first negative. I was warned that the paintwork is soft. It seems that Californian environmental laws affect the grade of paint that Tesla use and I've discovered that a Scottish winter is a tough test for that finish. As a result, there is a rash of paint chips across the car, exposing a white undercoat below the black gloss. I'll see about getting a touch-up kit and start addressing the worst of these before the car's second winter sets in.

That's not dirt. That's impact damage!

More concerning has been the abrasion, or sandblasting, of the paintwork by debris in certain areas. This is mostly seen at the outward flare just forward of the rear wheels and on the wheel arch directly behind those wheels. There is also a small area of abrasion on the leading edge of the rear nearside door. It so happens that the alignment of this door is slightly off and the lower ten centimetres sticks out slightly into the slipstream. Hence this edge has suffered a lot of damage.

Profound impact damage at the windward edge of the door sill.

My response has been to apply gloss black vinyl wrap to these areas, a solution that, while a little amateur, has turned out to be reasonably successful. For that reason alone, I'm glad the car has a simple flat colour that doesn't require careful matching.

I learned that in cold countries like Canada and Norway, Tesla was giving away mud flaps to owners in recognition of the large quantities of salt that are spread on the roads there. Sometimes even grit is used. I enquired about these flaps and was delighted when a Tesla Ranger (a mobile service engineer) drove up and fitted them for me. It wouldn't be the only time this mobile service solution would visit.

Ceramic coating... or not

When I was waiting for the car, my intention had been to get it ceramic coated while new. I'm reasonably convinced that applying this treatment will mean that caring for the car's finish will be a lot easier with dirt less likely to accumulate. I'm not one for preening cars so a simple solution that saves me effort seemed worthwhile. Circumstances were to foil me. As soon as I had the car, I was away for weeks on a job that involved some driving through heavy winter weather. When that was finished, I had more winter driving to support a hillwalking challenge. Around this time, I did ask someone to do it but they never engaged with the task. They worked outdoors and atrocious winter weather got in the way and then they stopped responding. Then the Covid-19 pandemic visited us all. At least in springtime 2020, I had plenty of time on my hands to polish the car regularly.

More negatives

While admitting that I am a fanboy and that I love the car, I'll keep bringing up the negative points. Next one; it's very low! Not for me though. Despite being in my seventh decade, I'm fairly supple and have no problem getting in and out of the car – except for that time a month after I got it when I had pulled a back muscle and doing anything was agony, never mind sliding into a sleek saloon. However, others around me of a similar age do find it a bit tricky, something I hadn't thought of when ordering it. I've no intention to change the car but if I did, I would perhaps choose a Tesla Model Y. It is very similar to a 3 but 18cm taller and more suited to older folk getting in and out.

My next negative is slowly turning positive. When I got the car, it came with no rain sensor. A button on the indicator stalk gave a single wipe and brought up a control panel on the screen for the wipers. I would then be expected to select a wiper speed on the screen. This is an unacceptably fiddly way to control wipers when conditions are tough and you have to keep your eyes on the road.

Thankfully, despite the lack of a sensor, there is an auto wiper function and Tesla has endeavoured to use the output of the car's cameras to sense when it is raining. At first, this didn't work at all well but this is where one of the Tesla's unique features comes into the story. Similar to a smart phone, every few weeks, owners find that an update is available to download into their cars. Usually this is just for bug fixes but often it is to add new features or let owners preview features that they might want to pay to add to their cars permanently.

Since I got the car, Tesla has added YouTube, Netflix, Twitch and a handful of games. The climate control has been enhanced with Dog mode (for keeping a dog in a climate-controlled car) and Camp mode (for owners to sleep in the back of a cosy car, no matter the outside temperature). The rear space is long enough for this and I have a mattress especially for the occasional camping out adventure. Tesla even upped the car's maximum power by 5% without me having to pay for it. Happily, they also improved the routines that control the wipers and a recent long road trip in very wet weather proved the effectiveness of the current system. Only once in a thousand miles did I need to ask for a flick wipe. I never needed to use the touchscreen.

Autopilot

That thousand-mile road trip was a good example of the power of Tesla's Autopilot system. The car comes with two flavours: basic Autopilot and, for an extra £8K, their 'FSD' package which they say will one day offer full self-driving. I have my doubts. Although I get that they are applying massive machine learning to vast amounts of data coming from the hundreds of thousands of Teslas already out on the roads, I think the task is just too hard for machines. The corner cases are too many. I can't help feeling that FSD is a bit of a unicorn – or maybe I'm too old and set in my ways.

Basic Autopilot, however, is great – usually. Get on the open road, two presses of the right stalk and the car as good as drives for you. This freaks most people out the first time they see it but it is a genuine and huge help to long distance driving. With basic Autopilot, the car senses the road's lane markings, other road users and objects. Everything from lorries and buses to bikes and people. It senses traffic lights, traffic cones, roadside bins and stop signs. Further, it shows you what it is sensing on its display. It is like you are seeing into the mind of a machine.

Using this information, the car maintains a central position in the lane, steering smoothly through the bends. If there is a road user in front who is travelling slower, the Tesla smoothly slows to match, maintaining a distance that the driver can set. (I prefer a setting of '5'.) Should the traffic become congested and of a stop/start nature, the car will tirelessly stop and start with the rest of the traffic.

What am I doing all this time? Like any good pilot, I'm monitoring the system, ensuring that it is behaving as I wish. The car wants to know that I am there and it does so by sensing an unbalanced torque on the steering wheel from me having my hands on it. Therefore I keep one hand at about the 5 o'clock position, exerting a mild torque on the wheel, ready to take over should any need arise – and they do! Occasionally poor markings will cause it to start up a sliproad, requiring it to be yanked back onto the main lane. If I need to, say, open a bottle of water, the car will give me about 15 seconds of hands-free driving before it begins to nag me to hold the wheel again.

The car will happily eat up the miles on Autopilot but there are times when I do have to intervene. The car won't overtake on the motorway. (It will in the US if the owner has bought FSD.) I have to manually execute an overtake manoeuvre. By indicating to pull out, the car drops its Autosteer function while maintaining cruise control. I change lanes and maybe accelerate a little. When appropriate, I reengage Autosteer.

Occasionally, a lorry will slightly wander out of its lane, edging into mine just as I'm passing it. This can freak the car out and makes it slow heavily. (I avoid saying 'slam on the brakes' because that exaggerates the situation.) Another instance is what's called 'phantom braking' which is where the car suddenly slows for no apparent reason. A press on the accelerator overcomes both of these situations but nonetheless, they are very disconcerting for all in the car.

Despite the phantom braking glitch, Autopilot is great. I reckon more than 95 per cent of my recent road trip was driven by the car. This removes a lot of the mental burden that a driver bears from constant speed and steering adjustment. After hours of driving, the result is to arrive more alert and ready to enjoy the remainder of the day.

My many trips through the Scottish Highlands have also been made easier by the more boring sections being handled by the car. Often, I'm happy just to let the car sit behind the vehicle in front and go with the flow of traffic. I'm not aggressive in my desire to overtake at every opportunity but the astounding response and speed of the car means that when ultra-safe overtake opportunities arise, they are completed quickly and without fuss.

Autopilot doesn't handle cities well, including roundabouts. But on anything except fast main roads and motorways, I'm more than happy to drive the car myself. The twisty sections of road in the Highlands are especially fun. The car is precise, firm, very well planted and responsive. "It's like it's on rails," is a comment I hear often, thanks to the very low centre of mass provided by the battery and some very solid design. The steering never, ever feels jittery, whether applying prodigious amounts of power or when at speed.

