Thomas and I just got home from covering our first Detroit North American International Auto Show. I think I can say that we both had fun, even if the show was weirdly short on cars and automakers. But perhaps the most interesting thing that we discovered at the show is how much money it cost us just to get there. I drove to the show behind the wheel of a broken 2010 Volkswagen Jetta SportWagen diesel while Thomas rode in with a new Genesis GV60 Performance electric crossover. He went about 500 miles total while I went 760 miles. Guess which one of us had to pay more to get to the show and back?
On Tuesday morning, I departed my apartment in my 2010 Volkswagen Jetta SportWagen TDI. This little black wagon has been my preferred road trip car since I got it. While my 2006 Smart Fortwo CDI gets far better fuel economy, the Volkswagen has more creature comforts, better seats, better suspension, and oh, working air-conditioning. Plus, it has an engaging manual transmission, which is why I bought it in the first place. That’s not to say that the Volkswagen guzzles diesel: I can get it to average about 42 mpg at and sometimes above 70 mph.
Detroit is about 350 miles from my home, well within range of my Jetta’s 16-gallon tank. I set off with 30 miles on my trip odometer from a full fill that I got three, maybe four weeks ago.
An Easy Drive
The trip in the Jetta was fun and somewhat uneventful. The 2.0-liter four under the hood provided 140 HP and 236 lb-ft torque when new. It now has about 230,000 miles, so who knows how many stallions are still in the stable. Still, the torquey diesel provided plenty of clickety clacky noises and bursts of power when I put the pedal down.
The car let me down just twice. Somewhere in western Michigan my car’s limp mode triggered twice in a span of about 5 minutes. The codes were for too little boost. Like most of my cars, this wagon isn’t perfect. It recently cracked its diesel particulate filter (DPF), which is supposed to clean up some of the vehicle’s emissions. That broken DPF is sending soot into my exhaust gas recirculation system, which in-turn is getting dirty.
My car also has a turbo actuator. This device actuates the turbo’s vanes, which allow the turbo to provide varying levels of pressure. The computer requests an amount of boost and if for whatever reason it can’t get that boost, limp mode is triggered. I’ve thus far found no vacuum leaks and no obvious leaks in my boost hoses. It could be that the actuator may be getting stuck or the vanes getting stuck. One issue is the actuator can rust, which tracks, given that my car has lived most of its life in Michigan. One thing I’ve noticed is that if I drive it frequently, the issue never happens. It only crops up after the car has sat for a month or longer.
Either way, when the limp mode triggers it can easily be reset by restarting the car. I did that and have since driven 500 miles without issue.
By The Numbers
As for fuel economy, it held at around 42 mpg with speeds between 70 mph and 85 mph until I arrived in Detroit. Fuel economy took a huge hit in the city as a lot of my driving around town involved low speed, stop and go, and brief periods of heavy traffic. Because of my car’s efficiency, I made the 350-mile drive to Detroit and drove about 60 miles around the city, and still had about a quarter tank left. On the way home I tapped out at 515 miles when the fuel light popped on.
When all was said and done my average dropped to 38 mpg and I drove a total of 760 miles. I noticed that the price for diesel is higher on the highway than say, in a rural area. I paid $5.50 a gallon to put 13.31 gallons into my 16-gallon tank and paid $73.25 for the privilege. According to my calculations, the car ran at about 14.2 cents per mile on that first tank of fuel. At 38 mpg, if I paid for every mile of fuel used, it would have cost me about $110 to do the whole trip.
So, how does this compare to a brand new electric luxury crossover? I’ll hand Thomas the megaphone.
Can An 800-Volt Architecture Stack The Deck?
At the time of writing this, I’m eating my first proper meal in three days. Detroit was one hell of a trip, and I figured I’d do it in an EV. Genesis Canada kindly lent me the GV60 Performance, a jaw-dropping ideal of what the E-GMP platform can be. It packs a respectable range of 235 miles and an 800-volt architecture that should allow for compatibility with blazing quick 350 kW charging stations. While not the perfect tool for the job, the GV60 Performance seemed quite apt for the task. Would infrastructure be able to keep up?
