Looking After Car Battery

GroundHog day. I'm not biting.
 
wyx087 said:
Fixed it for you ;)

Telling people to drive unnecessarily feels like saying to an older gentleman who only use their smart phone for phone calls: "you must to set up Email and social media, because that's how smart phones are supposed to be used."

Or telling a Canon 1DX owner "you must use the high FPS continuous shooting mode and shoot sports, because that's how the camera is designed to be used."
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Nothing like your examples at all.
A car ICE or Electric, that sits in the rain and gets very little use, will have brake discs that will start to rust, next time the car is used and you brake, the pads will remove the surface rust, but that rust will have started eating into the discs, over time the surface gets more and more pitted, that can lead to uneven wear on the pads and discs, cracks could start to form that can eventually leave the brakes in a dangerous condition.
Some things are alot easier to maintain and ensure they continue to work efficiently if you actually use them, rather than use them for a short while and once in a blue moon.
 
nilagin said:
Nothing like your examples at all.
A car ICE or Electric, that sits in the rain and gets very little use, will have brake discs that will start to rust, next time the car is used and you brake, the pads will remove the surface rust, but that rust will have started eating into the discs, over time the surface gets more and more pitted, that can lead to uneven wear on the pads and discs, cracks could start to form that can eventually leave the brakes in a dangerous condition.
Some things are alot easier to maintain and ensure they continue to work efficiently if you actually use them, rather than use them for a short while and once in a blue moon.
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It's not just the braking system that suffers, the motorhome forums are full of stories about 'sleepy motorhome disease' when vehicles are not used regularly. The emissions systems of turbo diesel engined vehicles can suffer serious harm if the vehicles are not run regularly & for long enough to warm up fully. Batteries can go flat, tyres can develop flatspots too.
 
And show room EV kept at low state of charge will have its battery damaged. The Nissan Leaf I saw in the showroom was left in the same way as ICE cars, at 2% charge. Li-on battery prefer to be kept at 50%.

But all that doesn't change the fact telling people to unnecessarily use the machinery is not really a good solution. We have been making machines for so long now, we should have figured out ways to cater for vast majority of use-cases. Low mileage for small cars, motorhome parked up for long time are all normal use-cases for those machines.

broc said:
Qashqai was 6th best selling car in UK 2019 and 3rd best selling car in the UK YTD 2020.......
https://www.smmt.co.uk/vehicle-data/car-registrations/

A comparable MG would be 'from' £24.5k after Govt grant not the <£19k she paid & I wouldn't trust MG residuals 3-4 years out.
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Simple supply and demand. The Qashcow is made in such high volume, selling them is the bottleneck. EV's are made in such low volume, demand is high enough to not need any discount. Case in point, how many reservations are there for new Golf mk8 (if any) vs ID-3.

The MG isn't "from" £24.5k if you've actually done your research. It's from £22k, I just said £24.5k because this trim is probably closes to your N-connect trim spec, which has RRP from £27k for comparable automatics.

Here's a very current example of supply and demand:
Consider surgical masks, they are made in huge numbers for a large number of applications. You can get them cheaply no problem, currently there's still no supply problem buying online and prices still seem reasonable. But try to buy a N95 anti-virus mask, they were not made in large numbers and prices has gone up from a few pounds when outbreak news just came out, to over £15 for one now.
 
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wyx087 said:
And show room EV kept at low state of charge will have its battery damaged. The Nissan Leaf I saw in the showroom was left in the same way as ICE cars, at 2% charge. Li-on battery prefer to be kept at 50%.

But all that doesn't change the fact telling people to unnecessarily use the machinery is not really a good solution. We have been making machines for so long now, we should have figured out ways to cater for vast majority of use-cases. Low mileage for small cars, motorhome parked up for long time are all normal use-cases for those machines.
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Using the car for more than a couple of miles is the norm and is the vast majority of cases.
 
nilagin said:
Using the car for more than a couple of miles is the norm and is the vast majority of cases.
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Al1944 said:
My previous car, a 2009 1.6 petrol Ford Focus, was bought at one year old and sold last year. IIRC the mileage was 22000.
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2000 miles a year, assume the car is driven every single day (unlikely), that is 5.5 miles a day. Quite normal for a car to be driven 5 miles a day isn't it?