Continuing negatives

One month after getting the car, the visor broke.

A broken visor clip.

The place from where the visor clip broke.

To be more accurate, the clip broke that holds one end of the visor in place but which allows the visor to be pulled out if the Sun is shining from the side, The first time I tried to pull the visor out, the clip snapped and flew off to the back of the car. The problem was entered into the Tesla App on my phone and a service appointment arranged. At the due time, a Tesla Ranger showed up and replaced the clip.

Then one month ago, I opened the car door and heard something fall down inside the door's innards. Again, I used the app to report the problem, gaining an appointment three weeks hence. One week later, I get a phone call. A Ranger is in the area and can check the door now. This was during the Covid-19 pandemic and I wasn't planning going anywhere.

A Tesla Ranger repairs my door.

The door was quickly dismantled and a little gear arrangement retrieved from inside. Rather than fix the existing door handle, a new complete handle mechanism was fitted. 

The offending damping gear.

The function of the gear is to damp the sprung movement of the handle. I have no idea how it managed to fall out of the handle assembly. There didn't appear to be any broken plastic associated with it.

Overall, that's three Tesla Ranger visits in a year, all for relatively minor issues. Once the 4-year, 50,000-mile guarantee is up (8 years, 100,000 miles for the drive train), I guess I'll find out the hard way how expensive owning a Tesla long term costs.

Speaking of costs

A commonly stated benefit of electric car ownership is the savings in fuel. When I drove cars with internal combustion engines, my typical fuel cost was about 10 pence per mile, and I drove very frugal cars in a frugal fashion. My current arrangement for electricity is as follows. If I charge at home, I have two choices. Either I charge during the day in which case the cost is 15p per kilowatt-hour (kWh). If the car is doing 4 miles per kWh, a reasonable average, then I'm paying 3.75p per mile. But I have solar panels and if they are able to contribute to the charge, that reduces the cost.

If I charge at night, my cost goes down to 5p/kWh. That equates to 1.25p per mile. In the summer, the Falcon can easily achieve 5 miles/kWh which means that, for a lot of the time, I'm paying a penny per mile.

I have the Tesla Model 3 Standard Range Plus (the cheapest version I could get) which is reputed to have a 50kWh battery. The range of that battery varies wildly depending on use scenarios but having had the car for a year, I've got a good handle on seasonal averages. In winter, with cold dense air and the need to warm the interior of the car, my range is about 170 miles. In summer, the range rises to about 250 miles. This is because the air is thinner and less heating is required.

Happily, the car has good trip meters that let me keep long-time records of its consumption.

This represents the first six months of ownership through the car's first winter. 270 Wh/mile is equivalent to 3.7 miles/kWh.

The second six-month period of car ownership. 238 Wh/mile is equivalent to 4.2 miles/kWh.

The figures for the first complete year. 257 Wh/mile is equivalent to 3.9 miles/kWh. 

In that first year, the car has done 19,951 miles on 5,124 kWh of power. At my typical daytime power cost of 14.7p/kWh, that works out as a 'fuel' cost of £750. In reality, some of that was from my night rate, some was from my free supercharging referral that I got when the car was new, much of it was travelling up and down to Skye where most of the chargers were (and still are) free, some was from when my solar panels had spare power available and a lot was from when my day rate was slightly lower. At a guess, I suspect my actual spend was in the region of £300.

For the aforementioned road trip, the car would suggest charging stops at about 150-mile intervals, something that worked well for us. Rest stops were welcome after a couple of hours driving and two stops were all we needed for a 400-mile destination. A good charge at a Tesla supercharger would require about 35 to 45 minutes, easily the time we would require to go to the loo, browse shops, get coffee and lunch and eat it. While we refuelled, so did the car. No need to then go to a petrol station. The cost at a supercharger is 24p/kWh which makes motorway trips at 70 to 75mph cost about 6p/mile after the first 150 miles.

But get back to the negatives!

The car has two types of key. I can either use an RFID card, two of which were supplied with the car, or I can use my phone. The car works with an app on the phone and uses Bluetooth to detect the phone's presence, allowing me to just walk up to the car and enter – except it doesn't. It used to, flawlessly, but whatever happened, either through a Tesla update or a phone update, the phone and car fail to achieve this about 90 per cent of the time. I fumble for my phone, switch Bluetooth off then on and this is usually, not always, sufficient to make the connection and I can get in. It's starting to rankle me, especially in heavy rain as I grumble in the wet trying to get the two pieces of tech to communicate. I really am too tolerant.

I could start using my cards to get in or I can buy a dedicated key fob that will apparently work flawlessly until its battery needs to be changed.

I'm running out of negatives...

Oh yes, the cruise control. It's great and is part of the Autopilot feature. One press of the right stick and it comes on, traffic aware and all. In my limited experience, conventional cruise control will read the car's speed at the moment it is engaged and hold that speed until modified by the driver. The Tesla cruise control doesn't bother with the car's current speed. Instead, it looks at what it thinks the speed limit of the road is, and proceeds to smartly accelerate to that speed.

The problem with this arrangement is that very often, I don't want it to do that. On many motorway journeys, I'm happy to sit at 60 whereas the car wants to take me up to 70mph. I have to twice flick a thumbwheel on the steering wheel to override this behaviour. Worse, on many roads I travel, although the legal speed limit is 60, the appropriate speed is far less, perhaps due to their winding nature or the quality of the tarmac. I think Tesla ought to revisit their assumptions of how cruise control should work.

Panel alignment

I mentioned at the start of this article that early examples of the Model 3 were criticised for inconsistent panel gaps. If I were to switch on my own critical brain cell, I could complain about some of the panel issues on my own car. For example, the top of the car from windscreen to rear window consists of three sheets of glass. As an aside, I think the all-glass roof is a wonderful feature. The ambience and airiness, particularly for back seat passengers, is a delight. Anyway, the central sheet of glass is slightly narrower than the adjacent rear sheet.

The two are perfectly aligned on the left side of the car, but on the right, there is a clear 5mm discrepancy. Such issues really don't bother me and I'm not going to lose sleep over them. But having lurked in a forum or two online, I know that some folk really lose their heads over issues like this.

A first birthday present

As I was writing this essay, I happened to look out of the kitchen window at my car and noticed a circle on the front left tyre.

I thought, "That's either a flower petal or there's a screw right on the shoulder of that tyre." Unfortunately, upon closer inspection, it was the latter. I have no idea how long the screw has been there. Did I drive my thousand-mile road trip with it in? The car monitors tyre pressures for me and hasn't shown any problems. Nevertheless, the Falcon is going to get a birthday present of two new front tyres. This isn't too bad. Having done 20,000 miles, there was only 2mm of legal tread remaining on those tyres.

I started to monitor the declining depth of my tyres' tread a couple of months ago and as the graph shows, I only recently got to swap the tyres over. Those front tyres used to be on the rear. Since the car is rear wheel drive, they had taken most of the wear and were nearly ready to be replaced. At 5mm, the other tyres are only about halfway through their life and I'll look to replace them after a few more months.

One interesting issue came up. It turns out that the factory-fitted tyres have internal foam to suppress road noise. However, this adds about £40 to £60 to the price of each. I'll take the non-acoustic version and see what they are like.

