242 - The BYD Dolphin Episode

Gary :

Hi, I'm Gary and this is episode 242 of EV Musings, a podcast about renewables, electric vehicles, and things that are interesting to electric vehicle owners. On the show today, we'll be looking at the BYD Dolphin. ♪♪♪ Before we start, just a reminder that you can support the show through either Patreon or Ko-fi.com. Links are in the show notes. Every little helps.

Thank you. ♪♪♪ Our main topic of discussion today is another in our occasional series where I chat with EV drivers about the vehicles they own and what it's actually like living with them. And in this episode, we'll be looking at the BYD Dolphin.

So let's get the basics out of the way. According to the official BYD webpage, the Dolphin comes in four different trims, Active, Boost, Comfort, and Design. Active and Boost have a 44.

9 kilowatt hour battery and charge at a maximum of 65 kilowatts. Comfort and Design have a 60. 4 kilowatt hour battery and charge at a maximum of 88 kilowatts.

The WLTP combined range for the Active is 211 miles, the Boost, 196 miles, the Comfort and Design, 265 miles, with efficiency ratings around 3. 9 miles per kilowatt hour. Prices between 25,000 and 31,000 pounds, depending on which model you get.

And to put that into perspective, prices for the Peugeot E208 only start where the Dolphin prices top out. Of the Volkswagen ID. 3, you'd need an extra 4,000 pounds to get the entry level.

There are numerous YouTube reviews of the Dolphin out there and they're all fairly consistent in their conclusions. It's a great little car, well-appointed, well-built, but perhaps a little underpowered and probably not a long-distance runner. But how much of that is true?

And can you really get a good idea of an electric car in a two-hour test drive? Well, I maintain that no, you can't, which is why I want to bring on Adrian Bond, who's owned a Dolphin for six months. So welcome to the show, Adrian.

Can you start by introducing yourself and tell people a little bit about what kind of work you do?

Adrian :

Thanks, Gary. So I'm a Chartered Electrical Electronics Systems Engineer and I work in sort of technical assessments in London.

electric vehicles is back in: 2008

n heat pumps, had those since: 2008

Solar PV back in: 2014

The story started there with: 2008

People would tell him in the office, it was the time when people were telling us, go out and buy a diesel, wasn't quite convinced by that. And also a used Toyota Prius, which back then people were telling me, not the right cars, never work, will die after five years, have to change the batteries. sound like sort of familiar story.

And so we went to test drove that brilliant car as an engineering solution, it was a really, really nice design to reduce a lot of the sort of pollution in town and stuff. So we went for that and we drove that car, which they said would last for a few years for 10 years. It's still on the road 20 years later.

The 10 years, it was time to get rid of that. It was too small a car. We need something which would take three bikes in the back, do long distance driving.

And back in: 2018

And it would do 25 miles to a charge. It still does. We've still got it.

nd car, we were talking about: 2020

We did look at some cheaper sort of fuel cars and thought, no, we'll go for a full EV. And so we started looking around and the Zoe was a bit too small. So we went for the Nissan Leaf, 24 kilowatt hour, really nice cars.

Tried to find one which in nice metallic red, they do full Technica with front heated seats, back heated seats, all the technology they threw into it. And so we went and bought the Leaf, only 80 mile an hour range on it, but that's exactly what we needed. Just a city runaround, something really cheap to run.

Drove that for three years, but even though I was taking it on 100, 150 mile an hour, 50 mile sort of trips, it was starting to get tiring having to stop off every 80 miles to go and find somewhere to charge up. And so after three years, it was time to move on. And that's how we ended up moving on into the BYD Dolphin, which we've had about six months now.

Gary :

As you know, as you're a long time listener to the show, I occasionally do these episodes such as this, where we get somebody on like yourself, who's driven one of these cars for more than just, you know, the 20 minute test drive or the two day test drive, someone who's actually lived with it for a length of time. So talk to me about why you chose the Dolphin versus any of the other vehicles that were potentially available at the time that you made the decision.

