5 Things from Driving an EV 500 Miles
Aug. 31st, 2022 09:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerI've been meaning to write a summary of my experience driving & riding in an electric vehicle (EV) for 500 miles earlier this month. My self imposed deadline is end of month... and here at 9-ish pm on the 31st I'm just going to make it. 😅
Theirs is the SEL trim level with AWD. That's probably a bit more than they wanted, but new car inventory is so tight right now they had to take what they could find. And just finding this one was hard. They searched in widening circles from home, ultimately finding this one at a dealership in Henderson, Nevada— over 500 miles away!
I joined my friend, David, to drive it home from Las Vegas over a weekend earlier this month. BTW, yes, their decision to look that far away instead of giving up was inspired by the decision my wife and I made when we bought a new used car last summer from San Diego. So after an early-morning flight to Vegas one Saturday I met up with David, went to the dealer with him, picked up the new car, and started the 500+ mile drive home.
2) It really is comfortable. This may seem like a repeat of the point above, but it's worth emphasizing. The Ioniq 5 is simply a nice car. It looks modern but not too outré. Inside it's very comfortable, with quality gear. There's definitely no sense of, "You've chosen an EV so you must want to sit in an economical penalty box." The car accelerates well with its two motors and AWD. (The non-AWD version is slower.) Handling is sharp. Although the car has plenty of height on the inside, being designed like a crossover SUV, the lack of a conventional powertrain underneath means the body can sit lower to the ground. The result is interior space without a high step-in height or exposure to crosswinds that taller SUVs suffer.
3) Trips take planning. Alas, this is the Achilles' heel of EVs right now. The infrastructure for electrical recharging is nowhere near as built out as the gasoline infrastructure. In a town of any size, or at an oasis along the highway, you can expect to find a gas station that will sell gas that works in any gas vehicle to anyone with cash or a credit card, and fill up in minutes. With an EV, charger stations are fewer and far between. And you've got to find one with the right plugs. And you've got to find one with fast charging capability or it might take hours to recharge. And you've got to pick one that's in the network you've subscribed to, or you'll be paying a non-member price that makes your recharge no cheaper that refilling a comparable gas car. Thus we had to plan our trip around availability of charging stations and the time it takes to recharge. In particular, that meant a long drive I would've made in one day had to be split across two days.
4) Range anxiety. Although the Ioniq 5 has a stated range of 256 miles on a full charge in practice it can be a lot shorter than that. For one, charging above 80% is slow— so often you'll choose to roll on less than a full charge. Second, and even more crucially, we saw the car's range depleted fast on superhighways in the hot desert. We rolled into Barstow on electron fumes when we should've had 60 miles of stated range left. A similar thing happened on our next tank of electrons, too.
5) Will charger networks get worse before they get better? Two or three companies are already building out charger networks across the country. Right now they're not interoperable. You pay for a membership with one. It's not like gas, where you just pay the pump price at whichever brand station you stop at. And how fast will they grow? In particular, will they grow faster— or slower— than EV adoption? Even in just 4 fillups I saw how recharging could go bad. Right now it works okay, but only because demand is below supply. If a lot more people start driving EVs before networks expand enough, recharging will turn into a time-sink clusterfuck.
The use case an EV is practical for is the in-town runabout. Especially if you have access to free charging, like at a school or place of work. Hey, if I could buy a special model of gas car that my employer would let me fill up for free, that'd totally change the analysis, too!
What did we Drive?
Two of my friends bought a Hyundai Ioniq 5.Theirs is the SEL trim level with AWD. That's probably a bit more than they wanted, but new car inventory is so tight right now they had to take what they could find. And just finding this one was hard. They searched in widening circles from home, ultimately finding this one at a dealership in Henderson, Nevada— over 500 miles away!