Fanboy

In this essay, I've honestly tried to be as negative as possible about my Model 3, but the truth is that as a piece of well-designed and well-integrated engineering, it is very impressive. There are solid reasons why the company is growing rapidly even during the Covid-19 pandemic. They are innovative and vertically integrated. They are able to react quickly when problems are found in their products, redesigning and implementing immediately. The design of their cars is compelling and I am always looking forward to my next trip in the Falcon. I have absolutely no regrets having bought it and look forward to many years of driving it.

No, I didn't electrocute the dog!

To butcher a line from James May when he recently discussed his Tesla Model S on You Tube (6 things James May hates about his Tesla), that is about nine things that I don't like about my Tesla Model 3 standard Range Plus. There are also 2,837 things I love!

Life with the Falcon

Regular readers of this blog will be aware that I leapt into electric car ownership a few years back when I bought a Nissan Leaf. However, in case the story is new to you, here is a quick recap of how I got here.

Over the decades, I tended to buy small cars, particularly the Toyota Yaris. This was not due to any style reasons but because I figured they offered enough car while being relatively efficient and highly reliable. To keep an eye on this efficiency (and this is something I always did since owning my first car in 1983), I kept note of the amount of petrol put in and the number of miles gained. The tank would be filled to the second click of the pump and the car used until the tank was nearly empty. From this, I would calculate a true miles per (UK) gallon. These graphs show the consumption that I achieved for all five Yaris that I owned.

Of note is the fact that the cars got steadily more efficient over the years. All cars had 1-litre, three-cylinder engines except the hybrid, which was a 1.5-litre, four-cylinder engine. I enjoyed the hybrid at first but soon got frustrated that I could barely move or accelerate without the car choosing to start the engine. It wasn't really electric driving. It felt more like a sticking plaster over the very worst parts of an engine's operating regime.

My move to a Nissan Leaf in 2015 was relative nirvana. At last, here was a pure electric vehicle and it felt like the future. Acceleration was nippy, instantaneous and strong - at least in comparison to my Toyotas. Moreover, I wasn't pumping out poisonous gases next to the people walking by. In fact, having arranged all of my electricity to come from renewable sources, my driving wasn't even putting any more carbon into the environment. On every level but one, having an electric car was a win and I loved it. I knew that I would never be buying another internal combustion engine.

The one problem I had with the Leaf was the range, that old chestnut that gets brought up by everyone who wishes to knock the electric vehicle. To put it in perspective, for the vast majority of my needs, the car's 70-80-mile range was more than adequate. Trips that were longer than a safe return distance did need a bit more planning but for me, the benefits far, far outweighed what I saw as minor inconvenience. And anyway, for an engineering type like me, planning was part of the pleasure.

I had two Leafs in succession. The first was new and was acquired on a 2-year PCP deal. It was a very, very good deal but the balloon payment at the end of the term was high so I handed the car back and walked away.

I was lucky enough to find another almost identical Leaf for £2,000 less than the balloon payment and bought that instead. All in, I drove Leafs for 4 years and was very happy with them. Where they fell down was when I got a multi-week job on Skye each autumn, almost 200 miles away. In the warmer weather, I could manage with the Leaf but as the cold weather took hold, I was forced to swap cars with my son. He was pleased with the deal as he also loved the Leaf's power.

The Model 3 is announced

Eight months after I got my first Leaf, I watched the announcement by Tesla of their upcoming Model 3. The next day I put down my reservation, and waited... and waited. Almost three years later, after the US market had been sated, orders opened for the car in the UK. I had been unsure whether I would be able to afford even the base version of the car but the length of the wait allowed me to save up the purchase price.

On 2 May 2019, I placed an order for what they called the Standard Range Plus version of the Tesla Model 3 - and again I waited. I was due back up in Skye that September and desperately hoped that my car would arrived before then. It did - with only a week to go.

Driving the Falcon

When you get your Model 3, you are asked to name it. I chose Falcon after the Apollo 15 Lunar Module and the reusable rockets that SpaceX launch.

The Model 3 is a serious looking car. When many other marques, not least Nissan, produced electric vehicles (EVs), the results quite frankly looked odd. The Model 3 came out as a classically beautiful car. It's styling may be timeless. It has a low, prowling look that says it is meant for speed and efficiency. It is uncharacteristically responsive, even to this practiced EV driver. In many ways, and more than any other car I've had, it becomes part of one's nervous system.

My weekend journeys home from Skye became a pleasure, not a chore. After all, the car was doing most of the driving for me! It's Autopilot function took the work out of steering and speed control along most of the long, boring sections past Loch Lomond and over Rannoch Moor. I reckon that, depending on my mood, the car would do the driving for 50 to 75 per cent of the distance for me. Another indicator of my pleasure was that although the ferry to Skye shortened the journey by 50 miles, I eschewed taking it and its time limitations, choosing instead to go the extra distance and therefore travel when it suited me.

In the September days, the car could do the 190-mile journey on a single charge. As winter drew in, a stop was necessary along the way to give that extra bit of range. Not a particularly long stop. Just enough. But I always stopped to pick up supplies anyway so it was no cost to me.

Speaking of costs, the efficiencies of the Leaf and the Model 3 are similar; I expect 4 miles per kilowatt-hour (or 250 Wh per mile) when the weather is decent. If I'm charging from home, and ignoring the fact that with solar panels, a fraction of my power is free, I pay 13.5 pence per kWh. The graphs above show that from my small, carefully-driven Yaris, 50 to 55 mpg was typical and my most recent records for the hybrid indicate a petrol cost per mile of about 10 pence. If a kWh is getting me 4 miles - let's say 3.5 miles to include winter effects, then my electricity cost is 3.86 pence per mile. That's pretty much a third of the cost, without the pollution and damage to people's lungs.

Moreover, in Scotland, many of the public chargers are free. As I zipped up and down to Glasgow, the vast majority of the power was free with only a handful of chargers having associated costs. I don't mind those costs but the tendency is to avoid them if possible. One day, all the public chargers will have a cost and I expect that to represent about half the cost of petrol.

However, Tesla ownership has more to it. There are no service intervals. With no oil to change, no timing belt issues and only a handful of moving parts instead of many hundreds, maintenance is vastly reduced. Further, the way the car works, the conventional brakes are hardly ever used and ought to last a very long time. The main maintenance issue is the wear on tyres and washer fluid.

Inside the Falcon

Then there is the interior experience. Tesla are not really a motor company. They are a tech company and have re-imagined the interior of the car. No more buttons all over the place - a button for this and another for that. Instead, nearly every function of the car is brought into a large landscape-mounted touchscreen. It is a minimalist design that works very well.

Where perhaps they have taken this too far is the wiper control. A button on the end of the left stalk gives a single wipe, while a harder press brings the washer fluid to bear. All other wiper control is via the touchscreen. As a driver in Scotland where the rain is a feature of our climate, this is too fiddly. There is an Auto setting but Tesla chose to use the output from the cameras to gauge when to operate them rather than have a dedicated rain sensor. It frankly didn't work well.

This brings me to one of the most interesting features of Tesla cars. Their internal software can be updated over the air - and very often is. Since acquiring my car 4 months ago, I have have half a dozen updates and some of these are quite profound. I can now watch Netflix and YouTube in the car, it has built-in 'Caraoke', very popular with families. The Autopilot function has improved, games have been added, and recently, the power of the car was increased by five per cent. Just like that! No cost to me. There was also an update to the wiper algorithm. Suddenly, my auto wipers work a whole lot better than they did before and on a very showery 5-hour drive, I forgot about them, so well did they work.