Adrian :

So I chose the Dolphin. So I originally test drove some, an MG4 and Orbi Funky Cat down at the fully charged show down in Farnborough. And that was the first time to try a modern, what I'll call a modern electric vehicle, five years or a lot newer than the Leaf. And they're both impressive cars.

And so when it came to actually making a decision to move on last year, I said to my wife, let's go and have a look at a few of these cars. We went down and looked at the Orbi Funky Cat at the grid serving brain tree. They had one in the display there.

So the boot is far too small. It's not a functional boot. So it's sort of a very tight fit.

They're giving the room to the cabin, which was nice. And the MG4 was a bit big for what we needed, but I had been seeing quite a lot of reviews about this BYD Dolphin, a new car into the UK market. And so they were doing an introductory offer and I said to my wife, let's go up to Norwich, which is about 60 miles from here, it's the nearest BYD centre.

And they're still building it when we turned up there, there was lots of refitting going on. And so we had a test drive of it there and really impressed. It was big inside.

It had all the safety features my wife wanted. The 360 degree camera you get, it was a breaker for her. If it hasn't got it, we're not getting it.

She needs that sort of safety so she can park and see what's going on around her. We had a test drive in that, she really liked it, but the real deal for that was that we had no cash pot, the leaf would, and that was now a 10 year old car, wasn't going to get much for that. And so it was the deal which came with it.

It was, remember now it's 269 pounds down, 269 pounds a month, 8,000 miles, four year PCP and we went, okay. And they said, which colors you want? You can have a dirty white or an off gray.

And so ended up with the off gray. And there are, am I right in thinking there are three different spec levels that the Dolphin provides? Which one did you go for?

So the two specs were offered at the time was the comfort of the design. So the design is the top spec. It comes with everything and a sunroof and wireless charging for the phone and a few other bits and pieces with it.

But the sunroof then meant there was a sunshade and the sunshade would have to be rolled back into this lump, which suddenly appeared in the back passenger seat above your head. So we've got a six foot. So now I'm six foot two.

So I thought I can't have this big lump. I sat there and I could almost feel it with where I was. So the, we went for the comfort, which was the next spec down.

And so you lose the sunroof, which means you lose the bump. You don't get the vehicle to load charging cable, but you can guess aftermarket, which is what we did. And you can't get these two tone colors and the big funky sort of color scheme you can get inside.

So there's a few reduced pallets, but apart from that, the car is pretty much the same car. And which battery size did you go for? So the only ones they had on offer was 60 kilowatt hours.

And that's a lithium ferrous phosphate 60 kilowatt hour, which I think they also put in their bigger cars as well. So it gives it the, it says the quoted range is 265 miles and the two long trips have done it. I've been getting 230, 215, but it has been minus two degrees.

It has been raining. It's not been the most pleasant weather, but come summer should easily be able to do 265.

Gary :

It's interesting.

I've just pulled up the EV database for the BYD Dolphin and it's quoting real range, city cold weather, 215, highway cold weather, 150. A city mild weather, 320. Hmm.

Interesting. Highway, mild weather, 195, combined mild weather, 250. Is that kind of yell with what you've been hearing?

Adrian :

Well, I mean, the, um, I mean, it was quite a long trip from Colchester to Midlands and it happily did 230 in the cold minus two to plus five. I did have the heating on, it wasn't there in gloves and a hat, but in the summer, yeah, 250 should not be a problem. And compared to the leaf during the 80 miles, anything above 150 is quite pleasant and quite nice.

And the charging speed was quite impressive as well. I know it's only 90 kilowatts because it's the LFP, but it's, it's twice as fast as the leaf ever was and, um, slightly quicker than I can actually go to the loop.

Gary :

Interesting. I, uh, I plugged in a Polestar 2 yesterday on a, one of the new V4 Tesla superchargers. It was a 16 units. They were all being used and it still pulled a hundred and, no, it hit 205 kilowatts and then dropped down to about 150, which for me, my little ID3 is kind of, whoa, that is fantastic.

You know.

