Electric Advice

Q: How much does it cost to charge an electric car? A: In a nutshell, charging at home on solar panels is the cheapest way to recharge your electric car; using a commercial fast-charger will be the most expensive. But, this is another one of those apparently simple questions that produces a relatively involved answer.

Like most other elements of the Tesla experience, the EV-only brand does servicing somewhat differently to its competitors.For example, scheduling a service appointment needs to be done via the companion phone app, and Tesla offers either a mobile service or a service centre appointment option for each visit. If the car is dropped at a service centre, Tesla will notify the owner via the app when the car is ready to be picked up.Visits are also not defined by kilometre or time-based intervals, the car’s computer will inform owners when servicing is required on a condition-based interval.The service manual for a Model 3 and Model Y stipulates that, at very least, the brake fluid and cabin air filter needs to be checked and replaced if necessary every 24 months, the air conditioning desiccant bag needs to be replaced every six years, and tyres need to be rotated every 10,000km.Tesla’s new-car warranty is behind the pace compared to most mainstream automakers, limited to just four years and 80,000km. However, a separate high-voltage component warranty for the drive motors and battery pack covers eight-years and 192,000km. Seventy per cent of the car’s original battery capacity is guaranteed at that time.In summary: Condition-based servicing seems to make sense for an EV, and there should be significantly fewer parts and, subsequently, costs involved. However, Tesla is hardly transparent about the costs or intervals involved and its new-car warranty is behind the pace. 6/10If you want to find out more about a specific manufacturer's capped price servicing, please see below:

Deciding on the best value car in Australia is not a straightforward task. Among other things, it depends on A: How an individual buyer values different elements, and: B: What properties and skill-sets are most important to a particular type of car.

Electric vehicles are known for their reduced running and servicing costs. That, combined with the environmental argument, is the reason they exist after all.

When it comes to hybrid vehicles, charging is achieved via a self-charging battery that is used to power an electric motor working in tandem with an internal combustion engine (ICE).

Electric cars are on the rise and are allowing new brands to enter the automotive world. Brands like Tesla, Rivian and Lucid Air have all emerged in recent years to take advantage of this seismic shift in the way cars are built and what people will buy.

Q: What is the difference between torque and power?A: It’s the age-old question that still baffles many car enthusiasts, but it’s really not that difficult when you break it down. As in: Torque is the force produced by (in cars and trucks) either burning a hydro-carbon fuel in an engine or (increasingly these days) applying an electric current to an electric motor. Power is simply that torque multiplied by engine speed.Fundamentally, then, an engine’s torque is the measure of its muscle and how much it can flex. Power is how fast it can flex it across a given period of time. In a boxer, torque would be how hard he or she could punch; power is how fast they could produce those blows.In the car world, the fundamental difference between horsepower and torque is that torque is real. Power, meantime, is the theoretical result of a mathematical equation that amounts to torque multiplied by revolution speed.Want to dig a little deeper? Okay, torque is a twisting (as opposed to linear) force that wants to rotate something. In the case of your car’s engine, that something is the crankshaft. It’s torque that actually makes the car move and accelerate (as that torque is passed from the crankshaft, though the transmission, differential and, finally, the axles).How fast it accelerates is down to power which, again, is a measure of how fast the engine can produce that torque-force moment. (The equation is also referred to as hp vs torque, horsepower vs torque and power vs torque, but it’s the same science.)Think of it a bit like a huge cargo ship. If you want to accelerate it through water, you need an engine that produces massive torque to get all that mass moving and keep it moving. It won’t be fast (relatively) but it will move thousands of tonnes through water which (in a macro sense) is quite sticky and produces a lot of drag. If, on the other hand, you want to go water-skiing, you use a smaller boat that doesn’t require the same force to get it moving, and power it with an engine that produces a lot of power that can move the vessel quickly.Torque vs power in cars is interesting, because it greatly affects the way the car feels to drive. A low-revving engine (like a turbo-diesel) with a lot of torque for its displacement, won’t rev like a petrol engine so it won’t make as much power (even though it can feel muscular because of its torque).The flip-side is a small capacity petrol engine which doesn’t make a whole lot of torque, but revs to 9000rpm, thereby multiplying that modest torque by a huge factor to arrive at a decent horsepower figure.The concepts of torque vs horsepower are no different between conventional petrol engines and electric motors. In both cases, the torque is generated at the crankshaft (or output shaft on a motor) and is then transferred to the wheels. In fact, the theory holds true for whatever power source we’re talking about. Even when you spin a lazy-susan on a table, you’re applying torque (from your arm) to do so. A wind generator? Yep, that wind hitting the blades of the turbine is creating a torque force, too.Actually, the windmill analogy is also a good way to explain how power is dependent on the rate at which that torque is applied. The faster that wind turbine turns, the more power (in this case electricity) it makes. It really is that simple.Getting back to cars, vehicles with lots of torque tend to be relaxed to drive and don’t require either you or the gearbox to work too hard. A car with less torque but lots of power, meantime (a typical arrangement for race-cars) will require more use of the gears to keep the engine spinning fast and producing plenty of horsepower.Where the engine develops its maximum torque also has an effect here. Again, smaller motors that like to rev do so because their torque peak is high in the rev range. That contrasts with an electric motor which can muster its maximum torque at standstill, which is why electric cars feel so frisky as you leave the green light.Having maximum torque at super-low revs is also why EVs don’t (generally) need more than one gear to take them through the whole range of everyday speeds. Contrast that with a 50cc Grand Prix motorcycle form the 1960s and 70s. Obviously, with just 50cc of capacity, these were never going to be torquey engines and what torque they did make was concentrated in a very narrow rev band. So, to keep the engine producing as much torque (and, therefore power) as possible for as much of the time as possible, the makers produced these bikes with no less than 14 gears. The riders were kept busy but amazingly, these tiny engines would propel the machine and rider to speeds of around 180km/h.

The Chinese automotive sector is on the rise globally, and here in Australia. The likes of MG, Haval and GWM have arrived in recent years and are already making their mark on the sales charts.

What is the best small car in Australia?

If your first instinct is to say ‘Mini’ you’d be wrong. How wrong? Precisely 168cm wrong. That’s because while the original Mini hatch was a compact 305cm in length, the world’s smallest car is the Peel P50 which measures just 137cm long.