Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Recently an acquaintance challenged me with the argument, "Green power is a massive jobs killer. You're going to put everyone in coal and oil out of work." I'm not sure why he put that challenge in front of me as we weren't discussing power generation technology, or green power, or electric utilities, or the employment rate. I can only imagine he sprung that on me because he knows I'm politically liberal, and that was the latest "destroy the libs" talking point implanted in his mind by the TV charlatans he's outsourced his critical thinking to.

I didn't engage the argument with this person as there wasn't time, but if there was I would have responded like I did to my father in law when he raised the same concern several years ago. FIL is politically liberal but lives in an area where most people he knows are aligned to the alternate-reality right. He hears their talking points repeated frequently enough without effective counterpoint that he worries they might be right. In addition, he lives in a state where coal mining has been a big industry in the past, and as a lifelong Democrat he has a lot of sympathy for the plight of blue-collar workers.

"What's going to happen to all the blue collar jobs like coal mining?" he asked me, earnestly. "Not everyone can earn advanced degrees and do white-collar work like you."

Here's how I responded then, same as I'd respond now if I thought my acquaintance actually wanted to listen and consider my argument as opposed to merely repeat a soundbite and gloat about how he "owned" me.



When I shared this with FIL he was already smiling before I got to the last sentence. He practically said it along with me.

The simple fact is green power doesn't mean energy now pops into existence so we can fire all the blue collar workers. Building, erecting, and maintaining green power infrastructure, like wind turbines, means plenty of skilled-labor jobs.

I'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. 😅

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!

Our second-half drive today was yet another object lesson that it's not so easy, being green. Again on the leg from Barstow to Bakersfield we experienced disappointing electro-mileage, about only two-thirds of the rated range. It wasn't quite as bad as the leg from Henderson, NV to Barstow, CA earlier in the day, which we finished with only 5 miles of range left. Though we did have a white-knuckle moment again.

As we were at the top of the Tehachapi Pass  noticed that the battery had once again depleted way more rapidly than forecast, leaving us with only about 35 miles of range remaining— and we were still about 35 miles out from our destination. We didn't want to roll in on electron fumes again.

I asked David, who was driving, to slow down. Going slower is more efficient. Meanwhile I tried looking up charging stations in the town of Tehachapi. The apps in the car and in Apple Car Play were close to useless while driving. And the small town of Tehachapi seemed to have only slow chargers. I reasoned that an emergency electron stop would be unnecessary as the road ahead entailed a steep downhill grade. Indeed, through the combination of easing off the throttle and letting gravity do some of the work in pulling us downhill toward Bakersfield telescoped our remaining mileage. We reached the hotel with 33 miles of range left.

After checking in, stowing our bags, and going out for dinner it was time to charge up the car. There was a charging station 1/2 mile away. We hooked up the car and waited outside in the still smoldering evening heat for 30 minutes.



While there we discussed the pros and cons of driving an EV. The depleted range of driving in the high heat is a big minus. The sparse availability of fast charging stations outside of major metro areas is a minus. The fussiness of the charging pumps is also a minus. By this point we'd visited three charging stations already during the day, and at each one there was at least one pump that was malfunctioning.

"But at least it's so much cheaper than driving a gas car," David asserted.

"Is it?" I asked.

While it's true that David's not paying out of pocket for charging, it's not really free. Two years of AYCE membership in charging network was rolled into the purchase price of the car. The pumps happily tell you how many dollars you're "saving"— i.e., how much each charge would cost if you were paying as a regular member. Their rate per kWh is not cheap.

"How can you compare it to gas?" David asked.

"Figure out the cost per mile of buying each type of fuel," I responded. I started to do some arithmetic out loud while we stood in the still smoldering evening heat.

By this point the pump refilled the battery to the charge we'd had upon leaving Barstow. The market price shown on the meter was $26. For that money we could have bought 5 gallons of gas. On a trip of 131 miles (Barstow to Bakersfield distance) a gas car would need to get 26.2 mpg to get there on the same cost equivalent of fuel. Our Nissan Xterra SUV wouldn't have beaten that; it would've gotten 18mpg on this trip. Our BMW convertible would've edged out the EV with about 28mpg. And plenty of more economical cars could've thumped the EV with way better than 26mpg fuel economy.

Bottom line, this EV is not showing well in terms of fuel economy right now. Electron filling stations are few and far between, somewhat hit-or-miss to use, and— with the car way under-performing its rated range— no cheaper than buying gas.