Problems with the Falcon

Apart from the dodgy wipers, what problems have I had? One day, I was driving in Skye in the dark and wet, when the loudest, most awful, high-pitched screeching started coming from the right front wheel. Startled, I stopped and looked with my phone light. Moved again, it's still there. Looked again and can't see what the problem is. Moved again, and heard a slight 'ping'. It stopped. I guess a small stone got trapped between a brake disk and the disk guard.

One afternoon on Skye, the Sun was shining to my right so I brought the sun visor to bear over the door window. As I pulled the visor over, the little catch that holds it in place snapped off and went flying into the back of the car. I used the app on my phone to inform Tesla of the breakage and we came to an arrangement that it would be repaired after my Skye gig finished. Then instead of me driving 40 miles to their service centre, they sent a mobile service technician to the house to do the job. Great service.

Another day, just as I was about to head home from Skye, the car refused to be charged. The problem turned out to be my incompetence, and a poorly-written software feature for scheduled charging that I hadn't operated properly.

More recently, an incompatibility between the car and certain old rapid chargers between home and Skye has caused me some concern. Hugely to their credit, Tesla have installed a network of 'Superchargers' to aid long distance travel. These are very fast and they always make sure to install multiple outlets to minimise the chances of having to wait. Though there are a few in Scotland, they are up the centre of the country or towards the east coast. One has been promised in Fort William for a long time now. This is the halfway point in my journey to Skye and would be perfect for me.

Instead, I have to use a network of so-called 'rapid chargers' of which there are a handful on my route. They are always single so may be occupied when reached. More worryingly, their CCS outlets have proved to be increasingly unreliable as the weather has got colder. I don't know if the two are related. It made my last journey home a lot slower than otherwise. A solution seems to be to support the cable while the electronic handshaking takes place. Hopefully by next year's stint in Skye, the Tesla Supercharger in Fort William will be open.

Remote Falcon

Both the Leaf and the Model 3 have phone apps that allow a degree of insight and control of the car. This is where Tesla's tech background really shows. The Nissan app was slow, clunky and unreliable. Tesla's version is smooth, quick, stylish, and far more capable.

Interest in the Falcon

When I first got the Leaf, there was a bit of interest from folks wanting rides in the car or just ask questions. I thought that was all past 4 years ago. Not so. Interest in Model 3 is sky high. At my work as well as at home, I must have given dozens of demonstrations of the car, and I still have some outstanding. I can see why Tesla don't bother with advertising. People are amazed at the car; its speed and handling, its design, its sense of fun and entertainment with Easter eggs throughout the software along with farts, Santa's sleigh, rainbow road, Mars mapping. The Autopilot function astonishes everyone.

This car redefines what a car can be. While I applaud the EV efforts of the legacy companies, Tesla have left them at the starting line. Tesla's cars are not just replacements for an out-of-date technology. They are experiences in themselves. As we are beginning to see happen, the legacy companies will do well to follow - and quickly.

Flying the Falcon

For a long time, I've been interested in sustainable power. In 2001, I installed a small solar panel onto our shed to power a light within. It has a small lead-acid battery and a charge controller, and it still works after nearly 20 years. In 2010, just as the UK introduced feed-in tariffs for domestically generated solar power, I had a 3.5kW-p solar array installed on the rear roof of our house. Nine years on, it has produced over 23MWh of electricity.
Around 2013, I became aware that an American startup company, Tesla, were making a car with unbelievable specs. The company's CEO, a tech entrepreneur called Elon Musk, was already on my radar thanks to a rocketry company he had set up, Space Exploration Technologies or SpaceX (and, yes, that is a puerile play on words). Both companies were on a path to disrupting large, well established industries and I found both to be very exciting because of that.

Tesla Model S, 2014. (Woods)

In 2014, a year after I first learned of the Tesla Model S, I got to test drive one around Glasgow. This car had a battery that weighed half a ton, was composed of over 7,000 laptop cells which stored 85kWh of electricity, enough to run most households for a week. The car was sleek, very attractive to look at and its instantaneous torque and stepless acceleration were utterly compelling as it smoothly and almost silently brought us up to a blistering speed. Zero to 60mph for this car was a little over 5 seconds, performance that put it very firmly in the fast sportscar class despite being a 2-ton large saloon. What's more, it could keep running for well over 200 miles on a single charge. I was smitten.
I'm not a petrolhead and have always preferred small cars that were as efficient as possible. The Toyota Yaris had been my car of choice, usually with a 3-cylinder, 1-litre engine. Massage it carefully and I could get 50 to 70 miles per gallon out of it. In my view, a high figure for mpg was a great achievement. The last of my Yaris cars was a hybrid, a concept that at one time excited me. The hybrid Yaris was perhaps a little bit of a let-down as its battery was tiny and was rarely used, being there only to cover for the brief moments when an internal combustion engine (ICE) is particularly inefficient.

Enter the EV

Then in 2015, an unbelievably generous PCP offer came from Nissan. By bringing out the Leaf in 2011, they had been early to the electric vehicle (EV) game. Strangely enough, this car had gone under my radar. However, this is not surprising when one realises that ICE car companies are not keen to sell EVs because these vehicles undermine many of their core profit sources. The deal I was being offered was much better than the one for my hybrid Yaris and it included a £5K incentive from the UK government. More importantly, acquiring a Leaf would take me completely away from burning petrol and the resultant savings would further add to the financial case. Grants were even available for the installation of a charging point capable of providing up to 7kW to an electric car while it sat in my driveway.

Nissan Leaf, 24kWh. (Woods)

The Leaf had a range of about 80 miles and was almost exclusively powered by electricity from my house at a cost that was about a quarter of what petrol would have been. I did take it on some long distance trips and used rapid chargers along the way, but it was not really suited for that purpose. For me, it was an excellent city car; quite luxurious (in my terms), well appointed, very comfortable and easy to drive. In winter, I could even pre-heat the interior before heading out. But all the time, I was keeping a firm eye on Tesla.

The Tesla Model 3 (The Verge)

In the spring of 2016, Tesla announced the Model 3. This was to be their 'affordable' car, starting at $35,000 and with a range of at least 200 miles. I naively factored in the then exchange rate of 1.5 dollars to the pound and decided that this could be less than £30K, maybe even £25K. Give me time and I could maybe stretch to that. The day after the announcement, I put down a £1K refundable reservation for a Model 3 and wondered (a) If I was being silly, and (b) when would it be ready? At this point, they hadn't even built a production line in their factory in San Francisco.
Tesla were caught out by the enormously positive reaction they got to the launch of the Model 3 with nearly half a billion dollars in reservation payments suddenly filling their account. Production plans were brought forward but I knew that Tesla would initially concentrate on supplying the US and then other left-hand drive markets. The wait would be a long one and I imagined two years or so.
Then the dollar/pound exchange rate slumped and the Model 3 concept was beginning to look a little shaky for me as its apparent, guessed-at price rose. There would be three models; standard range (the base), long range and performance. At 220 miles range, the standard would be enough for my needs. They spoke of it having a metal roof and basic cloth seats. The others would have a 'premium interior' with a glass roof, vegan leather powered seats and a ton of other goodies. I didn't need them anyway.
2017 and my Leaf's PCP deal expired. I could either buy the car outright or return it and walk away. It so happened that I was able to privately purchase a near identical Leaf for £2K less than the figure that would have been required to settle up for the first one, so I switched cars. I quietly hoped that my second Leaf would only be needed for a year before the Model 3 arrived. I was wrong.

