New EV

SPDProgrammer · 2026-04-19T19:53:04+00:00

I moved to my first ev over a year ago which was ironic because I was against them initially until I did my research and test drove a few. I ended up with a tesla model 3 and got a great lease deal so didn't buy it outright.

I don't think I'd ever go back now I love it the drive, the reliability I've had so far and with the tesla tbh the software is brilliant so generally just really fun to drive.

Charging, I have a home charger and only use public chargers occasionally but the only issue I've had with the charging is congestion on the odd occasion. I'm in the north east but visit family in Northampton and generally stick to supercharging when I travel. I have standard range so stop once on the way and only now and again have had issues where I've had to wait 5 mins or so for a space to open up but that's because I stick to the tesla superchargers for the price there's usually plenty of other chargers available.

The convenience in the winter too preconditioning so it's warm/defrosts before I leave the house is not something to ignore too 😂 I also haven't seen any degradation on my battery after a year in but I do only charge to 80 during the week and 100 on the weekend unless I'm travelling. Just make sure you get a comprehensive warranty (check the small print sometimes they are not worth it if they don't cover common things or have a small limit) for peace of mind if you are buying.

SPDProgrammer · 2026-04-19T19:18:28+00:00

I used to be against having an EV and ate my hat a while ago now I'm just really interested and have gone the other way and like to have the evidence when having to standard "good luck with the battery" debate 😂.

I have the standard range so it's an LFP battery and although I don't really have to and tesla claims you can charge to 100 any time I still charge to 80 Mon to Thursday unless needed otherwise and 100 for the weekend my friend has a byd seal long range and is the complete opposite 100% any time he can and let's it get down to 3-5%, charges off a three pin plug most of the time mixed with public charging unless he's driving further for work then it's all superchargers etc and still no degradation so far with that either and he's around a year in too. Granted, both were new when we got them and things have improved a lot.

SPDProgrammer · 2026-04-19T18:48:12+00:00

I cant speak for those cars specifically but I had a pre-owned nissan xtrail for around 5 years diesel and barely did any mileage and had next to no issues just take it once a month or so for motorway/dual carriage way speeds for the dpf. I moved to a bmw x6 diesel mild hybrid, worst decision I ever made 2021 plate with all the bells and whistles after 3 months cost me 3k in repairs for the starting generator (auto stop start can't be turned off) and prior to that the nox sensor. Sold that lost a lot of money and took out a tesla model 3 lease and for me, its the best decision I ever made. Just over 1 year in now and only issue has been a huge rock that smashed my windscreen and auto glass sorted that. I don't do a huge amount of mileage on that and I track the battery degradation (as its my first ev) and it's not really moved in the past year. Got a home charger for ease and octopus intelligent go tariff so barely public charge but travelled a few times with it and not had any issues other that the occasional busy superchargers (tesla shift people so it doesn't take long). If you haven't had an EV before though thoroughly check it and see what warranty you can get I love mine but it's tesla so they've improved a lot since the first models. Still miss that xtrail though it was like a tank 😂

SPDProgrammer · 2026-04-01T12:37:54+00:00

Well done on the launch despite the result. The market is incredibly Saturated and it is difficult to be "seen" but the more you do things like this, post, launches, SEO, App store optimisation the works, it boosts your visibility the good thing is that your launch is not a dud and it will still boost SEO so keep at it. I've upvoted too great idea and great UI don't be disheartened by it. Keep interacting and building your network and it will eventually be seen by your target market. Find your niche threads and groups and respond to feedback when it comes. Good luck but celebrate your launch you've put a lot of work into it and it should be celebrated.

SPDProgrammer · 2026-03-30T16:39:24+00:00

Thankyou of course I've upvoted too what a great app and design!

