New 2019 e-Golf SEL Owner

[wkuballa]

In Sep-2016 I took over the lease for a 2016 e-Golf SEL with 15,000 miles/year. The three main reasons for this car where:
- Growing up in Germany, I prefer the handling of German cars. I prefer to drive a car where I can feel the street I am driving on, not one where I "float" over the surface.
- I have to commute 36 miles one way here in the Bay Area. The HOV sticker saves between 15 and 30 minutes each way.
- Having just installed a solar system, I wanted max benefits of it.

I have driven now almost 40,000 miles with this car, and overall I am still very happy with it. The key disadvantages are:
- Range! Since I drive during commute hours, I have to flow with the traffic. This means 80mph in the morning and average about 40mph in the evening. Driving with 80mph costs a lot of energy and I have to charge the car in the office to make it back home. And now that the battery is down to about 19kwh capacity, it is getting worse.
- The HOV stickers expired.

Therefor I decided to get a new e-Golf SEL with the 36kwh battery. I picked it up just two days ago and I love it. This is what my new lease looks like:
- 2019 e-Golf SEL, white exterior, beige interior, DAP
- sticker price: $39,925.-
- down payment: $5,000.-
- 15,000 miles per year
- $456,86 (includes tax)
- $13,973,75 residual valuer (after three years)

Funny thing.... I am reading the manual for the infotainment system (USA edition). Obviously, somebody must have screwed up. A lot of text is still in German. It is *not* a manual that comes in English and German. It is continuous text - just some paragraphs are not yet translated into English. Looks like somebody took an early draft and had it printed. You can only understand this manual if you can read English *and* German.

Regards,
Werner

 

[stevestrange]

Congratulations! We have a 2015 SEL, and liked it enough to buy out the lease. Then a month later, the 2018s finally showed up, so we got one and we are now a dual e-Golf family.

I'm actually surprised your battery degraded to about 19kWh. While I haven't measured mine, i do pay very close attention to the number of miles I get between each "tick" on the gauge, and I haven't seen measurable loss of range on the 2015. I have 35K miles on it. Are you in a particularly hot part of the country? I am in the SF bay area.

 

[2016golfse]

When you say that your capacity dropped to 19 kWh, is that your estimate of usable capacity or total capacity?

 

[DepletedZPM]

Before I turned in the 2016 e-Golf, it was still estimating about 100 miles on a full charge, but I almost never went to a full charge because time-based charging meant that the last 10-15 minutes raised the cost. In hindsight, this micro-optimization saved little cash, but might have helped protect the battery chemistry over the long run.

 

[wkuballa]

I did measure the battery capacity. I did that in December. Maybe when the temperature gets up, the capacity will also go back up to 20kwh? When the car was new, I typically saw a range in the high 80s after the car got fully charged over night. Now it is more like 80 miles. Actually, I think that this is not bad at all. Considering that the car is now 3.5 years old and has almost 50,000 miles on it. I never used DCFC, but I also never cared about not fully charging. My car got charged typically twice each day to 100%.

Regards,
Werner

 

[JoulesThief]

Congrats on your 2019, with more battery capacity. Will be interesting to see how it does, now for miles and range.

 

[2016golfse]

I did measure the battery capacity. I did that in December. Maybe when the temperature gets up, the capacity will also go back up to 20kwh? When the car was new, I typically saw a range in the high 80s after the car got fully charged over night. Now it is more like 80 miles. Actually, I think that this is not bad at all. Considering that the car is now 3.5 years old and has almost 50,000 miles on it. I never used DCFC, but I also never cared about not fully charging. My car got charged typically twice each day to 100%.

Regards,
Werner

Sounds like ~10% battery degradation after 50K miles, which is excellent. Thus far, I don't think I've seen any examples posted about unusual degradation with the Panasonic batteries.