OT: Electric Vehicles--anyone driving them or seriously looked at them?

[MikeD]

If you want a Bolt, better buy now as GM is going to cease production soon. Someone on the Prius Chat forum claims they bought a Bolt recently and paid $21K with tax credits.

[yngpunk]

Originally Posted by robt57

The other changes with the fed tax credit are good. You don't have to wait until you file to net your coin, dealer can apply as equity. And I believe the folks paying less than 7500.00 tax can get the entire 7500, not positive on that detail.

Previously, you had to have at least a $7500 tax liability to get the full $7500 credit...less tax liability, less tax credit...US isn't going to give you cash back. Interesting that you can now get the tax credit at the time of purchase...but wonder what happens come tax time and you don't have at least a $7500 tax liability...do you have to pay back some of the credit?

Most likely scenario, is that anyone buying an EV already has at least a $7500 tax liability

[stackie]

If you don't have the 7500 tax liability, nothing happens. You got a 7500 credit on the car.

If you make over the income limit, then the dealership will be wanting the money back.

[Mark Davison]

We are on our second EV. The first was a Tesla Model 3 Long Range. We sold this to my daughter in order to buy a Tesla Model Y to accommodate elder care needs and a dog. The Model Y is a hatchback, rather than a sedan with a trunk, and is better for hauling around bicycles, packages and suitcases.

About 90% of our usage is driving to recreation, doing errands and shopping in the Seattle area. We generally drive less than 50 miles in a day and we recharge overnight in our garage on 120V house current. Electricity here is cheap (about $.11/kWh) and the running cost per mile of our Tesla is cheaper than our 2014 Subaru Outback.

We do frequent 150 to 200 mile road trips in the area. We have found that you need to be careful planning trips to destinations without chargers--I use a third party route planning program (see abetterrouteplanner.com) and simply plan a round trip. This ensures that you won't be marooned in a national park with no way to get out. Many rural destinations here have no public chargers, or a limited number of level 2 chargers. Our relatives in the area do not have 240V outlets that are accessible.

Be aware that when a Supercharger station is experiencing high usage, Tesla may limit your recharging to 80%. This is now quite common on the I5 corridor.

I like the way the Tesla functions as a car, but I would prefer having a car with better haptics. In particular, I think that any control that a driver needs to operate while driving should be a separate physical control that can be operated wearing gloves and with a minimum of distraction. You shouldn't have to go several layers into a screen menu system to set the windshield wiper speed.

It seems to me that the Tesla automation systems have not been properly stress tested. In particular, the automatic setting on the windshield wiper speed fails more often than it works in Seattle's particular kind of rain. Since this affects visibility out of the car on dark rainy nights it is a serious safety issue.

Note that you can issue voice commands to change the wiper speed. Response can be slow, and voice commands do not work at all in rural areas with no cellular data service.

I have had consistent trouble with the traffic aware cruise control system. When used on a sunny day I find it creates uncommanded rapid braking about every hour of operation on I5. This is so bad my wife forbids me from using it. She is correct—the uncommanded braking is rapid, relentless, hard to countermand and potentially fatal.

When I sold the Model 3 to my daughter I decided to drive it from Seattle to St. Louis because the wait for a shipping company was too long. So I have had the experience of a long road trip in the late fall of 2021.

Summary: the car basically performed well, but the automatic features are not ready for public use, and energy management in cold weather is still a challenge.

In particular, leaving Seattle on a rare bright sunny morning with wet roads, we had the emergency braking (not cruise control) engage several times. I would guess that automated collision avoidance systems that depend heavily on cameras do not fare well in the presence of wet roads glistening with low sunlight.

We enabled auto steer while crossing Kansas, and it does a good job of reducing your work load when driving in the presence of a steady cross wind. You learn that you need to disable near exit and entrance ramps, because the system is very myopic—it seems to be simply following the right lane market and gets confused when it loses touch with the lane marker, and veers off to the right to hunt for it. Not a behavior you want near on-ramps.