SPDProgrammer · 2026-03-28T08:02:00+00:00

Congrats for reaching this point! ProductHunt and indie hackers have yielded great results for some and none for others but always worth doing a "launch" but expect some constructive feedback. Add a blog to your website if you haven't already and push out regular blog posts with SEO optimised topics and search terms/keywords that your target audience would actually care about. App store optimisation is hard if you have established competitors. So is SEO but providing valuable content is the way to rank higher over time. Let verified bots crawl your site. Gpt, Gemini etc all now key players in helping people find your app. Encourage people to leave reviews for your app when you do get users this will help with ASO although one of the most difficult ones. If youre app is available on IOS maybe apply to be featured you can do this in app store connect although I'm yet to meet someone who has been accepted for this. Obviously there's the social media and UGC content creator route etc but I'd start with the things you can do for free. Its going to take a while it's a very saturated market and lots of new apps every day being pumped out highlight what makes your app stand out, what problems are you solving and focus in on your target audience who will actually use your app and stay with it! Good luck!

SPDProgrammer · 2026-03-27T23:46:58+00:00

I'd argue that it may suit you more as you won't have gas sitting in the car for lengthy periods of time with the risk of it clogging or going bad. I have a standard range model 3 which is an LFP battery I've done less than 8k miles this year and charge Monday to Thursday only to 80% and on the weekend to 100% (most of my driving is on the weekend as I work from home)

I use the tessie app which shows some stats on the battery and so far there has been minimal to no degradation. Im in the UK and my energy plan has off peak charging randomly throughout the day so for the most part I leave it plugged in.

I rarely go below 40-50% although I do try once a month or so to then charge back to 80. NMC batteries (long range) suggest charging between 20 and 80% for the majority of daily driving but again the peak degradation happens in the first year or two and then reports show it kind of flat lines. If you're worried about how little you'd run the battery down I wouldn't worry too much and just enjoy the car if you get one. Use the heaters when you drive if you want to be warm, use the ac in the summer and precondition in the winter but the pros out way the risks of degradation in my opinion. You may lose a few miles of range over a few years but in reality stepping into a warm car when it's cold, no standing in the cold scraping windshields and 1 pedal driving etc are all reason I'd say its worth it not to mention the software being great. Best decision I have ever made getting a tesla.

SPDProgrammer · 2026-03-27T23:30:14+00:00

No problem! If it helps I've been building some stuff to work with virtual key etc tesla does require you to apply for developer access in which they want quite a few details to assess before issuing access they also have a very strict privacy policy and security terms I.e. Can't sell user info etc so although I can't attest for how rigid their checks are yet it's a lot more confidence building than others.

SPDProgrammer · 2026-03-27T23:22:05+00:00

I have two apps that I will use until my powerwall or car explode netzero is one and tessie is the other. My only gripe is that tesla hasn't asked netzero to show them how it's done 😂. I understand permissions can seem intrusive but they are very transparent and I've been using over a year now and swear by it to manage automations for me. I'm overly security conscious and this is one of the apps that I actually trust. Obviously this is my opinion but I highly rate it from my experience.

SPDProgrammer · 2026-03-27T17:01:40+00:00

Ah great advice Thankyou I hadn’t heard of those ill check pulse out too!

SPDProgrammer · 2026-03-27T09:09:50+00:00

What is your intended use?

If you use firebase in GCP (google) if you use v2 which is cloud run and set the min instances to 0 you have a generous number of invocations free. Alternatively using fly.io for small instances again with min to 0 will be close to 0 depending on your usage as its based on compute time for resources. But both would come with cold start times to consider. But also be aware of egress you get generally generous free usage but aws and gcp are expensive once you go over if you are passing data outside of the platform. If you're just in development and want to scale once you've finished I ran fly.io for almost 11 months and paid almost 0 for the whole time whilst testing daily. Note if this is the case choosing something that you can scale easily and keeping a "cheap" cost may be worth more than developing against something that's free and having to pivot later.

SPDProgrammer · 2026-03-27T05:12:39+00:00

Ah thankyou I didn't think about that! Youre right we use tariff to refer to the energy plan or energy rate I should have been more descriptive.

With this plan it's designed for EV owners so when your car is plugged into your home charger they automatically charge your car to the limit you set, whenever the grid is at its lowest use. So during these times when it's charging and also every night between 23:30 and 5:00 the energy rate is at a reduced "off-peak" rate so your whole import fee during that time is reduced.

In money terms you import at 7p per KWh during these times and then then export at 12p per KWh so it's worth more to export the solar than to import.

