Daily Archives: July 15, 2015

2015 Kia Soul EV first drive

Electric Cars, Kia, News, Reviews and Comment, Soul EV

Kia is set to launch its first electric car in the UK. The Soul EV looks great, but high-tech typically brings high prices. Can this stylish EV really ever add up?

[From November 2014] According to figures compiled by Kia, the fastest growing segment in the car market is electric vehicles, so it’s not surprising that the Korean giant has chosen to make it’s popular mini SUV, the Soul, available as an electric-only version. The Soul EV goes on sale in the UK before Christmas.

Far from simply ditching the conventional engines in favour of an electric motor and a battery, the Soul has undergone a fairly radical rethink in order to go zero-emission. With Kia also working on hybrid, plug-in hybrid and hydrogen technologies, it is fair to say that the firm is hedging its bets a little, but the Soul is its first attempt in the UK, at least, to push something that doesn’t run on petrol or diesel.

Kia is going to appoint a selection of its dealers to sell and service the EV, but it has modest sales expectations, with around 170 units a year expected to find homes. As a result, only one trim level and two colour schemes are available.

What’s the 2015 Kia Soul EV like to drive?

The standard Soul drives pretty neatly anyway, but it would reasonable to expect the extra weight of the batteries and electric motor to dull things dynamically. Oddly, that is not really the case. From behind the wheel, the Soul feels more than eager enough, as many electric cars do, thanks to instant availability of torque from rest. It can sprint to 60mph in around 11.5 seconds which is around a second slower than 1.6 diesel models, but the EV does so in virtual silence. The claimed range for the EV is 124 miles on a single charge and the top speed is 90mph, which mirrors the official figures of the Soul EV’s natural predator, the Nissan Leaf.

In order to take the additional weight of the batteries, the floor of the Soul has been beefed up with extra steel crossmembers, which has the effect of making it more rigid than the standard car. There’s also some 277kg of batteries beneath the floor, although if you are going to add weight anywhere, between the wheels and low down is not a bad place to do it. Aerodynamic improvements have also been made to make the EV slip through the air as cleanly as possible and this has reduced the wind noise at speed.

The effect of all this is that the Soul EV drives really very well. For town driving, there is a mode with extra regenerative braking to keep the batteries topped up, which allows one-pedal operation, where backing off the accelerator pedal essentially applies enough braking force. For most conditions, the standard drive mode requires less thought.

Refinement is usually a strong point of any electric car and so it is here. The ride is a touch firm, but is never uncomfortable, even over poor road surfaces.

What’s the 2015 Kia Soul EV like inside?

At a glance, the interior of the EV looks much like the standard Soul’s, but there are a few key differences. First up, Kia is keen to ensure that buyers know the EV is as green as it can manage, which means a lot of the interior materials are greener versions than those seen on the standard car. Items such as the dashboard panel, headlining and various plastic panels are made using bio- rather than petroleum-based plastics with a view to the car being more recyclable at the end of its life. It is nice place to be, though, regardless of what it is made out of.

There is only one interior finish available, and no options, because it’s already very well equipped with a large colour touch-screen infotainment and nav system. The cabin is finished in light grey with light blue piping; despite the floor being 80mm higher than in the standard car, to accommodate the batteries, the EV has reprofiled seats which ensure headroom is just as good as in the very roomy normal Soul. Both front and rear seats are comfortable and there’s plenty of room for four adults.

Boot space is also slightly reduced by the need to house all the electric paraphernalia under the floor, reducing the regular capacity by 30 litres, at 324 litres with the seats in place. All told, though, the boot is big enough for a car in this class and easily eclipses the BMW i3’s.

One thing that Kia is very proud of in the Soul is the hyper-efficient heating system. Typically, running the heater or air-conditioning in an electric car has a devastating effect on the range. Kia has developed two key technologies to mitigate this as much as possible. First is a setting which heats or cools only the occupied part of the cabin when there is one person on board. This means considerably less energy is expended and there is no detriment to the comfort of occupants.

The other clever development is that, rather than having an electric heating element to put a bit of warmth in the car on a cold morning, the Soul harvests warm air from around the car’s complex electronic systems, and from the ‘back end’ of the air-conditioning system, to ensure that no warm air is wasted when it might be put to good use. Kia reckons this system gives the car a significant advantage over rival cars, which lose considerable range in order to keep the cabin comfortable in hot or cold conditions.

Should I buy one?

Maybe.

Kia suggests the price is likely to be around £30k, with the government grant for plug-in cars dropping that to around £25k. That puts it at a slight disadvantage to the Nissan Leaf, which costs £23,590 after the grant when comparably equipped, and assuming you want to own the batteries – which is your only option with the Soul.

Nissan also offers the option of leasing the batteries for a monthly cost with the Leaf, which means you won’t be responsible for any maintenance, and also brings much lower initial purchase costs, with the top-spec Leaf Flex costing £18,590. Renault offers the an even cheaper rival to the Soul – the Zoe, which is smaller and can only be had if you lease the batteries from £70 per month, but will still seat four comfortably and be practical to live with, and costs from just £13,995.

Viewed in isolation, the Soul EV is a very appealing, technically clever and nice to drive electric vehicle but even with the government discount for plug-in cars, it is still likely to be too pricey for the majority to consider as a stylish second car. If you like the Soul, a petrol version in a comfortable trim level will be £10,000 cheaper, and that buys you a lot of petrol.