The Way There
Every EV road trip starts with a fundamentally solid plan. A plan for route, time, speed, and energy conservation. For the route, the plan was a straight shot down the 401, over the Ambassador Bridge, and to the hotel in Dearborn. The goal was to arrive well before the reveal of the Chrysler 300C, and keeping things slow while sticking to eco mode was critical for that. The faster you travel in a car, the more drag you’re up against, and it’s easier to save time by charging less than by driving like you’ve discovered the fiery aftermath of lunch. After a fairly uneventful drive to London, I arrived at my first charging station, fully hoping to make good use of the Genesis GV60 Performance’s 800-volt architecture.
After making the 196-kilometer (121.8-mile) drive, strike one: the 350 kW Electrify Canada charging station in London was somewhat broken. The point-of-sale terminal was inoperable, so the unit was for members only. Instead, I had to use a 150 kW station. Not optimal but not bad, right? Well, just because a charging station can spit out 150 kW doesn’t mean it will spit out anywhere near to 150 kW consistently. For the duration of my first charging session, I averaged 41 kW of current, translating to well over an hour to 80 percent charge.
So what’s there to do when you’re stuck at a charging station for more than an hour? Well, you file emails, check in on your friends to make sure they’re doing okay, admire a particularly strange record shop sign, wonder if said record shop has a CD copy of Turn On The Bright Lights, then remember that the car you’re driving doesn’t have a CD player because it isn’t from the past. You also get a great chance to stretch your legs and back because the seats in the Genesis GV60 are unfit for human use. Total cost of this charging stop? $43.27.
Right, back on the road. While Canadians have a reputation for being kind and welcoming, that’s at odds with the nature of the land. Even if you live in a flyover state, it’s hard to picture how vast and empty much of the Great White North is. While the stretch of Highway 401 from London to Tilbury is far from threatening, it’s still unbelievably tedious. In America’s flyover country, monotony is punctuated by crops, cows, and amusing billboards for Jesus and hardcore pornography. On this 129-kilometer (80.1-mile) jaunt in southwestern Ontario, there isn’t much contrast. Just stretches of monotonous fields occasionally punctuated by quaint postwar overpasses. It’s a blend of surreal and reassuring, the seemingly oversaturated greenery blurring past like a Monet piece, the blocky concrete overpasses reminders that although the world we were raised to survive in no longer exists, we can still romanticize the remnants.
After about an hour of driving, I arrived at the Electrify Canada station in Tilbury, located in the parking lot of a charmingly small Canadian Tire. While this nationwide chain of stores does sell tires, it also sells so much more. Picture a place where you can pick up valve cover gaskets, a new reciprocating saw, a stand mixer, and a gazebo. I should really write an article on this Canadian oddity. Anyway, the 350 kW charger in Tilbury was working, so I plugged in, tapped my Apple Pay, and watched the current shoot up into the mid-200s. Very good.
Unfortunately, that lasted for all of about three minutes, with charging current stabilizing around 67 kW. The Toronto Maple Leafs last won the Stanley Cup in 1967. There’s no connection between those statements, but as a Torontonian, it’s my duty to force one. Thankfully, this stop was much quicker, getting to 80 percent state of charge 17 minutes and one second for the very reasonable cost of $10.87. Add in the time it took to get off the highway, get plugged in, and get back on the highway, and I ended up with a total detour time of around half an hour. Still, this would be enough to confidently get to the hotel and back to the charging station provided I didn’t need to drive anywhere else.
[Mercedes’ Note: Thomas informed me that he originally left home with about an 80 percent charge. Those delays meant that he wasn’t able to attend the Chrysler 300C unveiling. We took my wagon to and from the show because the GV60 seemingly had only just enough range to run back to Canada.]