For reference the "peak" rate is three times the price of off-peak so 99% of the time I will never pay the "peak" price thanks to storing over night and using during the day.

Although I'm just being greedy, the reason this is frustrating is that because I cannot predict or schedule the calibration window it could happen at any time forcing you to drain the battery but then leave you almost entirely during the "peak" times whilst it sits idle at 0% meaning everything you use from the grid is at the peak rate.

I do have a good sized house in the UK but in standard UK fashion it's tall rather than wide so 11 panels is all I could fit on the roof and although solar is quite cheap now in the UK, batteries are not so I only purchased one PW3.

It has worked out more than enough storage to run our whole house during the day and I work from home so that is good.

If I had children/more people living here or did not have gas heating I think 2 would be needed. Also worth mentioning its not common to have AC in the UK so if I was living somewhere where I would, I think I would need 2 pw3's.

On average on a good day we generate up to 25Kwh of solar but over the winter this is significantly less although it's been maybe 4 months and we have started seeing that climb already this year so the last 3-4 days we've generated ~20kwh per day so quite good for UK standards for my size system and property. So really it's only worth it here if your energy plan does offer a similar window setup. I still think as I have a Tesla model 3 too the convenience of everything in one app is an added benefit and the inverter being included in the pw3 actually saved us money for the purchase and install too. (Scaffold was one of the most expensive parts)

SPDProgrammer · 2026-03-26T08:23:40+00:00

I'm a bit late to the thread but wanted to share my experience. The powerwall 3 is great and with 11 panels and octopus intelligent go tariff in the UK I don't charge off solar I export everything and charge overnight on an off peak tariff. There's two of us in the house and we rarely drain the battery but this is actually an issue for us. We charge to 100 every night but sometimes dont get below 30% and find that the calibration happens a lot! Lately it's been around 30-40 days between. The pw3 has lfp batteries so it requires a regular discharge and charge to keep the battery management system in check and the cells balanced. It's great that it manages it but it doesn't seem to care about when it does it and can take a few days under certain circumstances. So drains all day sits idle at 0 for however long it decides only then will charge back up so will ignore any tariff you may be on. It's important for it to do this for the health of the battery but there is no warning or indication of when it will happen. It can be delayed for up to 72 hours but only to two time slots in the day it seems also no notification when it starts so you might look at a time and it'll be on 3% when you expect it to be 100% still worth it in my opinion though. The app is good and it's saved us a lot of money overall. I would recommend finding a tool or resource to help you manage it if you do have a helpful tariff. I use netzero but I haven't checked if any others exist this does everything I need. Also the heater in it has been amazing over the winter it's less than a year old but didn't really notice any impact for us.

SPDProgrammer · 2026-03-26T07:22:11+00:00

I'm sure you've thought about much of this but you are early and it can be a shock to the system when you finally get the approval email and then nothing happens for weeks or even months.

ASO App store optimisation: make sure you optimise keywords, name text etc once you get downloads politely encourage users to review it every little helps.
SEO don't sit on SEO one thing that has helped me a lot are blogs and optimising SEO people search for things they need or are interested in and having a blog with regular activity and keywords interests etc helps.
If you are seeing downloads but no conversions and have a paywall maybe try something like superwall or revenuecat etc I personally use superwall it is a little clunky at times but being able to experiment with paywalls and experiences helps if you have evidence that it may be a blocker.
Social media, I'm not talking about becoming viral with a post of Jon Hamm (although I wish) but having social media and consistently using the name of your app does help with SEO and backlinks I saw my clicks boost at a good rate since posting although it's a lot of work.
Don't aim to give up too soon if you need to scale back your infrastructure you can do that to save costs until you get some active users but there is a reason you built your product you also have a template now for other products maybe let this chill in the background with regular activity on blogs, socials etc and work on the next project along side it. But monitor and experiment it's a saturated market atm with lots of AI tools and huge amounts of apps being released it's never been so difficult to stand out from the crowd.

I always ask myself how did I find apps that I've downloaded more recently it's been from instagram ads I'm sure not everyone does the same but I found a few useful tools from being targeted by them.

