EV Stupidity Checklist
38 points by kevinc
38 points by kevinc
If i could get a PIH EV with the interior design sensibility of a mid-90s honda civic, and with a kill-switch on any means by which telemetry can be transmitted wirelessly, I'd consider switching.
I like tactile buttons, unpretentious solutions, and ownership. This is a lot to ask for now.
Why would you like a hybrid?
I collect Mitsubishi iMiEV vehicles. I love the Minicab MiEV. Doesn't even have electric windows - not that it'd be particularly bad if it did, just it's an extremely basic battery electric vehicle.
range anxiety.
There's nothing like an early Leaf or similar to cure range anxiety. You get to really appreciate how nice a purely electric vehicle is while also realizing how far you actually drive most days. My first EV was a 2014 Spark EV with 65-70 miles of range in nice weather, and I managed to put over 8,000 miles/year on it and drove it all year in northern Wisconsin (including driving to work in -22 °F/-30 °C temps). I've now been 100% electric for over two years, putting over 20,000 miles on a Bolt EV in the first year of ownership and 16,000 miles on an Equinox EV in its first year.
Even the Bolt, which is one of the slowest fast-charging EVs you can get, was perfectly fine on a 2,500-mile Wisconsin<->Virginia trip two years ago, and the charging networks have grown immensely since then. I'm planning a trip to Pennsylvania and Virginia this summer, and there is an embarrassment of riches even if I select only 350+ kW charging stations with four or more stalls (no Superchargers).
In nice weather, my Equinox gets 350 miles of range (nearly 250 miles if you're just looking at 80-10%). I have had zero range anxiety in either of my long-range EVs, but anything newer like the Equinox is especially unexciting even in winter. But still, the Bolt was our only long-range vehicle for over a year and 23,000+ miles.
Range is beyond massive these days, the range of my EV is 10x what I need most months of the year. And the charging infrastructure is so good I can drive across the nation with only a handful of stops.
Edited to add: "the nation" is canada. So, lots of big empty space to cross for cross country, but still very doable.
I live on the island of Tasmania, and I have a Hyundai Kona EV which gives a range of somewhere around 400km. When I tell people around here the range, they said "oh wow that's not far"
Tasmania is somewhere around 300km wide, 350km tall.
The range still pales compared to pretty much any ICE car with a full tank, and refueling takes two minutes compared to 45. I will 100% get a pure EV next time it's time for a new car but I would consider a plug-in hybrid or just a regular hybrid too if my needs involved regularly driving significantly longer than what's practical with a single charge for the class of car I'm looking for. (Yes a Leaf has long range, but if you need something with more ground clearance and 4WD drive you're not getting 500 miles.)
Normal EV ranges are already close to equivalent to a smaller ICE car (500kms) and charging on a fast network is closer to 10 or 15 mins. I only do a 40 min charge when really out in the middle of nowhere and even then I usually have to rush my kids through the pee stop to get back in time haha
I know that my situation and sensibilities are my own, but I wonder how many other people like me are out there.
I live in Poland and have access to not bad public transport. Once a couple of months I visit my in-laws. It is around 300km (~180mi) ride that takes around 4/4.5h (no highways there). I just don't want to do this without a stop and especially for my kid as well. I can do it and I did when there was just my wife, but it is not comfortable. Going with a car for more than 4h straight is mild torture for me. Just sitting on my ass for so long without ability to move is not something I want to do. That's why if I can I prefer a train.
That said for me personally an electric car with 250km of real life winter range would be enough. The problem for me is that I don't have ability to charge it anywhere cheap and public chargers are too expensive in my opinion.
I'd say the real problem is that you can't do long, mostly highway trips on a single charge - this year I had to do 2 trips basically around Poland (most of A4 and S3, roughly 700km/430mi) and I'd go insane with more than 1 stop (and it wasn't refueling, I wanted to eat something), especially with our not-so-great charging network I've got pretty much the same situation with $DAYJOB - I'm mostly remote, but I've got no charger near the office and I'd be anxious about doing ~360km (total, about 1.5h each way) with basically no slack in range
I do wish trains were more of an option here. Driving hundreds of miles is simply the norm in the US.
Similar to you, I used to drive for four hours at a time and realized years before getting an EV that it just wasn't safe or healthy. I adopted an EV-friendly travel regimen of driving ~2 hours, stopping for 20-30 minutes, and then driving a couple hours more. Even the slower Bolt was ready before we were on many of the stops of our Virginia trip.
Home charging is a huge plus, and more needs to be done to bring charging to apartment complexes and anywhere else people park their cars. I will say I comfortably ran the Bolt and Equinox off a shared 120V (so about 1.4 kW to the car) outlet for a month.
Slate truck maybe fits the bill for you? I don't know if it does telemetry or not, but it's pretty basic and cheap. The SUV variant does look mildly interesting to me but I currently have a reservation on an R2 (but I'm in Canada so not till next year at the earliest).
They have a 90s Civic and seem to want something somewhat like it. What makes you think a truck fits the bill..?