The morning after the first media day, I was looking to hedge my bets with a quick splash-and-dash. The problem is that easily-accessible charging in Dearborn isn’t really a huge thing. My best bet was a Level 2 charger. After locating the nearest Level 2 charging station, I was able to add enough range to pad margins should my GPS try to send me through the tunnel rather than over the Ambassador Bridge. It turns out, I really needed that. Total cost? Free, surprisingly. I really can’t be mad at that.
The Way Back
Getting back from Detroit was much easier than getting to Detroit. Getting back from Detroit took forever. Let me explain why these aren’t conflicting statements. After arriving at the border roughly half an hour late, I met a surprisingly chill guard who shared some great tips on sushi restaurants right near my apartment. If you’re that guard, you’re awesome. The jaunt from Windsor to Tilbury is almost entirely on concrete road surfaces. If you ever meet me in person, don’t talk to me about concrete road surfaces because I’ll talk your ear off about how dreadful they are from an NVH perspective. Anyway, I kept the climate control completely off for the return trip to conserve range. One episode of The Basement Yard later, and I was back at the 350 kW charging station in Tilbury.
This time, things were a lot slower. The station peaked at 71 kW and took 36:36 to replenish the GV60 Performance to an 80 percent state of charge. Figure a total cost of $23.52. Upon plugging in, I checked my DMs to find a message from Susan, one of my Journalism school professors. We chatted for a bit on the phone about EV charging and the Detroit show. She shared an anecdote about wanting to cry while covering NAIAS as a reporter back in its glory days. I wanted to cry over the Detroit show too, but for very different reasons. Think less scramble and more funeral.
Not long before reaching London, I caught up to an industry colleague in a BMW i4 traveling very slowly behind a transport truck. The overtake went something like this. Funnily enough, we both pulled off in London but for different reasons. I needed a splash-and-dash (jolt-and-bolt? Charge-and-retreat?), he wanted to check out a vintage videogame shop. Despite a peak charging rate of just 45 kW and an average of around 41 kW, the GV60 was ready to go in 35 minutes and four seconds at a cost of $22.57. Well, that and the cost of completely missing the game store because it had closed. Apparently it had a copy of Driver: San Francisco for Xbox 360 that I was looking for. Fuck.
The final stretch back to Toronto was marred by single-lane bottlenecks and heavy traffic. Good for range as I could lean on regenerative braking, but bad for time. I didn’t get back to my flat until nearly midnight. Truthfully, I would’ve arrived in Toronto a bit sooner if I hadn’t made a quick detour to try out a hard launch in the GV60 Performance with my childhood best friend. With roads glistening in evening dew and the frustration of a customer service rep, I tapped to boost button and ripped off a four-tire salute to everything this past week had brought.
The Aftermath
So what did I learn from this EV road trip? Well, almost every number attached to an EV is bullshit in the context of a road trip. Total range doesn’t matter nearly as much as range from 80 percent state of charge. Theoretical peak charging speeds don’t matter as much as actual sustained averages and properly-maintained infrastructure. Efficiency matters more than pure range. I wanted this road trip to be easy, relatively cheap, and fun. Instead, it was a little bit of a nightmare. I like electric cars, but it genuinely feels like they aren’t ready for prime time just yet. Electrify Canada is a Northern counterpart to Electrify America, which is a preferred network for Genesis. Stops at those stations should’ve worked well, but they didn’t. Oh, and my childhood best friend I made a detour to see? His dad owns a Hyundai Ioniq 5. After several months of running, it’s getting sold for a combustion-powered vehicle because charging is so much of a faff. Keep in mind, we’re talking about a homeowner with a proper Level 2 charging station installed in his garage. The current crop of EVs are almost all brilliant, but public charging infrastructure just doesn’t measure up.