My second Leaf at Shiel Bridge on the road to Skye. (Woods)

Meanwhile, I took on a work gig on the Isle of Skye that lasted the whole of the autumn. Trying to go back and forth to Skye in an EV through increasingly poor Scottish weather was extremely inconvenient when two or three charging stops were required to make the trip. I swapped cars with my son and held my nose while I poured £40 of petrol into his car each week. He, on the other hand, was delighted. He loved the Leaf's nippy acceleration around town and he appreciated the savings from not buying petrol. Further, by transferring ownership to him for six months, he was able to have a charge point installed on his house for free thanks to UK and Scottish government incentives.
As I sat on Skye during late 2017, I watched as the first Model 3s became available in the USA. Most new owners adored them with the usual fervour of the early adopter. Critics pounced on them and poured scorn over them in bucketfuls, pointing out the shoddy, limited state of the car's software, the inconsistency in the headliner material and the wide variations in the gaps between panels. But these were early cars and issues with the new production lines were being worked out.

Changing minds

About this time, two things happened that really made me sit up. The first was when EV expert, Jack Rickard, a grouchy old engineer who converted ICE cars to EVs, managed to procure a crashed Model 3 and proceeded to take apart the battery on his YouTube channel.

Jack Rickard (right) and the Model 3 battery. (YouTube)

Rickard was sceptical about the Model 3 as a car for his daily use but what he found within astonished him. In one of his odd, extremely long, techically rich videos, he pronounced the Model 3's battery "a work of art," and "the best battery in the world, of any kind, anywhere."

Sandy Munro and the 'Superbottle'. (Autoline/YouTube)

The second occurrence was in Detroit, the capital of the US car industry. Engineering consultant Sandy Munro had his firm purchase a Model 3 to take to bits. His company, Munro & Associates Inc., creates enormous reports that detail every last part of a particular car; down to each screw, nut and washer; to reveal what it took to build it and whether it was therefore profitable. Competitors pay very good money for these reports and the new Tesla was eagerly awaited. He was scathing about the Model 3 when he looked at it prior to disassembly. The critics gleefully lapped up his words of poor panel gaps and below par fit and finish. Then he and his engineers got to work pulling it apart to understand how it functioned.

Having dribbled caustic criticism over the car in his first pronouncement, Munro returned with a different story and he manfully admitted that he had to "eat crow". His revised opinion of the Model 3 marvelled at the tightly integrated design and execution of its battery, drive train and associated electronics. To illustrate his amazement, he showed off a part of the car's cooling system, the so-called 'superbottle' which was central to the way that the Model 3 integrated the thermal control of its various systems; the cabin, the motors, the battery and the electronics. The engineers were so proud of their creation, they included a little cartoon of a 'Superbottle' superhero on its surface.

The Tesla Model 3 'Superbottle'. (HyperchangeTV/YouTube)

Munro's point was that legacy car manufacturers could not do this. They are intrinsically limited in their ability to innovate. Their design houses are fractured, each dealing with separate narrow functions and each often unwilling to step outside their own fiefdom and collaborate. The majority of parts are bought in which further inhibits flexibility. Even car assembly is often outsourced with the major contribution of a particular legacy company being the engine itself. Factories for ICE production were their biggest investment. Tesla, on the other hand, are vertically integrated to an extent barely heard of in the car industry. They design and produce 80 per cent of each car and they are deeply focussed on innovation, easily capable of making changes as engineering experience teaches them better ways to proceed.

Creating EVs

As I watched Tesla ramp up production levels of the Model 3 in the face of an overly sceptical business media (that's another story), I became convinced that something very special was happening, and by giving Tesla an interest-free loan, I was a part of making it happen. However, the effect of UK politics on the exchange rate was sobering and I was also waking up to the fact that a car imported from the US would have 10 per cent duty added, then 20 per cent VAT. Add the effects of inflation and this $35K car was getting very expensive.

At one point, I looked at the Hyundai Kona Electric. This was a very attractive package for me and would be a good bit cheaper while still having a 200-plus-mile range. One problem though. They couldn't deliver for over a year and by this time, the Model 3 was on track to be a lot sooner than that.
Hyundai have a problem shared by a lot of legacy car companies. They simply don't want to make EVs. The electric car utterly undermines their vast investment in ICE manufacture as well as the huge dealership networks that make a huge profit from keeping internal combustion engines burning petrol and diesel - fossil fuels. The EVs they do build, they do so in very small quantities, either to comply with regulations or they are too scared to commit while excusing themselves by saying that the EV market is too small to justify high numbers. They even design their EVs around conventions of ICE design, placing the electric 'engine' under the bonnet so that the same production line can be used for the manufacture of all variants; ICE, hybrid or pure electric.
Further, they maintain their habit of outsourcing and choose to buy in batteries rather than making them in house. Yet that is exactly what every other legacy marque is doing; all scrabbling over a very limited supply of batteries from a very few companies like LG Chem, CATL and Samsung.
Tesla has gone for a very different approach from the outset. For batteries, they partnered with Panasonic to produce their own packs in house, part of their vertical integration approach. But more than that, they don't build compliance vehicles. They choose to make products that are utterly compelling, designed to destroy myths that surround electric vehicles, showing them to be anything but milk floats and golf carts. Further, they design from the ground up, having realised that there are huge advantages to this approach.

The Tesla model 3 'skateboard'. The electronics penthouse sits at one end of the structurally strong battery pack. (Tesla via Electrek)

A Tesla Model 3 has a large rectangular battery that forms the floor of the car with all its attendant electronics mounted at one end in a 'penthouse'. A wheel at each corner forms a large skateboard arrangement that keeps the great weight of a lithium-ion battery very low for excellent stability. The drive train (motor and single-gear transmission) are also tucked down low between the wheels so that the space above is free for the designers to do with what they wish.

The 'frunk', or is it the 'froot'? (Woods)

With no engine under the bonnet, a cavity is opened up that can carry luggage. This also allows a well-designed crumple zone to be formed where it is needed most. In a head-on crash, there is no danger of that non-existent engine being pushed into the cabin. The inherent structural strength of the battery pack acts as further protection for passengers, strongly resisting penetration by side impacts. On top of all these hardware innovations is the competence that Tesla have in the computer realm that comes from their Silicon Valley mind set. They integrate all the car's systems into one in much the same way that a modern smartphone does, finishing off the presentation with a large touchscreen that dominates the cabin. The Model 3 is therefore often described as a smartphone on wheels, and rightly so.

Where's my car?

