Anybody want a Zoe?

[Mr Gus]

Swwills.

"I'm telling you son, the world is your lobster" A. Daley.

[Swwils]

There is same spec cars with 34k, full history, not base, owned battery for 8.9k, it might not shift for that price especially as your essentially capped by the lease buyouts (ive seen sub £3k now for this, RCI have made bank on these almost 10th anniversary packs).

On the flip side the PEB on these 15-16 zoes is very over engineered so should last a long time, usually get done in by leaks not the DC/DC design itself.

If you are interested, the early zoes have a very unusual charging architecture. When it was designed it wasn't clear what the predominant architecture around would be. So instead of the now typical standalone onboard AC charge (1ph 7kw, 3ph 11kw turned into DC) you get on other EVs. These early ones can charge at 43KW AC within the car so we made a nice design to avoid a big heavy converter; would have been over 35KG for inductor alone in typical design... So instead we think and use a large inductor already in the car... Motor windings! These are inductor actual for the boost converter (also the drive inverter shared) to provide charging function!

Downsides is no true isolation between supply phase and the motor/car shell so a very robust earth is needed. (Zoe does a true earth loop test before it starts charging) - this causes the reported charging fussiness, also I guess responsible for very many charge station RCB trips and firmware team must have had good time with that. Its also loud whine because large windings of the motor and other difficult harmonics.

Alas 43KW AC charging didn't catch on and mostly gone now. The system still in place in all zoes, just optimised for 22kw limited configuration in R motors. Unsure if it made it to the MeganE or the Ariya.

[Mr Gus]

Whilst the wife one time looked at zoe, she deemed it to uncomfortable, (spinal injury from sport & childbirth, ..hospital) & the fact that when they did start coming through BCA en masse the zoe's finnicky charging problem, (so many early monitored chargers staff were saying "its usually the zoe that causes problems" locally if a zoe was charging next to us in Peterborough queensgate it became dicey to plug in, everything tripped, necessitating a hard reset of the naff chargers by staff, extending your paid parking quite considerably when you "nipped into lewises"?

I loved the renault 5 & understood it morphing into a clio (ice version) & hoped the zoe would take over from it especially when the bigger battery models arrived, but sadly bigger, taller, wider faux suv style like the nissan jike, proliferate taking peoples understanding of smaller & lighter helps squeeze mileage out the window, that & lease vs ownership driving style (keep the bodywork appearance ok, screw anything not visible as its going back seems to make a tranche of drivers far less careful & lead footed, certainly younger folk at least seemed least able to understand "drive like a twat, get a twats mileage range" & adapt.

So we always stayed away from the zoe, the leaf was comfy & roomy has a big boot all things considered, ..& the go-kart twizy just never turned up for sale at anything other than ridiculous second hand prices.