[posted and deleted repeatedly from a thread because I hadn't realized I was in this post via a link to a comment. facepalm]
[another edit: I am super confused, apparently every comment I post on this story seems to attach to this comment]
[one last edit: apparently it was just attaching to the comment on post, but if loading directly it's in the right place shrug]
Yeah, I just got an EV, and the temperature and fan speed can be controlled by buttons that are not on the central display. Just under them instead. And they're still touch buttons. The gear stick is removed and replaced with buttons on the center of the dash, so the first step in reversing is to look forward. Why?
Let's not forget every builtin "feature" to support google spying on me, the non-removable google spyware integration. Even if I did want to use the non-removable Google Maps view that you can at best hide, you can only use it if you let them spy on you. There are similar unremovable buttons to use the assistant spyware or you can choose to use Alexa instead.
The car itself defaults to - and you can't just say no, you have to search through endless menus - spying on you and recording everything in order to sell that data, presumably to google.
Every single sub-app on the system has separate "do not spy on me" checkboxes. e.g. you have to go through every. single. separate. google "service" to disable location spying.
It's astounding just how overt google is about being absolutely disinterested in even the pretense of privacy. I'll give them credit for not being Facebook, but that's really not a high bar.
Rearview mirror […] requires the driver to focus on the surface of the screen itself
First time I’ve seen someone else criticise this and… yeah I feel it, being severely nearsighted, every time I checked the RVM in the polestar 4 I rented was initially severely uncomfortable. I think it’s largely expectations, having lived with normal RVMs my entire life there’s no expectation of having to focus on it, and it’s not like you get troubled checking your instrument clusters and whatever. After a week or two with the car it mostly went away.
What didn’t was the loss of depth perception, especially at night where it’s already an issue.
the loss of depth perception, especially at night where it’s already an issue
What? I would expect that at night rear view camera would be better than a plain mirror. Stretch the brightness curve, bring out the shadows (and control the contrast of headlights)! Use IR camera to show me shapes instead of two bright dots! A camera could give me so much better view than two dots of headlights in a mirror – don't tell me that car manufacturers haven't picked such low hanging fruit. It has a camera and a DSP FFS, its input isn't restricted to what human senses can handle!
(That said, focus & depth are obvious problems. At night I'd also expect display's brightness to mess with eyes' accommodation to the darkness outside. The only possible benefit of a rear view camera would be exceeding what human eye can perceive (which could be actually helpful at night), and maybe better view/angles/visibility if it's proven that it's more helpful than disorienting for the driver that the rear view is from a different viewpoint)
IME rear view cameras have poor dynamic range during low light conditions, so other cars' headlights usually blow out the image. Perhaps you could stack exposures and tonemap in real time, but given how poorly these sensors perform I wouldn't expect them to handle that either.
That's really sad. I mean, given a price of a new auto, adding a price of a new iPhone on top of that wouldn't be that much of a difference, and an iPhone–quality camera with iPhone–quality DSP can't cost more than an entire iPhone (if they have an actual mirror too, I think it wouldn't even need to be at the same level of reliability as, say, drive–by–wire — it would only be an extra on top of obligatory/critical mirror, like parking cameras & sensors). And a good rear view camera for night conditions would be a real benefit of a high–tech car, unlike a doorknob–by–wire or animated blinkers.
I appreciate this list, and I agree. I have owned three EVs now, three generations of Chevrolets, and aside from the pop-out door handles on the Equinox EV they mostly meet these requirements. Depending on how strict you want to be, there are perhaps still too many controls on a touchscreen. But I still have turn signal and wiper stalls, cruise and audio controls on the steering wheel, and physical buttons and knobs (sometimes frustratingly software-dependent) for HVAC. I hate how Tesla has essentially set the tone and played Apple in the car market, and now it's hard to get an EV with a proverbial headphone jack because of their Courage.
While still not perfect, GM has been making EVs for people who want a regular car that happens to be electric. It's working for me, and hopefully their sales volume speaks volumes to the rest of the industry as Tesla falls out of favor.
EDIT: That's not to say they aren't making stupid decisions with the infotainment system, but I don't have any CarPlay- or Android Auto-compatible devices anyway and use my car's infotainment system as a glorified Bluetooth speaker. It was easy to disable all the Google stuff, and I've not once been bugged by OnStar. No pop-ups, no audio alerts, and no Google login.
EDIT 2: I especially hate slow powered charge port doors! That's the last thing I want to wait for or have fail. It's a solved problem ten times over! The Blazer EV and Ioniq 5 are the ones I've experienced, and with both you have to wait so much longer than any manual port door.
I'm currently in love with my 2021 KIA eNiro which has physical controls for everything and almost zero "smart" features. Hope to be able to keep it running for many more years.
Edit: It checks all of the boxes in the article
I also bought an e-Niro (2019 model) last month as my first EV.
I also considered the Polestar 2, but went for the Kia because it was not suffering from touch-screen syndrome and just functions like how I would expect from a car.
I have a 2024 VAG based BEV and apart from the stupid touch controls on the the steering wheel, it checks all the boxes in the post. The charging port is locked for some inane reason[1], and the little piston that locks has stuck at importune moments, blocking charging. I made a hardware-based correction to the issue.
[1] possibly the cover is just the same hardware as for the petrol vehicles, where locking makes a bit more sense
not sure about VAG BEVs, but IIRC Kia with vehicle2load doesn't require to be open to use v2l, so someone could steal your energy, just like with traditional fuel