I joined my friend, David, to drive it home from Las Vegas over a weekend earlier this month. BTW, yes, their decision to look that far away instead of giving up was inspired by the decision my wife and I made when we bought a new used car last summer from San Diego. So after an early-morning flight to Vegas one Saturday I met up with David, went to the dealer with him, picked up the new car, and started the 500+ mile drive home.
Five Things
1) "It drives like a real car". That was a joke the car salesman made as he was driving us over to the dealership to complete paperwork. He gets a lot of customers curious about the car, and he knows it well from driving one himself for a year. Some people think EVs are weird. Some have definitely looked weird. But in 2022 they're becoming mainstream in how they look— and how they handle. The Hyundai Ioniq 5 looks, handles, accelerates, and brakes so much like a conventional car— and a nice conventional car, at that—a casual passenger might not notice it's an EV. That's a big part of why Car and Driver magazine named it their EV of the Year a few weeks ago. It beat out Teslas, the Ford Mustang Mach-E, the Rivian R1t, and the Lucid Air (to name just a few) in their comparison.2) It really is comfortable. This may seem like a repeat of the point above, but it's worth emphasizing. The Ioniq 5 is simply a nice car. It looks modern but not too outré. Inside it's very comfortable, with quality gear. There's definitely no sense of, "You've chosen an EV so you must want to sit in an economical penalty box." The car accelerates well with its two motors and AWD. (The non-AWD version is slower.) Handling is sharp. Although the car has plenty of height on the inside, being designed like a crossover SUV, the lack of a conventional powertrain underneath means the body can sit lower to the ground. The result is interior space without a high step-in height or exposure to crosswinds that taller SUVs suffer.
3) Trips take planning. Alas, this is the Achilles' heel of EVs right now. The infrastructure for electrical recharging is nowhere near as built out as the gasoline infrastructure. In a town of any size, or at an oasis along the highway, you can expect to find a gas station that will sell gas that works in any gas vehicle to anyone with cash or a credit card, and fill up in minutes. With an EV, charger stations are fewer and far between. And you've got to find one with the right plugs. And you've got to find one with fast charging capability or it might take hours to recharge. And you've got to pick one that's in the network you've subscribed to, or you'll be paying a non-member price that makes your recharge no cheaper that refilling a comparable gas car. Thus we had to plan our trip around availability of charging stations and the time it takes to recharge. In particular, that meant a long drive I would've made in one day had to be split across two days.
4) Range anxiety. Although the Ioniq 5 has a stated range of 256 miles on a full charge in practice it can be a lot shorter than that. For one, charging above 80% is slow— so often you'll choose to roll on less than a full charge. Second, and even more crucially, we saw the car's range depleted fast on superhighways in the hot desert. We rolled into Barstow on electron fumes when we should've had 60 miles of stated range left. A similar thing happened on our next tank of electrons, too.
5) Will charger networks get worse before they get better? Two or three companies are already building out charger networks across the country. Right now they're not interoperable. You pay for a membership with one. It's not like gas, where you just pay the pump price at whichever brand station you stop at. And how fast will they grow? In particular, will they grow faster— or slower— than EV adoption? Even in just 4 fillups I saw how recharging could go bad. Right now it works okay, but only because demand is below supply. If a lot more people start driving EVs before networks expand enough, recharging will turn into a time-sink clusterfuck.
EVs aren't for Me— Yet
It was a fun experience driving an EV for a weekend and 500+ miles. Definitely more revealing an experience than test-driving one for a few miles near a dealership. Sadly my conclusion is that EVs are not for me. Yet. The driving experience was fine; but it's all the concerns about the refueling experience that I deem unacceptable. It's kind of a mess now, and it's not clear that it won't get worse before it gets better. And even "better" might not yield a car it's practical to drive ±500 miles in day. That's not something I do often, but it's something I do.The use case an EV is practical for is the in-town runabout. Especially if you have access to free charging, like at a school or place of work. Hey, if I could buy a special model of gas car that my employer would let me fill up for free, that'd totally change the analysis, too!