It's, it's getting so fast though, that you don't actually want to leave the car because by the time you've gone and got your coffee, then you're hogging your charging space because your car's pretty much full.

Adrian :

Yeah.

Gary :

I mean, I effectively, that particular one is associated with a McDonald's. So I wandered in at a peak, grab some food, came back. It's kind of, oh no, better, better go.

Cause you know, a couple of cars waiting, none of them waited more than about two or three minutes. Apart from there was what would have been a courser E that waiting. The reason it waited is because I believe the charge ports on the, as Tesla Beyond says, it's on the right side, which is the wrong side, not the left side, which the right side or whatever it is, so he was waiting for two to open up so they could park in one and use the other, he might've been there quite a while.

Adrian :

Yeah. And hugged another space in the meantime, but that's, that's part of where we are in the transition. I mean, again, I've not tried the Tesla superchargers yet with the dolphin, but because it's on the front right-hand side, provided they don't put a bump stop in the way, it should quite conveniently take a normal Tesla charging spot, just as a going front ways as opposed to back ways.

Yeah. Have I heard anything about the dolphins on a Tesla unit? I don't think so.

Gary :

I think I've heard about the MGs on a Tesla unit. There could have been issues with those, but I think the B1Ds, they're worth seeing. Isn't it?

Where is your nearest public supercharger that's open?

Adrian :

I don't think there's one directly near Colchester, but I must have passed a couple on my trips up to Birmingham and other places. I must pop in now that I know I can use them and use them.

I've downloaded the Tesla app only last week, so I will go off and try and find one to use. What's it like?

Gary :

I say, I'm compared at the moment, I'm running around in the Polestar 2, lovely car.

Went up over the festive period to see my parents and my dad decided, this is the man who always, always either drove or sat in the passenger seat, decided to get into the back. Plenty of room in the back, but he had trouble actually getting in. I mean, he's not a big man, he's kind of slim and slender like me, but the actual, the access, the B pillar, a little bit too far back and he had issues getting in.

Have you had any issues like that with the Dolphin?

Adrian :

So this is one of the features, he passed the mother-in-law test, who kept trying to get in and out of the car, both the back seats and the front seats. I think the door opens almost 90 degrees, which gives you really easy access into the back and the front.

And the space once you get in there is huge. So don't have problems getting in or out of it. And that's one of the features, isn't it, of electric cars.

You can make more space inside when you haven't got all the running gear, it has the flat floor and those sorts of things. The only thing I've ever noticed is the floor is a little higher than I'm used to, but I think that's probably because of the skateboard design where the batteries are. Other than that, no, there's been plenty of room.

And even the boot's fair size, it's supposed to be smaller than the Leaf, which was a big boot. But as long as you put the partition floor down, it allows you to open it up and you get a fairly big boot as well. So no, plenty of space inside and fairly easy to get in and out of.

Gary :

Looping back to charging, do you have any idea of what the efficiency figures are, miles per kilowatt hour?

Adrian :

That's an interesting one. The car has a sort of very distributed approach to showing you energy.

It will show you miles per kilowatt hour. It will show you kilowatt hours per kilometers. It will show you BH per hour.

So British horsepower per hour on another display. And everything's supposed to be set to miles and kilowatt hours. I don't figure that out.

So after having to do a lot of calculations, I'm getting about 4. 4 miles per kilowatt hour. But when I did a test of the day, it was saying I was getting about five, but it wasn't showing me what the accessories was using.

So one display will and one display won't. So depending which display you're reading, it gives you different numbers. So I just like one consistent display given one consistent set of numbers.

But it is over four kilowatt, four miles per kilowatt hour. But for a small car, because this is a small car, it's nice and efficient. Even on a motorway one, it's nice and efficient.

Gary :

We'll come back to the software in a little while because, you know, one of my personal bugbears on a lot of vehicles is they can't do good software. So we'll talk about that. I've driven cars for 40 odd years and for anything other than the last six years, I've never had heated seats.

I've never had heated steering. And having had those in my last two electrics, I can't have one without the other on there. Now, did you say on the spec that you got, it didn't have heated seats or it did?