There are still long passages between Superchargers out on the plains, and you may have to carefully manage consumption to make it between chargers, especially if you start the morning with a cold-soaked car at a hotel with no available level 2 charger. You minimize consumption through the following means: 1) slow down to the slowest speed you and surrounding traffic can tolerate, 2) minimize non-essential electric use, i.e. turn the cabin heat down or off, use the seat heat on low, only defrost as necessary, 3) navigate to a location near a Supercharger, but don’t tell the Tesla you are going to a Supercharger, because it will automatically raise consumption by pre-conditioning the battery.

Note that the EPA range of the Tesla grossly exaggerates the usable range—the EPA test assume you charge to 100%, drive the battery all the way down to exhaustion, operate at ideal temperatures, and drive a mix of highway and urban roads. If you are charged to 80% and want to arrive with 10% you have, at the best, 70% of the EPA range available, and you will have to drive at 60mph with the heat off to achieve anything near that.

Having said that, you will find that if you are caught in heavy highway traffic that surges from 0 to 40mph and back again, you may well beat the EPA rated consumption. This is a regime where EVs perform extremely well, and ICEs not so well.

In a range emergency you can almost halve the consumption rate of the Model Y by driving at 40mph.

We keep our ICE Subaru Outback for hiking and trips into rural areas with no charging facilities. A plug-in hybrid version of the Outback would be welcome, because the Outback is painfully inefficient around town (it consumes about 21mpg), but this does not seem to be in Subaru’s plans.

[kppolich]

Originally Posted by Mark Davison

We are on our second EV. The first was a Tesla Model 3 Long Range. We sold this to my daughter in order to buy a Tesla Model Y to accommodate elder care needs and a dog. The Model Y is a hatchback, rather than a sedan with a trunk, and is better for hauling around bicycles, packages and suitcases.

About 90% of our usage is driving to recreation, doing errands and shopping in the Seattle area. We generally drive less than 50 miles in a day and we recharge overnight in our garage on 120V house current. Electricity here is cheap (about $.11/kWh) and the running cost per mile of our Tesla is cheaper than our 2014 Subaru Outback.

We do frequent 150 to 200 mile road trips in the area. We have found that you need to be careful planning trips to destinations without chargers--I use a third party route planning program (see abetterrouteplanner.com) and simply plan a round trip. This ensures that you won't be marooned in a national park with no way to get out. Many rural destinations here have no public chargers, or a limited number of level 2 chargers. Our relatives in the area do not have 240V outlets that are accessible.

Be aware that when a Supercharger station is experiencing high usage, Tesla may limit your recharging to 80%. This is now quite common on the I5 corridor.

I like the way the Tesla functions as a car, but I would prefer having a car with better haptics. In particular, I think that any control that a driver needs to operate while driving should be a separate physical control that can be operated wearing gloves and with a minimum of distraction. You shouldn't have to go several layers into a screen menu system to set the windshield wiper speed.

It seems to me that the Tesla automation systems have not been properly stress tested. In particular, the automatic setting on the windshield wiper speed fails more often than it works in Seattle's particular kind of rain. Since this affects visibility out of the car on dark rainy nights it is a serious safety issue.

Note that you can issue voice commands to change the wiper speed. Response can be slow, and voice commands do not work at all in rural areas with no cellular data service.

I have had consistent trouble with the traffic aware cruise control system. When used on a sunny day I find it creates uncommanded rapid braking about every hour of operation on I5. This is so bad my wife forbids me from using it. She is correct—the uncommanded braking is rapid, relentless, hard to countermand and potentially fatal.

When I sold the Model 3 to my daughter I decided to drive it from Seattle to St. Louis because the wait for a shipping company was too long. So I have had the experience of a long road trip in the late fall of 2021.

Summary: the car basically performed well, but the automatic features are not ready for public use, and energy management in cold weather is still a challenge.