Three years or more to wait for a car is a long time but in May 2019, Tesla finally announced that the Model 3 would be available in right-hand drive and sold in the UK. The next day, I put in my order and began the final stage of my wait. Over the years, I had been canny enough to build up the funds for the base version. However, since the Model 3 had first come out, things had changed.
With sales and manufacture experience behind them, Tesla had decided that the cheapest model would be somewhat more refined than originally suggested. The glass roof would be standard, as would be the vegan leather power seats. The official range of the battery would be a little improved at 240 miles. These were among a suite of upgrades that took the sting out of the fact that the car would cost in the range of £38K (after a UK government incentive). Nevertheless, this was a huge leap for me.
More used to driving small, under-powered hatchbacks, I found myself on social media following the chat of people for whom Audi and BMW were the norm. Not for them my measly 235-horsepower, 5.6-second 0-60 time. They wanted the Performance model that offered 456 horsepower and an acceleration of 3.4 seconds 0-60. I had been pulled into a different world of car ownership; one that wasn't concerned with efficiency or just having a vehicle to commute to work and get to the shops in. These folk wanted to show off. It was all about smart-looking wheels, perfect polished paintwork, and the bragging rights of as much speed as possible. Yet I wasn't the only one being pulled into the luxury car market. It seems I was part of a phenomenon called the Tesla Stretch.
Let me explain. When Models 3s began to ship in large numbers, it was remarkable that an unexpectedly large percentage of the trade-ins were not similar luxury cars. Rather, buyers were trading in more mass market, lower cost vehicles like the Honda Civic, Honda Accord and the Toyota Prius – and the Nissan Leaf. People were stretching themselves to get this car, all without any conventional advertising. Although the cheapest Model 3 is considered a luxury car, many of its buyers were like me, entering this market for the first time.
Waiting was a slightly unnerving affair. Across nearly 4 months after I ordered, I heard from Tesla exactly twice; once near the start to confirm the order and again two days before pickup to inform me of the delivery date. But in between, I learned that there were unusual ways to keep track of progress through the internet.

The online purchase

Tesla does not work through dealers. Customers buy online, direct from the company and there is no haggling. If a test drive is desired, then an arrangement can be made through one of their High Street stores, though in this case, it was a moot point as there were no Model 3s in the country at that time. I was aware that there would be a sudden flood of 3s into the UK and that Tesla staff here would be stretched. While others fulminated on social media about very long wait times on phone lines and Tesla's lack of contact, I decided to just wait. It wouldn't come any faster.
I did learn that if I went to my car's page within my Tesla web account, I could look at the source code, the script that forms the page, and learn a bit more than what the page appeared to be telling me. By that method, I got a pleasant surprise; a vehicle identification number, or VIN. That made the car seem more real. Then when the final invoice appeared and I began to pay for the car, rather than waiting on phone lines or firing off emails, I could confirm receipt of the cash by looking within the source code.
My big fear was that the car would not arrive before I headed to Skye for my annual autumn gig and I strongly felt that it would be excellent for the long drives back and forth. Further, it would be hard to pick the car up once I get onto the island. I needn't have worried. The phone call came and a most suitable date was suggested. Time for a bit of fist pumping and smiles.

The Falcon arrives

When it came to delivery of my Model 3, all went smoothly. Three owners were picking up their cars in the same slot and the Tesla employee spoke to all three of us at the same time. Then having introduced us to our respective cars, he gave us time to pore over them and made himself available to answer queries.

My first reaction was that it's a heck of a big car for me. Americans think of the Model 3 as a small car. I think it is huge! But I'm the guy who is used to a succession of small Toyotas. What also struck me was the sheer power and beauty of its styling. The largish wheels and the way the car's shape forms around them gives the impression of a machine made for speed and aerodynamic flow. The nose has a Porsche-like duck-bill effect and the rear is gently bulbous with a sharp cut-off. The glass roof is a gorgeous curve that accentuates the sleek, futuristic lines of the 3. I can see why, at 0.23, the car has the lowest coefficient of drag of any mass production car. Despite its size, this looks like it is going to live up to its efficiency expectations.

It has often been said that the Tesla Model 3 is a much more impressive vehicle in the flesh than in photos. I can completely agree with that. It's stunning. The interior is minimalist perfection in my opinion. Uncluttered and stylish, dominated by the great 38cm screen through which the vast majority of the car's functions are operated. The power seats with vegan leather are extremely comfortable and the glass roof gives the interior a very pleasant airiness.

There were a few minor details to deal with. I have a personal registration number which I wanted to put on the car, but given the huge numbers of deliveries Tesla were trying to manage, they were refusing to carry out the necessary bureaucracy. However, they did agree to make a set of plates up for me, an arrangement I was happy with. Also, the representative informed me that it came with a 2-metre charging cable. I was aghast! It would be very difficult to position the car in my driveway for such a short cable. Happily, he was wrong. it is a 4-metre cable and I can just make it work.
In the initial set up of the car, I was asked to give it a name. I chose Falcon. This was the name of the Apollo 15 Lunar Module and I had worked with that mission's commander, David Scott, who drove the first car on the Moon, appropriately enough, a small electric car called the Lunar Roving Vehicle or LRV. My personal registration number is a nod to Apollo 15 and labels my car as the Scottish Roving Vehicle or SRV. Also, the workhorse of the SpaceX rockets is called the Falcon 9.

Fun with the Falcon

So began a week of delightful driving and giving folk demonstrations of this amazing car. I can't make comparisons with other cars in the mid-size entry-level luxury sector but even compared to the excellence of the Leaf, this was very special. Acceleration is astounding, sweet and smile inducing. It is always a great party trick for passengers, especially when going up a large hill at the same time.
As I continue to drive it and get used to it, I hope to find it to be as efficient as I hoped. The first indications are good. I felt that the Leaf was doing well if I got 4 miles per kilowatt-hour (kWh). That's 250 watt-hours per mile. The Model 3 offers multiple trip meters that not only give distance, but also time and power use. I have one of these set to record the Falcon's performance from new. So far, its overall consumption of electricity, including demonstrations of acceleration, is 225 watt-hours per mile. That's for a car that is half a ton heavier than a Leaf.
The car's ride is a little hard but its handling is excellent, well planted on the road and precise. The navigation is based on Google Maps and along with the large screen, is a vast improvement on what I'm used to. Tesla is not a company that takes life too seriously when it comes to the customer's experience and so we find a range of amusing diversions in the vehicle's software. Always a laugh is 'Emissions Testing Mode', a play on the fact that the car has no exhaust pipe. Instead we get a virtual whoopee cushion, able to place a fart in any position in the car and with a range of emissions like the 'Ludicrous Fart', the 'Falcon Heavy' and the 'Short Shorts Ripper'. These are all Elon Musk's in jokes.

Emissions Testing Mode. (Woods)

I'm getting used to the car's limited autonomous abilities. I haven't bought the full autonomous package that is intended to take the car to full autonomy one day, but the basic 'Autopilot' software is fascinating. Once on the open road, one press on a lever and cruise control is enabled. But it is traffic aware and will keep a distance from the car in front, even to the point of stopping if necessary. Two presses on the lever, and if the car is happy with conditions, it will also autosteer. This is freaky the first time one tries it. As I hold the steering wheel, which I am required to do, I feel the car steer itself around the bends. I could come to like this a lot on long drives along the UK's motorways.
I have come across a couple of small characteristics that are worth mentioning. On one occasion on the motorway at night, it thought the lane was continuing up a slip road due to the worn out dashes that mark its threshold. The car tried to follow the solid white line up the slip road and I had to wrest it back into its proper lane. Also, its speed control is rather jittery when it is having to slow for a vehicle in front. My wife pointed out that my driving was much smoother and so she could tell when cruise control was on.