Adrian :

So on the spec we've got, everything is pretty much the same between the design and the comfort. The one thing that neither of them have is a heated steering wheel. So they've got heated front seats, which you can control.

We'll talk about software later, but they've done updates so you can control it now from the center screen quite easily or from the app. But not a heating steering, which I miss from the Leaf. I get cold hands.

We quickly got over that once they'd fixed the other heating, which was another issue they had. But they both come with front heated seats, but not in the back on this one.

Gary :

Talk to me about the heating issue that you just mentioned.

Adrian :

So there's been quite a lot of updates since we got the car. When I got the car, I think it was on version 1. 1 of the software.

And there's a whole lot of complaints, as you can imagine, on the Facebook and any small thing they complain about. But BYD seems to be doing a whole rapid rollout, I think on version 1. 6 now of the software.

One of those was, I put the heating on, you put it at 20 degrees in the Leaf, that'd be really hot really quickly. And it was lackluster at best. And I thought, it's got a heat pump, so I expected it to heat up quite quickly, and it didn't.

But you had to stick it on high, which was for some reason I can't figure out the spell, H-I, not H-I-G-H, and you stuck it on high, and it would then go really hot. But once they fix the software, it will now heat properly 20, 21 degrees and the cabin will get really nice, quite warm. But there's all these little minor sort of software updates they've been rolling out over the last six months.

Gary :

Amazing What are the sort of little nice to have things? Does it, have they put in that you don't really realize you need them until you have them and then they get taken away? Richard So, I hope they take none of them away.

Adrian :

But yeah, so there's heated seats now on the front screen. So as soon as you go in, they don't have to go through a menu to get to the heated seats. You can use the voice assistant, which is minimal, but there, and can understand you, which is nice.

It's no Alexa. There's no AI, but it is, it does work, does do the heated seats and the cabin and the windows and all those sorts of things. Other things they put in, they upgraded the phone.

So it does have Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, but now it's also done over wireless. So now we'll link Bluetooth. They changed the mapping slightly and updated the mapping software.

The mapping software is good. It's got a 13 inch display. It's the first thing you'll notice you get into this huge sort of center display, very Tesla like, very high quality resolution and the mapping really does work quite well.

Once it connects to a phone or it's got its own phone signal, it will then show you traffic alerts. And then the last update, it also did charging. So I was doing a charging run and it showed the next grid serve and it showed how many chargers there were, what speeds they were and how many were in use.

And that was a whole, almost, almost, I would say the Tesla experience, but it doesn't do preconditioning stuff, but these sorts of things improve all the time. They turn the bings and the bongs down. So when I first got it, they're quite loud, telling you about speed and those sorts of things and turn those down to sort of nudging you saying, you're going a little bit over the speed limit or the speed limits just changed here if you noticed.

So those tone, those sorts of things down. So improving all the time, listening to people. And I think the last sort of big problem we've got is in this weather, it's cold.

It's minus two last night, is it seems to do an air vent just as you turn the car off, which then leaves a whole lot of humid air in the car and you come back to the car and it looks like it's all steamed up. So that's the latest sort of rant, I'm sure they'll fix that one as well. On the subject of bings and bongs, I think the one thing that everybody finds annoying on pretty much every electric car is the automatic lane keeping assist, which bings and bongs and then tries to push you down roads that you don't want to do.

Gary :

What's the status with that on the Dolphin?

Adrian :

The Dolphin's got fairly good sort of navigation features. So the automatic cruise control, it's really good for those sort of distance levels.

So you jump onto a highway, dual carriageway, motorway and stick that on and quietly sit behind somebody to turn the lane centering on. It will do actual center of lane. It doesn't bounce, it doesn't ping pong.

There is ability to turn on feature where if you start straying onto a line, if you're driving, it'll do that. But once it's on its own lane centering, it'll keep you there. The only time it has an issue is if the road is going to bend to the right and there is an off ramp to the left.