Jetta SportWagen TDI Road Trip Stats
Total spend:Â $73.25 at $5.50 a gallon for diesel.
Distance driven before filling up: 515 miles
Total distance: 760 miles
Cost-per-mile (cost / fill at 515 miles): 14.2 cents per mile
Cost-per-mile (cost / total distance): 9 cents per mile
GV60 Performance Road Trip Stats
Total spend: $100.23 ($75.51 USD)
Total distance: 825.2 km (512.8 mi)
Cost-per-mile (cost / total distance): 12.14 cents per km (14.73 US cents per mile)
[Note: Due to charging methods we weren’t able to accurately calculate cost per mile between chargers.]
Our Conclusions
The Genesis proved to be the more reliable steed, but getting it to and from Detroit was far more of a hassle than it should have been. For a similar cost, the Volkswagen was able to sprint the whole way from my home near Wisconsin to Detroit without stopping. Then it drove around Detroit and went some of the way home before finally needing fuel.
And since I was working with expensive diesel (which was more than a dollar more expensive than 87 octane gasoline), it seems that a regular fuel efficient car or hybrid would have widened the gulf.
Now, what are we trying to say here, exactly? We’re not trying to say that the EV is bad. Indeed, it made the trip silently, without emissions, and without breaking. Really, Thomas’ gripe is that the combination of the Genesis and the charging network made for a worse experience than a broken diesel. Hopefully, as infrastructure and the cars get better, situations like this will be a thing of the past.
There is something incredibly enjoyable about making it from Metro Detroit to the Charlotte area (and previously, East of Raleigh which is about 100 miles further) to visit the in-laws without stopping for fuel in our ’14 Cruze Diesel.
I usually go run out sometime during our trip and fill back up in preparation for the drive home, but it makes things so much easier not having to stop anywhere along the way.
Definitely not selling anyone on the benefits of EV. If a beat down VW still costs less per mile and you had free energy at one stop and do not consider in the value of your time lost as well as missed work assignment, then there really is a rude awakening about to hit the populace.
the benefits are always going to depend on location and charging network. he got hosed charging that thing the first time for 40+$. i dont see canadian prices but for michigan EA charges 43c/kwh. that gv60 should be able to charge from dead to full for $33.28. but if you pat 4$ a month to get a membership for EA its 31c/kwh and a full charge would only be 23.99.
I know in a thankfully small number of states/provinces EA is mandated to charge by time instead of by kwh. Suspect that’s how that cost ran up so high.
Thomas, your little aside about Canadian Tire made me remember when I first moved to Canada. I drove past a Canadian Tire and thought it was some massive warehouse. Why else would a tire shop need to be that big.
A few weeks later, I needed something for the dorm room (a kettle maybe) and my roommate suggested Canadian Tire. I was blown away that a ‘tire store’ sold housewares and damn near everything else.
Western Auto in the US served the same purpose for quite a while.
I do appreciate that this article (while perhaps not super scientific in terms of a 1-to-1 comparison) doesn’t try to sugar-coat things to paint the EV in a more favorable light.
To me, the takeaway seems to be that (at least with the current state of charging infrastructure) an EV makes a lot more sense as a daily driver/commuter, than it does as a road-tripper. And, as such, it makes a lot more sense in a multi-vehicle household than it does as an individual’s sole mode of transportation.
That in itself isn’t a revelation, but it is is closely related to one of the discussions in the recent Autopian podcast, in which Torch and Tracy were making the case that it does us a disservice to always assume that any vehicle we buy needs to accommodate 100% of all driving situations we might ever face, which often leads to people buying “more car” than they need in terms of cargo capability, horsepower, and various other metrics.
I honestly can’t say I would be eager to attempt a long road-trip in an EV unless I was specifically doing it for the sake of science and/or journalism… however, if I’m just considering one as a means to get to and from work, and still keeping my gas-powered van for actual road-trips, then suddenly my “range anxiety” basically disappears and an EV starts to make a lot more sense.