In particular, leaving Seattle on a rare bright sunny morning with wet roads, we had the emergency braking (not cruise control) engage several times. I would guess that automated collision avoidance systems that depend heavily on cameras do not fare well in the presence of wet roads glistening with low sunlight.

We enabled auto steer while crossing Kansas, and it does a good job of reducing your work load when driving in the presence of a steady cross wind. You learn that you need to disable near exit and entrance ramps, because the system is very myopic—it seems to be simply following the right lane market and gets confused when it loses touch with the lane marker, and veers off to the right to hunt for it. Not a behavior you want near on-ramps.

There are still long passages between Superchargers out on the plains, and you may have to carefully manage consumption to make it between chargers, especially if you start the morning with a cold-soaked car at a hotel with no available level 2 charger. You minimize consumption through the following means: 1) slow down to the slowest speed you and surrounding traffic can tolerate, 2) minimize non-essential electric use, i.e. turn the cabin heat down or off, use the seat heat on low, only defrost as necessary, 3) navigate to a location near a Supercharger, but don’t tell the Tesla you are going to a Supercharger, because it will automatically raise consumption by pre-conditioning the battery.

Note that the EPA range of the Tesla grossly exaggerates the usable range—the EPA test assume you charge to 100%, drive the battery all the way down to exhaustion, operate at ideal temperatures, and drive a mix of highway and urban roads. If you are charged to 80% and want to arrive with 10% you have, at the best, 70% of the EPA range available, and you will have to drive at 60mph with the heat off to achieve anything near that.

Having said that, you will find that if you are caught in heavy highway traffic that surges from 0 to 40mph and back again, you may well beat the EPA rated consumption. This is a regime where EVs perform extremely well, and ICEs not so well.

In a range emergency you can almost halve the consumption rate of the Model Y by driving at 40mph.

We keep our ICE Subaru Outback for hiking and trips into rural areas with no charging facilities. A plug-in hybrid version of the Outback would be welcome, because the Outback is painfully inefficient around town (it consumes about 21mpg), but this does not seem to be in Subaru’s plans.

Don't forget you can set your right scroll wheel on hold down to be the windshield wiper speed, fan speed, etc.

Also, my 1 or 2 phantom braking issues have gone away since the latest firmware updates. Hooray for over the air updates instead of having to drive the car to a dealer to get it fixed.

[AngryScientist]

Good real world review Mark.

I hope to never own a car that has automatic emergency braking. The issues you are experiencing really sound like a serious safety issue that Tesla should be taking much more seriously.

Why is Tesla so attached to the screen based functions? A stalk based wiper control is so dead simple and reliable, other than cost cutting, there cant be any real benefit from burying that in the ipad thingie.

[Carbonita]

This. I've been a Tesla driver for 4 years; the autopilot TACC is so good now as to make driving other cars aggravating. Wipers work fine in SFBay weather, and can be activated with voice, tap on the stalk, scroll button config. Phantom braking a non issue in the past year. Superchargers are now common in California, and now virtually all other EV makers have adopted the Tesla NAC standard plug. Touchscreen is wonderful, since gestures and visualization can be used, and IIRC even the SpaceX Dragon has them.

Originally Posted by kppolich

Don't forget you can set your right scroll wheel on hold down to be the windshield wiper speed, fan speed, etc.

Also, my 1 or 2 phantom braking issues have gone away since the latest firmware updates. Hooray for over the air updates instead of having to drive the car to a dealer to get it fixed.

[saab2000]

Originally Posted by Mark Davison

We are on our second EV. The first was a Tesla Model 3 Long Range. We sold this to my daughter in order to buy a Tesla Model Y to accommodate elder care needs and a dog. The Model Y is a hatchback, rather than a sedan with a trunk, and is better for hauling around bicycles, packages and suitcases.