That said, if an electric car fits into your lifestyle, the Soul EV is a very likable, practical addition to the market and should be considered a genuine rival to the Nissan Leaf, Renault Zoe and even the BMW i3.

Source: What Car

Climate March poster on the Underground (Image: T. Larkum)

One magical politician won’t stop climate change – It’s up to all of us

Energy and Climate Change, Opinion

Lots of people eagerly study all the polls and reports on how many people believe that climate change is real and urgent. They seem to think there is some critical mass that, through the weight of belief alone, will get us where we want to go. As if when the numbers aren’t high enough, we can’t achieve anything. As if when the numbers are high enough, beautiful transformation will magically happen all by itself or people will vote for wonderful politicians who do the right thing.

Climate March poster on the Underground (Image: T. Larkum)
Climate March poster on the London Underground (Image: T. Larkum)

But it’s not the belief of the majority or the work of elected officials that will change the world. It will be action, most likely the actions of a minority, as it usually has been. This week’s appalling Obama administration decision to let Shell commence drilling in the Arctic sea says less about that administration, which swings whichever way it’s pushed, than that we didn’t push harder than the oil industry. Which is hard work, but sometimes even a tiny group can do it.

Take San Francisco, population 850,00, which is near the very top for percent of people who believe in climate change, according to a pollster I spoke to recently. I wish that meant that there were 850,000 climate activists in my town, or even 425,000. But I’ve watched for two years (and sometimes joined) the group of people pushing the San Francisco Retirement Board to divest its half billion dollars or so in fossil fuel investments. In April of 2013, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed an exhilarating unanimous (but nonbinding) resolution asking the Employee Retirement Board to divest.

Out of the 850,000 San Franciscans, seven or eight dedicated people have kept the divestment initiative alive, while the retirement board balks, stalls and grumbles about how straightforward changes in a modest portion of their portfolio are difficult, impossible, dangerous (even as they lost tens of millions when petroleum and coal stocks crashed). The activists pushing this forward are not one percent of San Franciscans, which would be 8500 people, or .1%, 850, but about .001% of people in the city.
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They’ve come this far by being dedicated, tenacious, deeply informed on the issue and on board policy, and by regularly meeting among themselves and attending most of the meetings. Occasionally they get more people to show up, but they’ve carried the weight for two years. Recently they had a substantial victory, and they may yet win. For all of us. Otherwise divestment might have slipped away in San Francisco. It’s been the same at schools from Rutgers to Stanford: small groups of students and allies have pushed divestment and, sometimes, won. This is the kind of race that tortoises, and not hares, tend to win.

Sometimes small groups matter. Larger groups often do. People have the power, when we choose to use it, to act on it, to dedicate ourselves to change. We have so many stories about how power is elsewhere. As the Obama Administration nears its end, I keep hearing from the bitterly disappointed and the generally bitter, who seem to believe that one man should have reversed the status quo more or less singlehandedly. They blame, credit, and obsess about the 53-year-old in the White House. But Obama is just the weathervane, and he knew it when he was elected.

Then, he implored the great wind that lifted him up and carried him along to keep going. Instead, people believed the job was done when it had just started and went home. Had the exhilarating coalition of the young, the nonwhite, the progressive, the poor who are usually excluded from political power kept it up, had they believed the power was ours, not his, we could have had an extraordinary eight years. The failures are not his alone – we can’t expect more of politicians than of the civil society that could push them. We can expect more of ourselves.

The climate movement is picking up steam – or rather wind. This January you could even see Mitt I-Will-Build-the-KXL-Pipeline-Myself Romney start to waver on the reality of climate change and its causes.

Yes, that’s the same Mitt “I’m not in this race to slow the rise of the oceans or to heal the planet” Romney we heard from in 2012.

In 2004 Senator John McCain actually said, while pushing emissions-control legislation:

“There is strong scientific consensus about the fact that global climate change is occurring, and occurring as a result of human activity.”

By 2008, he was picking a climate denier as his running mate. Corporate wind machines make them spin and spin, these ambitious men.

“Marco Rubio Used to Believe in Climate Science. Now He’s Running for President”, ran a Mother Jones headline.

He knows, as my mother would’ve said, on which side his bread is buttered.

We complain about politicians spinning, rather than recognizing that this is exactly what we want a weathervane — or hey, a wind turbine — to do, or recognizing that it’s up to us to be that wind. That’s why the ordinary people of Richmond, California, managed to beat the candidates mighty Chevron Corporation backed to elect a full sweep of green populists to city government last November. It’s also popular to say that we need to get money out of politics, but the people in that Chevron-refinery-dominated town proved that even money can’t buy everything if people are passionately engaged. As my friend Jamie Henn of 350.org said, we don’t need to get money out so much as we need to get people in (and by that I don’t think he means obediently voting at the end of the process, but transforming the process, inside and outside electoral politics).

Too many of us seem far too fond of narratives of our powerlessness, maybe because powerlessness lets us off the hook. As we head into that most dismal of situations, another unbearably long electoral cycle, many who care about climate change will say that we need an elected official who will represent us or a great majority who agree with us. But we don’t need everyone on board; we don’t need one magic person in office; we need ourselves. To act. It’s the wind, not the weathervanes.

Source: The Guardian