Travelling the distance

To me, range anxiety, the last great excuse of those who resist electric cars, is dead and gone. Tesla refuse to state its battery capacity but people seem to have settled on this car having a usable 50kWh. If I achieve 4 miles per kWh, that will mean 200 miles. I look to be getting better than that (about 4.4) so I ought to expect about 220 miles. In day to day driving, this makes range a non issue. I never do that distance going about my normal activities and the battery will be brought up to 90 per cent overnight.
It doesn't matter how long our journey, we never drive further than about 150 miles before taking a break. The roads south of us are well served by Tesla superchargers as well as the more universal rapid chargers. The routes north have a few superchargers to the north east but I am awaiting one being built in Fort William on my route to Skye. I have 5,000 free miles of supercharging to use up and it would be great to do so going back and forth to Skye. Even without this facility, there are plenty of other rapid chargers I can use on the way, many of them still free; Balloch, Arrochar, Crianlarich, GlenCoe, Fort William and Broadford. Those at Tyndrum and Shiel Bridge charge 18p per kWh.
I am delighted that I ought to be able to take the long route to Skye (195 miles) on a single charge in decent weather. But having a good infrastructure will become more important as winter sets in. Wet roads reduce range. So does cold air, high winds, demands on heating systems within a car. This happens in both ICE cars and EVs, but the effect is much more profound in an EV.
When one fills a tank with fossil fuel, there is a certain quantity of energy available in that liquid. Unfortunately, in an ICE car, 75 to 80 per cent of that energy is lost as waste heat, with a little being scavenged to warm the cabin. Compared to that massive loss, the other losses that kick in when conditions are poor are negligible and consequently, people tend not to notice them too much.
EVs are so efficient and so little waste heat is generated that active heaters have to be installed to warm the cabin, further reducing range. All the other extra losses now become very apparent. Having a car that can achieve over two hundred miles in summer gives me a lot of room to manage my charging options on a long trip.

The charging infrastructure

The Model 3's charge port in Europe. (CCS or Combined Charging System)

If I charge at home, the power flows in at 7kW. It adds about 30 miles of range in an hour and costs 12.5p per kWh. This is where the vast majority of my charging takes place. (Update Summer 2020: Having changed my energy supplier to Octopus, I can now take advantage of nighttime charging at only 5p per kWh. Since in summer I can easily achieve 5 miles per kWh, this means I'm driving at a 'fuel' cost of only about 1 pence per mile.)

All Scottish chargers, 3.3kW, 7kW, 50kW and Tesla. Purple indicates the rapid chargers.

The rapid chargers out and about work at a rate of 50kW though in practice, I never see above 40kW. In Scotland, many of these chargers are free, a situation that is expected to change. As the battery approaches full, the charge rate drops so it is better not to try to charge to the top. It only slows progress on a journey. To use the rapids, I carry a card that I have to show to the unit. Any costs due are automatically put onto the account I have with this card. There is talk about making these use contactless payment.

Tesla superchargers in Scotland. Six are active with five to come online soon.

I have just had my first shot on a Tesla supercharger. The two nearest are about 45 miles away. I'm led to understand that my shorter-range Model 3 will charge at levels greater than 100kW. This will add distance at a rate of  over 400 miles an hour. I arrived with a half depleted battery and in 15 minutes, it went from 70kW to 48kW, adding 80 miles of range. Had I been nearer empty, the car would have reached the 100kW figure.

The Falcon at the Abington supercharger. (Woods)

The current cost of supercharging is 24p per kWh but owing to me buying my car with a referral, they are free. I do not need to wave any cards at them. I just plug my car in and Tesla know the car and charges me on the account I have with them.
Having come to the end of my first week as a Model 3 owner, I am elated with the thing. Thanks to Tesla's ability to remotely update the car's software, it will continue to improve through ownership, something that no other make can achieve. It looks stunning, feels great and has a long future ahead without an engine to wear out. There are no service intervals. If something goes wrong, take it to get it fixed. In some cases, they come out to me. Experience is showing that battery health is a non-issue with multi six-figure mileages being the norm.
I strongly suspect that I have bought my last car.

A sustainable catchup

Blog writing tends to fall behind as other aspects of life come to the fore so it has been a while since I wrote about the progress of my solar panels. Having just passed the eighth anniversary of their installation, this seems like a good point to revisit them and see whether they are living up to expectations, especially considering that the interest-free loan I received from the Scottish government has just been repaid.

As a reminder, the system is rated at 3.5kW-peak and cost me £14,300. That's about three times what a similar system would cost nowadays. However, in order to incentivise the take-up of domestic solar generation, the UK government set in place a system, known as the Feed-in Tariff (FiT), to allow people to sell their excess power to the grid at an attractive price. Early adopters, like me, got a very favourable rate that ought to make the panels a worthwhile investment. The deal paid 41.3 pence per kWh (plus an extra wee bit, the export tariff), guaranteed for 25 years with the rate rising with inflation.

At the end of the eighth year, the system had generated 19,689kWh and the income thus far has been £9,198. That's a £5,000 shortfall at this point. I had always had the expectation that the system would pay for itself within 10 years with the remaining term being pure profit and at first glance, with only two years remaining, it isn't going to make it. But part of my calculation is the value of the electricity that I did not have to buy.

It is only when the Sun is shining bright on the panels that they generate more than the house can use. Therefore, essentially all of the low level generation goes to the house. The amount of electricity I have to buy from the supplier is definitely lower and I think it is a fair estimate that I save £350 a year on electricity bills, rising over time as electricity becomes more expensive. If we conservatively say about £1,000 per three years then over 10 years, I should save over £3,000. Add that to the amount received so far, and that is £12,500 approximately. With about £2,500 likely to come in through FiT payments over the next two years, I'm more than likely to cover my initial costs. The next 15 years is profit and after 25 years, if the panels are working okay and although the FiT payments will stop, I'll still be getting free electricity.

Year by year power generation, showing how the most recent year has been the worst by far

Annual electricity generation has varied over the eight years with no obvious downward trend showing until now. The most recent year, 2017/18, was substantially down and it isn't at all clear whether it happened to be cloudier than usual or whether the panels are showing signs of ageing. I think that subsequent years will be required to give more insight. It is possible that the panels had accumulated a film of algae through two mild, snowless winters. There was plenty of snow this past winter and the hope is that the action of it sliding off the panels will have been sufficient to clean their surface.

This graph shows the daily generation throughout the eight years. Lines showing averaged values integrated over 30 days and one year are included to smooth out the inherent variability of the Scottish weather. The rise and fall of the seasons are clear. Small sections where the daily trace goes horizontal for a bit represent periods when I was away from home. The readings for those days are averaged out. A dip in the annual average over the most recent months is notable. Time will tell if this is a trend.

Electric car

One of the destinations for the spare electricity I have been generating is the Nissan Leaf I bought in 2015. If I see the Sun is out and there is a lot of spare power going to the grid, I'll head outside and divert it to recharge the car's traction battery. I've written before about the car and my thoughts on electric vehicle (EV) driving but an update is well in order.

The two years of my astonishingly good PCP deal finished in 2017. The balloon payment to keep the car was unattractive and would also have meant continuing to hire the battery at £80 per month. I elected to give the car back and walk away from the deal. Instead, I managed to source an almost identical Leaf for £2,000 less than my balloon payment would have been and without me having to hire a battery. This car's battery is fully owned. I am delighted with the purchase. The only problem that the car has is that the front brake discs are corroded and will need to be replaced very soon along with the front brake pads.

The previous Leaf had shown no problems with the health of its battery but I was keen to determine how the replacement car had fared over its previous life. The display that shows battery health still had the full 12 bars but this just meant it was above 92 per cent. Was it just above 92 and about to lose a bar, or was it better than that?