The average commute mileage is something like 30 miles daily isn't it? For every 100+ miles commuter, there has to be 3 low mileage driver to get that average.

When my wife drives, during last cold, windy and rainny winter days, she drive 1 mile to nursery, 1 mile back, another 2 miles to pick up. 4 miles in total for that day. I can see her annual mileage to be very similar, if not lower to OP's.
My parents, a few years ago when before my mother retired, she'd only drive 3 miles to next village, then 3 miles back. They also had battery problem with their Volvo.
My neighbour, apart from occational long trips, only uses his petrol car to go to nearby station to pick up daughter when it's dark, that's less than 3 miles for most days.
 
wyx087 said:
2000 miles a year, assume the car is driven every single day (unlikely), that is 5.5 miles a day. Quite normal for a car to be driven 5 miles a day isn't it?

The average commute mileage is something like 30 miles daily isn't it? For every 100+ miles commuter, there has to be 3 low mileage driver to get that average.

When my wife drives, during last cold, windy and rainny winter days, she drive 1 mile to nursery, 1 mile back, another 2 miles to pick up. 4 miles in total for that day. I can see her annual mileage to be very similar, if not lower to OP's.
My parents, a few years ago when before my mother retired, she'd only drive 3 miles to next village, then 3 miles back. They also had battery problem with their Volvo.
My neighbour, apart from occational long trips, only uses his petrol car to go to nearby station to pick up daughter when it's dark, that's less than 3 miles for most days.
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UK annual average mileage is 7900 per annum, several years ago it was as much as 10k.
At a mile each way, twice a day, it's not a car your wife needs, it's exercise. 10-15 minutes walk each way. That is just plain lazy.
 
nilagin said:
UK annual average mileage is 7900 per annum, several years ago it was as much as 10k.
At a mile each way, twice a day, it's not a car your wife needs, it's exercise. 10-15 minutes walk each way. That is just plain lazy.
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If UK annual average is 8k, how many 3k drivers is needed to balance out a 16k driver? Answer: more than 2.
In another words, the median is probably 5k.
So for every high mileage driver, there is more than double waaaay below average drivers to get the average mileage of 8k. Therefore, the high mileage drivers are the outliers and it is norm cars only get driven 2-7k a year.
Then we get car enthusiastics turn around and say "drive it unnecessarily" and car manufacturers tell people the same, never mind people's time wasted and unnecessary additional emissions because the cars can't be designed to meet the norm.

It will not be 15 minutes walk when pushing a buggy. It will not be excise or pleasant in the cold, wind and rain. Finally, this is not your place to judge.
 
wyx087 said:
If UK annual average is 8k, how many 3k drivers is needed to balance out a 16k driver? Answer: more than 2.
In another words, the median is probably 5k.
So for every high mileage driver, there is more than double waaaay below average drivers to get the average mileage of 8k. Therefore, the high mileage drivers are the outliers and it is norm cars only get driven 2-7k a year.
Then we get car enthusiastics turn around and say "drive it unnecessarily" and car manufacturers tell people the same, never mind people's time wasted and unnecessary additional emissions because the cars can't be designed to meet the norm.

It will not be 15 minutes walk when pushing a buggy. It will not be excise or pleasant in the cold, wind and rain. Finally, this is not your place to judge.
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My wife has had her car a couple of years, it only gets used two maybe three times a week, but the minimum distance it does is around 5-6miles. The first year she had it, she only covered about 900 miles between MOT's, just because a vehicle has a low annual mileage, it doesn't naturally follow that the journeys are short.
There are thousands of people who have more than one car, cars that only come out in the spring and summer, cover a couple of thousand miles during those months before being stored away again.
Unless the buggy has square or no wheels, it isn't going to slow a walking pace down by much.
 
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