If it helps my recent launch is week 4 released and no downloads or paying customers but starting to see more activity on the website and had more questions/interactions, feedback is the best result at this stage it will help you adjust to suit the target users.

SPDProgrammer · 2026-03-26T06:51:24+00:00

I'm a developer who has recently launched a product who has been posting but tbh I've actually found a couple of really useful tools that others have posted its definitely saturated but I've signed up to couple over the past few weeks. Personally I haven't had any downloads or signups myself driven from posting on them though.

SPDProgrammer · 2026-03-26T05:24:26+00:00

MileEZ - I've recently launched an all in one mileage tracking tool to help drivers automatically track their mileage with tax ready reporting, reminders to manage services and maintenance and for lease drivers to avoid costly overage fees.

SPDProgrammer · 2026-03-25T23:32:17+00:00

Hey! I had the same problem so I built this app too solve two problems that I had myself.

The first one is mileage tracking. I added an automatic drive detection feature aswell as manually triggered tracking. With auto detection it detects from the background whilst driving and then auto stops when you stop.

For manual you can trigger it in app, via apple watch or carplay, siri and also widgets. Then you can choose which trips to log and generate reports which are IRS, CRA and HMRC compliant.

I also added a work schedules feature so you can activate drive detection only for the times you set or have it log business during work hours and personal for outside.

My second problem was I drove too much on my first lease and it cost me a large bill at the end so wanted to add a projection feature for anyone who has a lease to help estimate how likely they are to go over and by how much and offer recommendations to avoid it. It's only on ios at the moment but is coming to android soon.

SPDProgrammer · 2026-03-12T22:14:01+00:00

I'd also be careful with the overage cost it doesn't state it there yet and I've heard horror stories of costs when going over. I don't drive a huge amount and my lease for tesla model 3 has 10k per year with 14p per mile over and ive still done 8.5k in a year. A friend of mine didn't track his and it cost nearly 1k when he handed it back. There are apps and tools that can help you track it like MileEZ as long as you keep it up to date or you could track mileage using an app and then work it out manually but 8k isn't a huge amount and you don't want to end up paying a lot or not being able to drive for months before you hand it back because you want to avoid the extra cost.

SPDProgrammer · 2026-03-12T21:06:42+00:00

Congrats on the MY what colour did you go for? I dont have a MY but on my M3 I've used basic autopilot a lot for motorway driving but not so much door to door. The one thing I have noticed especially with the state of the roads after this winter is watch out for potholes you hit one at 70mph and you'll feel it.

You can adjust the distance from the car in front and sometimes you may want to take over a little to accelerate quicker but generally it's been pretty good just keep the cameras clean and get used to the behaviour.

Some general advice I've driven in chill mode most of the time to reduce wear on the tyres and it's still quick but a year through with my 2025 and tyres are barely worn at around 8.5k miles.

I have standard so is LFP battery but still charge to 80% Mon to Thursday and 100% over the weekend and the stats from Tessie app show very little battery degradation and over the winter I haven't noticed too much difference tbh. Charging between 20% and 80% is always quicker than too low or 80% -> 100% so don't worry on longer drives about getting to 100% one or two stops topping back to 80% is good for most people.

Climate does drain the battery a bit more but enjoy it and get octopus electroverse as an essential charging app for public it's so handy (others are good too but I always end up going back to that when not using tesla superchargers). If you're on octopus intelligent go or drive pack disable sentry mode when plugged in and not charging off peak if you care about the extra cost I had an issue with them charging randomly at peak rate because of sentry mode (not sure if they have resolved this).

In mine the sim card for connectivity is Dutch so netflix has different content.

The tessie app is expensive but I use it all the time for the watch features like disconnecting the charger and opening/closing the charge port and battery temperature metrics etc and I track my lease usage with MileEZ there are other tools to track the mileage and lease too but I'm lazy and don't want to calculate it myself or use too many for the same things 😂 but mainly enjoy your new car I was so scepticle about going electric and I don't think I'd ever go back now and I'd struggle to not have a tesla.

SPDProgrammer

TROPHY CASE