Most cars have an ODB2 port that comes to a connector to allow an engineer to plug the car to a computer and see what its electronics are saying. I bought an inexpensive dongle that could read this information and transmit it to a smartphone via Bluetooth. An app for the phone called LeafSpy then allows me to see the battery's true state of health.

A typical display from the LeafSpy app of the fully charged car. 

The LeafSpy display shows the voltage of each of the car's 96 cells. The large figure to right shows the spread of those voltages. only 13 millivolts means they all match each other very well. The red bars indicate that a shunt was used to equalise that cell's final charge. This balancing of the battery is something that the car does for a period of time once 100 per cent charge is reached. The state of charge (SOC) is indicated lower left. It shows that even when the car's dash display says 100 per cent, the internal system holds it back from a true 100 per cent.

For me, the most important figure is among the small writing at the top. This indicates the battery's true state of health (SOH). Very reassuringly, this is over 100 per cent! I've monitored the SOH figure and it hovers between just over 100 and 97 per cent. What makes it improve is a long drive on the motorway with a rapid or quick charge from a CHAdeMO point. These chargers push the power in at around 50kW, fifteen times faster than when I charge at home which the car's inbuilt electronics limits to 3.3kW.

The LeafSpy display also offers values for the battery's internal resistance (Hx), its voltage, the car's odometer and the total number of quick and slow charges it has had (77 and 829 in this example).

What? No Leaf?

Unfortunately, my professional circumstances meant that for a few months last autumn, I did not get to drive my replacement Leaf. I had a job on the Isle of Skye; 145 miles away by ferry and 192 by the Skye Bridge for when ferries are not available. While the ferries were on summer timetable, the Leaf was probably just about doable for returning home at the weekend. Indeed, I took it on a trip to my place of work on one occasion to give it a try.

However, with the sparse winter timetable and the cold weather hitting the car's range, travelling electric via the Skye Bridge did not seem wise, at least not using a 24kWh Leaf. I elected to swap cars with my son for a few months and he could not have been happier. He loves the car for its performance off the line and its tiny running costs. Meanwhile, I had to burn petrol which cost me a fortune compared to what I had been used to.

I am returning to Skye this autumn but for the first half of the job, I plan to use the Leaf and see how I get on. At some point, I'll attempt the long route via the Skye Bridge, as much because I want to try the section between chargers at Fort William and Sheil Bridge, a run of 58.2 miles. In the normal course of things, this should be a doddle in a 24kWh Leaf with a range of 80 to 100 miles in summer. However, when using the quick chargers, there is no point in trying to achieve a 100 per cent charge because the charging rate slows dramatically as the battery gets to around 90 per cent full. This means leaving Fort William with a less than complete charge.

Then to reach the halfway point requires a steep climb of over 1,000 feet from Loch Garry to a viewpoint. Hills are notoriously hard on EVs and I would like to get some experience of the road in conducive conditions to test the range. Coming downhill on the far side would allow a significant amount of power to be regenerated but if too much has been lost on the way up, the gains may not be enough to outweigh them. What would help is a quick charger at the Cluanie Inn which would knock 11 miles off the run from Fort William.

In the meantime, I still have a reservation for a Tesla Model 3. This exciting and very desirable car has been released in the US and for the most part, owners are very pleased with it. The cost of what is an entry-level luxury car is a bit of a stretch for me but I'm saving up for mid-2019 when Tesla say they will begin the production of the right-hand drive versions. I'm weighing up whether I would fork out the additional cash for the long-range version (310 miles versus 220 EPA range). If Tesla proves to be too much of a stretch, the long-range Leaf will be one of the increasing number of EV models available on the market at that time.

Range Rant

A point about electric car range and how it is understood. People make this big deal about the range of electric cars and figures are quoted as if they are the absolute truth. No. No. No. As electric cars become dominant, folk will have to come to terms with how incredibly variable the actual range of a car is, and here's why.

When you pump a certain amount of energy into your petrol or diesel tank, the distance you can travel depends on how much of that energy actually goes into moving you forward and keeping you going against friction and aerodynamic drag, and how much is lost as heat. It is an awful truth that in an internal combustion engine, about 70 per cent of the available energy is lost as heat, often more. So when there are variations in other possible losses, they are barely noticed.

If it becomes colder and the air is denser (and you want to keep warm), or it is wet and the water increases the stiction with the road, or if you find yourself driving into a gale, or the car is highly loaded, or there is a soft tyre, or you just want to go faster and hammer along the motorway at an illegal 80mph, or there is a 1,200-foot ascent to your destination - the effect of all these extra losses are so small compared to the massive loss through heat that only a particularly attentive driver will notice them.

But the efficiency of the electric drive train completely changes all this. With much less than 10 per cent of the energy in the battery being lost through unwanted heating, all these other variables suddenly become very noticeable and crucially important. The EPA range figure for my Leaf is 84 miles (a US standard rating). My experience has been that in summer, my 24kWh car is capable of over 100 miles on a full charge before coming to a halt. I would never let it get to that but I monitor its progress by watching the percentage drop as the miles go up.

In winter, when the variables stack up against the car, I've calculated ranges that go below 60 miles. The temperature had dropped to -5C, the traffic to work was stop/start (mostly stop) and I had the heating on. That's virtually a 2:1 ratio between seasons! Knowing that, it seems crazy to me that the industry fixates on quoting range figures. It misleads the public into thinking that they ought to get that kind of range month in, month out. They won't and they will sorely notice it when they get caught out on that bad day when all the variables stack up against them.

The situation will be improved as battery capacities go up, as they surely will, and the charging infrastructure improves. Again, Tesla leads the way. Their cars, though relatively expensive, always have decently large batteries and the company has been exemplary in its investment in charging infrastructure through the Supercharger network.

And my final rant for now. It is the height of corporate stupidity that not one of the other car manufacturers has taken Tesla up on its offer to share its superchargers. They are so far behind the curve, it beggars belief. The superchargers are sited to suit long distance travel. There are always plenty of stalls at each site. They are fast and easy to use and reliable. The rest of the charging infrastructure is pathetic in comparison - slow, isolated, unreliable, finicky to use requiring cards and apps. Yuk!

Moving on...

Heating solutions

Over a year ago, I wrote about my intention to upgrade our home's heating system with one that uses the principle of the heat pump. As with my solar installation, this would attract incentives which were meant to defray the high initial cost of the installation. The idea is like a refrigerator in reverse. Outside air is drawn across a heat exchanger where it is cooled. The heat that is given up to the exchanger is then taken into the house and concentrated to warm the radiators. No fossil fuel is burned except that which might have been used to generated the electricity that powers the system. As we are with Bulb who supply electricity from 100 per cent renewable sources, that wasn't an issue.

In the end, we elected not to go ahead with the work for various reasons. The main one was that the house would have undergone significant disruption as almost every one of our radiators would have had to be replaced. Also, because we were intending to get a hybrid system, one which would allow gas to contribute to the heat in the very coldest conditions and warm our hot water supply, the incentives were less than expected.

Instead, we did two things. First, we insulated the floor and roof space of my room at the back of the house. This made a huge difference to the comfort of that space. Second, we upgraded our boiler to a much more efficient condensing type. Not a perfect solution by any means but one that has made our home more comfortable while burning the same quantity of gas. As it happens, 10 per cent of the gas supplied by Bulb comes from renewable sources. Hopefully that ratio will increase.