It always wants to take you off the off ramp for whatever reason, I don't know. But you're supposed to keep your hand on the steering wheel anyway, which you do, of course. And just nudge it over, it goes, oh, you want to keep on this road, do you?

And it'll keep you there, which means that for miles and miles, you don't come across it. But when you come across, when you see it coming, you're going, right, just be ready for that. And every single time, but no, it seems to be quite competent until you get onto quite small roads and then it can't see the lines and it turns around to you and says, I give up.

You take over.

Gary :

So the two questions that I always like to ask when it comes to adaptive cruise control is what's the slowest speed it will go at in the adaptive cruise control? Is it 30 or is it 20?

Adrian :

It'll kick in. I think the slowest I've done it is most about 28, 29. So it'll go below 30, but then it will stay on all the way to stop and then it will start again for you.

So it'll keep going even though you're in traffic, which is nice. But I don't think I've put it on anything lower than say 28, 29 miles an hour.

Gary :

And if you're going down the motorway at 60, 65 and you hit a roadworks at 50, will it automatically reduce the car down to the speed?

Adrian :

So will it recognize the speed signs and adjust the speed accordingly? It does do speed sign recognition, it throws it up and there's a tiny little secondary display in front of the driver. actually get a pair of glasses to see it because the old cars, I didn't need it.

But now I need to be able to read a display close to me as well. And it does show up there what the speed is, but it won't change for speed. It'll just stop pinging at you saying, nudge, nudge, you're going too fast.

And considering the amount of times it'll pick up, maybe a side road speed camera speed sign, or the GPS will kick in and say, this is a different speed, or it has noticed that the speed has changed. I'm happy for it to not choose the speed. I'll choose the speed.

It just tells me what speed I'm supposed to be doing.

Gary :

It's interesting on that because the ID3 that I drive will do that. If you're doing 70 and a 50 comes up, it will drop it down to 50.

And then at the end of the fifties, it'll take it back up to 70. The Polestar 2 that I'm borrowing at the moment, exactly the same as you said, it will go at 70 and then it'll hit the 50. It will go, oh, you're in a 50 now, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, without actually slowing down for you.

So I don't know whether that's a software decision or whether that's a hardware limitation or what, but there are some cars that do it one way and some cars that do it the other. And Polestar and the BYD appear to do it that way. And the VW appear to do it the other way and presume Tesla do it the other way as well.

Adrian :

Hmm. It's easy to get it wrong. So I'm quite happy it leaves the human in charge or if they can turn it off, I don't mind what they do.

Gary :

Hmm. There is a particular stretch of the N25 around Heathrow where for some reason the car thinks the speed is 40 miles an hour, so you'd be going down the motorway and suddenly it'll slam the brakes on 40 miles an hour. And there is no traffic sign around anyway.

So somewhere in the past when they've loaded up the software and put all the information in there, there must have been a 40 mile an hour zone there as they were upgrading the motorway. And it just hasn't been updated yet, which probably says more about the people managing the Volkswagen software than it.

Adrian :

Yeah.

It's, when things change rapidly, especially with roadworks and such, like I think I'm quite happy to leave the human in charge. Indeed.

Gary :

Talk to me about vehicle to load.

Adrian :

Ah, right. Yeah. So that's a feature we've not covered yet.

So that came with the car, not with a cable. So you buy a second hand aftermarket cable, about a hundred pounds. I've never used it before.

I wasn't quite sure I was sure how it was going to use. So I've got a fairly short cable and then realized that I'm with Optimus. And today, again, we've had it a couple of hours of free energy.

I could fill the car up and then use it for the things. So the main thing I've been using it for is to heat my study. So I will plug in into the normal charging port.

This just looks like a normal charging connector with a three pin socket on the end. And then put that three pin socket through the letter flap and then run the fan heater into my study. And I must have used over 60 kilowatt hours out of it.

Free energy, thanks to Optimus. I mean, in the summer when it comes sunny, you know, be able to charge up with that as well. So you can actually play the game of charging and discharging as you wish.