As someone who just put down money for their first EV (’22 Ioniq 5) this was a great article. I still need to learn the ins and outs of charging and I’m in a generally rural area that doesn’t have a lot of chargers available.
There are a couple of city utility owned chargers by the local high school. One level 2 and one fast charger. I’m getting the electric in my garage updated and have a home level 2 charger on it’s way.
I’m kind of taking the whole going electric thing as an adventure. I don’t have much of a commute living in a small town and I would still be able to use my wife’s Civic if I have to do a longer trip where chargers will be scarcer. So I don’t think the problems mentioned in the article or comments will be a big issue for me. I’m usually not one to have practical vehicles anyway.
So as someone who is in an EV only household and has driven (non-Tesla) EVs around 50k miles since 2016 including regular road trips that round trip to 1600 miles, few thoughts (tl;dr- those are super inflated charging costs, if you have kids and stop regularly the long stops are pretty normal anyway, and wow the Genesis range seems super underwhelming real life vs. EPA).
1) Holy shit you got hosed on charging costs. Guessing EA Canada does exclusively time based DC Fast Charging – in almost all (sorry Texas) states its per kwh instead, so the random super pricey charging stops aren’t really a thing – around $10-$15 to go 10% to 80%, depending on the exact car and charger.
2) Always get the EA Membership road tripping – you save its cost in a single fast charging session and you can flip it on and off by the month.
3) Can confirm the US based charging infrastructure is way better than that in my (fairly extensive) experience, but stop times of 20-40 minutes are to be expected.
4) Said long stops matter like nothing if like me you usually have 2 kids in the car so stopping for takes a solid half hour and you make it longer than 2 hours driving in a stretch you’ve been unusually lucky.
5) also wow the Genesis range is super underwhelming – I get something like 300 miles of range at highway speeds (70 mph) in our Mach E. That sounds like road tripping our first generation Bolt back in 2017.
“2) Always get the EA Membership road tripping – you save its cost in a single fast charging session and you can flip it on and off by the month.”
This pisses me off so much about the current EV charging situation. I don’t want to have six different subscriptions to charging services just so I don’t have to pay extortionate amounts for electricity on a road trip. Plus I’ve heard a lot of horror stories about the apps not working correctly. The fact that gas stations don’t have all of this app-based membership BS* is a huge thing that will keep people in ICEs.
*: I mean, they do, but if you just want to pull up to the pumps and fill up you can do that. People would never stand for gas stations working the way EV charging stations do.
It’s a real issue, for all that you just swipe a card at an EA station, you end up paying something like an extra 10 cents/kwh ($4-$6/charge) to do so unless you sign up for the membership. The good news is it’s as simple as hitting a button in the app to turn it on and off (takes about 30 seconds) but it is another step.
The one thing I really underrated is the convenience of not dealing with gas stations/commercial charging outside of overnight trips. Really appreciate that.
It’s almost like a charger network built by vw as punishment for diesel-gate isn’t well executed. Harrr!!!
My dad used to punish me for stuff by making me shovel dog crap in the yard. Let me tell you, i did a lousy job.
So from this article and another article I read recently on “another (non-J) blog”, I can conclude that tripping across North America in an EV is the same as tripping across the Australian Outback, minus large, migrating marsupials.
Mercedes, your under-boost limp mode is caused by the VG vanes in the turbo being clogged with soot.
At 230k miles, especially with the cracked DPF, it is understandable. The good-ish news is the fix is not a particularly complicated procedure, but the turbo has to come out and then put back in after cleaning the vanes. There are YouTube videos that will show you, much better than any explanation.
Umm the turbo and its VNT are pre DPF so even with a cracked DPF it can’t possibly see more soot than it does under stock conditions, it’s actually the spot that keeps the VNT vanes lubed up. A cracked DPF will plug up the EGR cooler/filter (excess soot makes it to the LP EGR which isn’t designed for) where the only fix is new DPF and new EGR filter (or delete but we can’t talk about those).
