@bellac11
I dont understand the charging, in the description it says 39kwh but equally it says 10.5kw charger
39kWh is the battery capacity - equivalent to the volume of petrol a tank can hold. Where ICE car fuel efficiency is measured in miles per gallon, EV owners talk about miles per kWh. The Kona is a very efficient car, 4 miles per kWh is a good rule of thumb, so you’re looking at 160 miles range. Less in bad weather and high speed, quite a bit more in benign conditions.
The 10.5kW charger is the maximum speed the on-board charger can handle (although you would only get 7kW on most supplies). Imagine you were pouring electricity in through a tap - the higher the charging speed, the wider open the tap is, and the quicker the battery will fill.
Then looking at the extra information about charging it mentions a home charger (fast) of 7.4kw and then public charging of 50kw rapid
Most home chargers will supply 7.4kW, so filling a 39kWh battery from scratch will take about 6 hours (6x7.4. = 44.4kWh, but there are some losses during charging, so to fill the 39kWh battery you need to supply more than 39kWh cos you lose some on the way.). At a rapid charger, electricity is supplied directly into the battery as DC rather than via the AC onboard charger. It can therefore charge must faster - like the tap is open much wider. The maximum speed the 39kWh Kona can accept is 50kW, although the speed you will actually get depends on the temperature of the battery and how full it is. It slows down as the battery gets closer to 100%. For this reason, most people don’t stay on a rapid charger until the car is completely full. Get enough to get you to where you’re going, and move on.
What does all that mean?
I hope my explanations are intelligible.
its very slow to fill up however.
Compared to petrol, yes it is. Consider, however, that most cars spend the vast majority of their time parked up doing nothing. That’s where 7kW chargers come in. You put them in places where the car is going to be sat for a long time doing nothing - like at home, or at work, or in a park and ride or station car park. It makes no odds to me if my car takes 9 hours to charge (I have the 64kWh Kona), because I am tucked up in bed when it’s charging.
Personally I wouldnt want an SUV but much cheaper than some that are around. Plus range isnt great
I didn’t want an SUV either! The Kona is classed as a crossover rather than a full SUV - a Range Rover it is NOT. The 64kWh version has a much better range than the 39kWh (bigger battery = more miles). For the driving I usually do - I live semi-rurally, so it’s a mix of country roads and town, not much motorway - I reliably get over 300 miles in summer, 270 in winter. Motorway speeds and bad weather do reduce that, but even in the worst of conditions I am confident of over 200 miles from a full charge.
My car would take over 9 hours to charge fully from empty. In practice, no-one ever does that. You top up, as and when need and opportunity dictate. Most of the time I’ve had this car, I’ve been on an EV tariff which gives 4 cheap hours each night. So I charge for 4 hours at a time, enough to add 100-120 miles. So I plug in every 2/3/5 days - depending how many miles I’m doing - to bring me back up to 200-250 miles of range.
It may start off feeling overwhelming, but it soon becomes second nature to think: what’s my SOC (state of charge), how many miles am I doing tomorrow, shall I plug in tonight or not? Or if you don’t have a home charger or are away from home, you get in the habit of checking where the chargers are and fitting charging in. Without waiting for it to charge, the vast majority of the time.