And because it's got 250 miles, it doesn't matter if I'm using, you know, 10, 15 kilowatts, who cares? You know, it's still, it's still charged up when I need it and run it around. I've also got, I've tried it with kettles and an air fryer and stuff.

So whenever, and the next sort of things I go to, I can make myself my tea and coffee on the road. Or the occasionally do things like eco festivals where we take electric vehicles down so I can take it there and show people the future of how to actually use a vehicle more than just the 5% people use to drive it around. So as far as I'm concerned, that was a battery, which happens to also go places.

Gary :

I forget where it was. There was a vehicle that had vehicle to load capability and it said, you cannot use this vehicle to load capability to charge another car, which I find interesting. Have you tried that by any chance?

Adrian :

I may have done. I've not found that disclosure agreement in the manual. No, I have.

I've used it to charge the plug-in hybrid, the Outlander. And that seems to work quite well because it's only a 2. 2 kilowatt feed and it's a 3.

3 kilowatt source from the Dolphin. So no, it's more well within its capability. And so that worked just as an experiment.

I've not done it for any longer than a few minutes now.

Gary :

Okay. Let's, let's come and sort of look at the elephant in the room when it comes to electric vehicles, which is the software.

Now we've talked a little bit about the bings and the bongs like that, but as a general sort of overall impression, does it seem to be that the Dolphin software has been put together by people who've actually driven electric vehicles and know how software should work?

Adrian :

I was quite pleasantly surprised, but again, really fairly recent to the table. I mean, obviously PRID is mainly a battery manufacturer, but they've come with a nice software package.

And I think it's the fact that they've not downgraded the software package for their, what is their second lowest car in the brand now, because they've also got the smaller car as well. And so it's the same, seems to be the same software fit for all of them, the prestige cars and all the way down, premium cars all the way down. And it is impressive.

It was one of the first things my wife mentioned about how quick the display is, how fairly intuitive a lot of the menus are. Some of them were hidden and so they're updating them. And that's the other thing, they're listening to their user base.

Can we have this? Can we have that? And things are moving about and things are improving all the time.

It has Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, which was a bit flaked to start off with, it would drop occasionally, that's been fixed. And it has all the usual apps and Amazon musics and karaoke, which my wife seems to like and a browser, which only works when you're stationary, which is nice, which means you can do YouTube and sit around at high res. It does seem to work apart from this weird issue to do with metrics and it can't be consistent and it doesn't seem to know what it wants to tell you and how it's going to tell you it.

So apart from little niggly things like that, I'm really, really impressed.

Gary :

A key question for me, can you open the glove box without having to use the screen?

Adrian :

It is an old manual lever, full-size glove box and it is now, after six months, full of stuff.

Gary :

Indeed. Indeed. Jumping back to sort of feeding back to the company, do you have any idea how that mechanism is?

Are they reading the forums or is it people going into dealers and going, look, this is a problem, we need it changed?

Adrian :

I'm not entirely sure. I know that the dealership I went to, they knew me before I turned up, they said, oh, we've seen you on the Facebook.

So at least the dealership knows me and we've got a good relationship with them. And there is an active community, there must be about four forums in the UK dealing with both Dolphin and BYD and then international forums as well. So somebody is listening somewhere.

I've not gone back directly myself, I've just gone back through my suggestions to the dealers and whether they go back, I must ask them the next time I go up there due to see them later on this year. But whoever it is or however they're doing, it seems to be working.

Gary :

Are you happy with it overall as a car?

Adrian :

As a car, yeah. As a great city car, yeah. It does everything we wanted it to do at a price which we weren't expecting.

But I think it was what they called a sweetheart deal to come into the UK to get people to start buying them, to see them on the road. I still only see maybe one or two down here because I'm about 60 miles away from the dealer. But as a car to do the driving around I was doing, yes.

The problem now is that it's making the Outlander look very dated and it's starting to look like it's going to be replaced in the next year or two, clearly with a full electric vehicle. The other ones we're looking at shopping now with is an EV3 or an EV6. So it's that sort of spec of car where to replace what is an SUV.