I’d wager it’s a failing actuator, easy to swap/diagnose by running outputs with VCDS.
What’s up with the inconsistency of charging rates on the Hyundai eGMP cars? Is that common? I keep seeing folks say that even at a working charging station, they just decide to slow down charging because Mercury is in retrograde or something. Which really bums me out, because I was planning to make an Ioniq 5 or 6 my next car.
I had a 2020 Jetta S with the 1.4T and 6-speed manual, and although it was EPA rated at 40 highway, it would average closer to 45mpg on all-highway trips – even saw 50 a few times but that was at lower (below 70) speeds, or a tailwind. I am curious whether the newer 8-speed automatic Jettas also beat the EPA ratings.
I think a major component that’s often overlooked when considering the cost per mile of electric cars is this:
Road Tax
As far as I know, no electric cars pay road tax right now. As we push people to transfer to electric over time, the cost of running an electric vehicle will go up by nature of that. I’m unsure if road tax will be applied via mileage per year (as opposed to in the price of fuel), but its significant.
That being said, it’s impressive that the Diesel can be competitive even with the disadvantage of being taxed.
In Washington we absolutely pay road tax on EVs. Not on the “fuel” but as an additional fee on our annual registration. I believe it is $125 regardless of vehicle, but I could be wrong by a little. Call it 1 cent per mile for most drivers?
Yes, I figured it out a while back and I pay the equivalent of $1.50/gallon tax if my EV were an ICE that got 30 mpg. That said, I did Level 2 charge for free today while running errands.
Also pay road tax in NC – EVs pay an additional annual registration fee around $150 IIRC.
In Virginia, EVs and any “fuel efficient” vehicle now pay a “Highway Use Fee” at registration. Fuel efficient is defined as better than average. So your Accord pays extra, and so does your Tesla or Prius.
Comparing the cost of the trip between a $6k car and a $60k car seems like the wrong metric. What was the carbon footprint of each trip?
How would the trip have gone if you had run the battery lower and taken longer at less charging stations?
How would it have gone in a Tesla using superchargers?
Note: I’ve had a Model Y for about 9 months and prefer not to take trips over 200 miles round trip, haven’t tried a Supercharger yet, and haven’t installed a home charger yet. My normal commute is 22 miles round trip and the 110 charger at home meets my needs for that so far. I’ll install a 240 at some point in the future. We also have two other ICE cars in the household for longer road trips.
Thomas pretty much nailed it: brilliant but not ready for prime time. Add in the toxic mining and production methods, and the lack of recycling technology for the batteries and we have a long way to go before we are done with gas and diesel.
I used to have a 2004 TDI. I loved that little manual, diesel, brown (gold) wagon. We have one of those early compliance EVs, you know the ones where they get 89mi on a full charge. With a home charger and around town trips it’s been perfect and costs us nearly nothing with solar on the roof of our house. But I’d never take another road trip after my one experience trying to charge away from home: Charging stations that were listed and not in operation, finding a charging station but it has a different plug, finally sorting those two issues only to charge the car for 4 hours at a station and then run out of juice 4 miles from home. I plugged the car in to a local building’s 120v outlet and came back 24 hours later after getting a ride home. Then I offered the building owner $20. Never again. Super frustrating.
This is why the plug in hybrid ( Think Chevy Volt ) is so superior. Electric for all the reasons electric is good, and gas when you need range. Why are we selling $90k+ vehicles that aren’t made this way is beyond me.
I mean the Genesis’ trip sounds like it was on major highways for the most part. If you can’t find what you need off the interstate, how are you going to recharge when the closest town consists of 1500 people off a county road?
I’d consider a full EV for one of my cars that would be charged 95% of the time at home, but there will need to be more competition at lower price points first. I’m not spending $60k on my “commuter” car.