My son is 16 now, he doesn't want to go camping with us anymore. So that sort of requirements have moved on. But we do still need a big car so we can do the longer miles and we just end up driving around the Dolphin all the time because it's just quicker and easier and I can just jump in it and go where I want, when I want, which pretty much is what you do with any fuel car.

Gary :

Would you say, I know you've talked about some of the longer journey you've made, but you've just then said, it's not really a long distance vehicle, are you sticking by that or do you think if somebody like me, it's my only car for example, and I do quite a few chunky journeys in a year, would it be something you think that would suit somebody like that or would it need somebody with a certain aptitude who's happy to make compromises?

Adrian :

It's not like the old days of jumping into an old Austin Metro and forcing it to go 300 miles. Funnily enough, they wouldn't do 300 miles in a tank, I don't know where this business having to do 500 miles ever came from, most of my cars never did.

But it is a smaller city, bigger than a city car, but it's a smaller sort of family car which is happily do the long distance mileage as well, comfortably, but it's not a long distance cruiser. So it'll quite happily do it, amicably, but it'll also be at home in the city. It sounds like an awful attempt and an advert, it's not.

It is just happy to do what it's to do. I think that's, again, because they've not downgraded anything for the comfort and design specs. It is the smaller versions, which have got smaller batteries and lower power, possibly you wouldn't want to start doing longer journeys, but because they've left it at the 60 kilowatts, which is what they use in the kilowatt hours, which is what they use in their bigger vehicles, it's still got the legs to do that sort of journey, even though it may not have been originally designed for it much more than capable of doing it.

Gary :

What would you change about it if you could?

Adrian :

What would I change about the car? I'd have the heated steering wheel, please.

Gary :

Anything else?

Adrian :

So they are improving features all the time. So we have this problem to do with steaming, that'll be handy this time of year.

The boot could be just a little bit bigger. I could do with a couple of clips in the boot. We are talking really minor stuff here.

ing where we started with the: 2010

So I think all this catch up, I don't know if it's sort of Tesla-esque, I've never driven a Tesla. Correction, I did drive a Tesla Model X once, I was really impressed, so it's that sort of level of spec. So if everything else catches up to that, then I'm not really missing anything else.

Gary :

Thank you, Adrian. Great conversation.

Adrian :

Thank you very much, Gary.

Gary :

So let's summarise. The BYD is a great little car that packs in lots of goodies, but not a lot of money. It has a reasonable range, but the long distance journeying can be hampered by a relatively slow charge speed.

Some of the additional BYD functionalities, such as vehicle to load, can be useful. Adrian told me after we recorded that he has managed to charge his plug-in hybrid Mitsubishi Highlander from the Dolphin, and it works. So, anyone out there also driving the Dolphin?

How are you finding it? Let me know. Info at EV Musings.com. It's time for a cool EV or renewable thing to share with your listeners. Just two years ago, 10% electric equipment operations seemed like an ambitious target for Sweden's pioneering fossil-free construction site.

Last week, the site reached a 50% all-electric threshold with the addition of a new Volvo LL120H electric conversion wheel loader. This 50% electric operation rate has doubled its initial goal of 10% in just two years. This significant leap showcased the effectiveness of electric equipment in reducing carbon footprints on construction sites.

tonnes as of June: 2024

I love it when we can electrify things people think can't be electrified. Brings a smile to my face. I hope you enjoyed listening to today's show.

It was put together this week with the help of Adrian Bonn. Many thanks to Adrian for his time. If you've reached this part of the podcast and are still listening, thank you.

Why not let me know you've got to this point by tweeting me at MusingCV with the words Glipper? Surely not. Hashtag if you know you know and nothing else.

Thanks as always to my co-founder Simone. You know he's gradually increasing the speed he goes on his electric unicycle, but as he goes faster and faster, the chances of him having an accident increase. But he's got full life insurance, which is great, and one person's quite happy about that though.

Adrian :

So this is one of the features. It passed the muddling law test.

Gary :

Thanks for listening.