For our vehicle that gets taken pretty regularly for day trips away from major cities, PHEV is still the best compromise…assuming it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg over a ICE model. The tax rebate isn’t an option for me.
Yeah, I’ve got an electric Mini I use for commuting. They start at about $30k. Only a little over 100 miles range, but I unequivocally love it. BUT I still have a gas car for road trips for now.
I get it, the Electric mini is possibly a bit more reliable than Bavarian based english gas motored thing built in the middle east, but damn, only 100 miles. 30K is a heck of a lot for a Daily commuter only.
Not just reliable, it honestly feels great to drive around town. People used to call it “V12 torque and smoothness,” and it still feels luxurious to leave the line effortlessly and without a single vibration.
But, yeah, the price was a lot better when I got it before the tax rebate got re-jiggered. I’d look a lot harder at a less pretty car in the current climate.
PHEV is the way to go short term.
I have a Honda Clarity, and simply love it. Accord sized sedan, 40mi electric, 300mi gas, charges overnight on level 1, household plug in and under $40K with a $7,500 tax credit when new.
It’s also now discontinued, and I have zero idea what I’m going to get when it’s time to make that change.
I imagine you will need to get a Jeep Cherokee 4Xe
After commuting with a Chevy Volt on loan, I would have to strongly disagree.
The Volt was an excellent EV. It had a great powertrain and was even fun to drive.
The real fatal flaw was the Chevy lump under the hood, and all the shit needed to support it. Once that kicks in, the car becomes shitty to drive. Like, CVT kind of shitty. The engine drones and engine speed does not change with vehicle speed, and seriously, converting energy to heat and a Lil bit of electricity using an engine, then storing it in a battery before finally using it to drive an electric motor is a silly way to get around.
All the Volt needed was a larger battery in place of that engine to give it 200 to 300 miles of range and it would be perfect for most drivers needs.
For the very very few people who drive farther than that regularly, an EV would be a poor choice of vehicle, but a Volt with a range extender would be much worse.
Yeah, this kind of encapsulates where I’m at with BEVs. I’m glad they work for some folks—my mother adores her Model Y, and dad has a 4Runner for the rare-for-them occasion where it doesn’t make sense. I’m glad they’re getting more common and that they’re getting the development and support they need to continue improving. But for me, they’re not there yet. I’d consider a hybrid or PHEV for sure, but I don’t think I can be totally dependent on charging.
There also just aren’t quite the types of BEV vehicles I want, at the prices I can afford. I’m also concerned about depreciation, what with the rapid improvements in the sector and the fact of battery degradation.
My next vehicle will definitely still have a combustion engine in it. The one after that? Probably by then, I’ll feel comfortable getting an EV.
I’m really concerned with depreciation if batteries are still degrading 15-25% depending on amount of fast charging. Given how often I am on the road for work, I’d be really dependent on DC fast charging and using the full 100% of the battery.
Degradation is one issue I have with EV’s. I remember Jay Leno saying something like “mechanical parts break and can be fixed, electronics degrade”. I like the idea of EV’s but only as a commuter. Honestly, I would much rather have a plugin hybrid.
“There also just aren’t quite the types of BEV vehicles I want, at the prices I can afford. I’m also concerned about depreciation, what with the rapid improvements in the sector and the fact of battery degradation.”
This is my big problem. So far, for BEV’s I can afford, it’s basically a bunch of jellybeans to choose from, with the Model 3 thrown in there. Gimme a true sedan, or a true wagon, or a small pickup (Maverick) and I’d be happy.
The problem w/a BEV is you are carrying the weight of a full tank of fuel w/ you all the time. And thx to battery degradation, the size of the tank (but not the weight) gets smaller as time goes by.
I’m shocked both by how inefficient the Genesis is (90 MPGe combined, so 2.6 miles/kWh. As a comparison, my Bolt EUV gets 3.9 miles/kWh) and by how expensive the charging stations are.
500 EV miles should take 192 kWh in the Genesis (128 kWh in my Bolt). Assuming the national (US) average 15.5 cents/kWh cost, that’s only $29.76 of elections ($19.84 for the bolt).
So electrons cost an approximate 3x premium over what’s available at the plugs when fast charging.
well since the pricing is not regulated and their are not enough options to make the laws of supply and demand kick in, and of course the infrastructure costs to even install a DC fast charger, the price is whatever the owner want to charge to cover costs(amortized infra cost) plus 30%. or more likely with no competition, cost plus 100 percent.
I love real world down to earth stuff like this [thumbs up smiley goes here]
Even though we have been at it for some time, the EV-1 was what 25 years ago?, we’re still very much in the stone ages of electric cars.
well if you want to call that the first, it was never really sold as much as leased and only in that stupid state on the Left Coast.
Motorola made a full EV corvette in the 80’s, the citicar and many other Electric things came around and promptly failed in the 70’s, but even if you go back 100 years there were electric cars in the days of the Model T. Imagine if they had thrown down back then and forced 100 years of development on the car companies?
No it wasn’t first, but it was one of the first good ones.
We had electric cars over here in the eighties, but they were all kind of crappy.
I really like the idea of an electric car, and would love an ioniq5 or a BMW i3.
However, I have a diesel VW Golf estate, just like Mercedes’ Jetta above. It’s done 180000 miles, is worth about £1000 and (touch wood) is utterly reliable and does 650miles to a tank of fuel.
It was meant to be a stop gap car, but that was 3 1/2 years, 70k miles ago. Anything electric would take a major investment from here. So instead I’ve just bought a diesel VW Eos as a sister car to the golf hoping to repeat the trick again.
Fucking reliable Volkswagens. We got a hand-me-down ’98 Polo (base model) as a stop gap car at a time when we depended on a nightmare ’89 Renault Espace Quadra. The plan was to hold on to it while we waited for a decent deal on an old Volvo 745/945, and then pass the Polo on to someone else in the family who needed it.
It’s been 10 years and the bastard refuses to become unreliable. We had a fender-bender about 2 years ago and the car was almost junked, but we ended up letting it sit for a few months while I searched for cheap parts (we found someone to do the labour for cheap). €450 in parts+labour later it was back on the road, and still, not a hint of trouble. We probably spent a bit more than the car is worth, but it was an easy decision to make. What’s it gonna take for it to die so I can justify buying another cool car?
I’m mostly kidding; in the course of a decade I learned to appreciate the Little Polo That Could. It’s very cheap to drive and maintain, and if I don’t mind the abyssal drop in gas mileage it will go pretty damn fast on the highway (according to Waze I’ve done almost 10km/h more than the listed top speed, somehow). I still prefer to daily drive a ’91 Renault 4 we got in the meantime, but it’s good to know the Polo is there whenever I need it.
Every season I watch every game anxiously hoping the Leafs can make it to and win the Stanley and every season I’m let down; Being from Alaska they were my favorite team as a kid and still are as an adult. Oh well, at least they still beat the Stars
Very interesting article with more useful information than I’ve seen recently. I might conclude that right now an electric is mostly good for local running until I read about your friend’s Ioniq. Was he mostly local or trying to make out of town trips in it?
You’re absolutely correct with your initial assumption, he’s experienced some fairly significant charging challenges on out-of-town trips.
OH SNAP!!!!!
Interesting article and awesome to see a warts-and-all discussion. Comments section has big “it’s 1999 and my landline works better than a cell phone ever could” energy
Sounds like the thing to do is to agitate for a rapid improvement in charging infrastructure. I do wonder if chargers will start showing up at existing gas stations.
I do miss my TDI. Shame it was predicated on lies, but it was a joy to own
I miss so much our Cyber Green New Beetle TDI, we could 50 MPG highway so easily in that thing.
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