About 90% of our usage is driving to recreation, doing errands and shopping in the Seattle area. We generally drive less than 50 miles in a day and we recharge overnight in our garage on 120V house current. Electricity here is cheap (about $.11/kWh) and the running cost per mile of our Tesla is cheaper than our 2014 Subaru Outback.

We do frequent 150 to 200 mile road trips in the area. We have found that you need to be careful planning trips to destinations without chargers--I use a third party route planning program (see abetterrouteplanner.com) and simply plan a round trip. This ensures that you won't be marooned in a national park with no way to get out. Many rural destinations here have no public chargers, or a limited number of level 2 chargers. Our relatives in the area do not have 240V outlets that are accessible.

Be aware that when a Supercharger station is experiencing high usage, Tesla may limit your recharging to 80%. This is now quite common on the I5 corridor.

I like the way the Tesla functions as a car, but I would prefer having a car with better haptics. In particular, I think that any control that a driver needs to operate while driving should be a separate physical control that can be operated wearing gloves and with a minimum of distraction. You shouldn't have to go several layers into a screen menu system to set the windshield wiper speed.

It seems to me that the Tesla automation systems have not been properly stress tested. In particular, the automatic setting on the windshield wiper speed fails more often than it works in Seattle's particular kind of rain. Since this affects visibility out of the car on dark rainy nights it is a serious safety issue.

Note that you can issue voice commands to change the wiper speed. Response can be slow, and voice commands do not work at all in rural areas with no cellular data service.

I have had consistent trouble with the traffic aware cruise control system. When used on a sunny day I find it creates uncommanded rapid braking about every hour of operation on I5. This is so bad my wife forbids me from using it. She is correct—the uncommanded braking is rapid, relentless, hard to countermand and potentially fatal.

When I sold the Model 3 to my daughter I decided to drive it from Seattle to St. Louis because the wait for a shipping company was too long. So I have had the experience of a long road trip in the late fall of 2021.

Summary: the car basically performed well, but the automatic features are not ready for public use, and energy management in cold weather is still a challenge.

In particular, leaving Seattle on a rare bright sunny morning with wet roads, we had the emergency braking (not cruise control) engage several times. I would guess that automated collision avoidance systems that depend heavily on cameras do not fare well in the presence of wet roads glistening with low sunlight.

We enabled auto steer while crossing Kansas, and it does a good job of reducing your work load when driving in the presence of a steady cross wind. You learn that you need to disable near exit and entrance ramps, because the system is very myopic—it seems to be simply following the right lane market and gets confused when it loses touch with the lane marker, and veers off to the right to hunt for it. Not a behavior you want near on-ramps.

There are still long passages between Superchargers out on the plains, and you may have to carefully manage consumption to make it between chargers, especially if you start the morning with a cold-soaked car at a hotel with no available level 2 charger. You minimize consumption through the following means: 1) slow down to the slowest speed you and surrounding traffic can tolerate, 2) minimize non-essential electric use, i.e. turn the cabin heat down or off, use the seat heat on low, only defrost as necessary, 3) navigate to a location near a Supercharger, but don’t tell the Tesla you are going to a Supercharger, because it will automatically raise consumption by pre-conditioning the battery.

Note that the EPA range of the Tesla grossly exaggerates the usable range—the EPA test assume you charge to 100%, drive the battery all the way down to exhaustion, operate at ideal temperatures, and drive a mix of highway and urban roads. If you are charged to 80% and want to arrive with 10% you have, at the best, 70% of the EPA range available, and you will have to drive at 60mph with the heat off to achieve anything near that.

Having said that, you will find that if you are caught in heavy highway traffic that surges from 0 to 40mph and back again, you may well beat the EPA rated consumption. This is a regime where EVs perform extremely well, and ICEs not so well.

In a range emergency you can almost halve the consumption rate of the Model Y by driving at 40mph.

We keep our ICE Subaru Outback for hiking and trips into rural areas with no charging facilities. A plug-in hybrid version of the Outback would be welcome, because the Outback is painfully inefficient around town (it consumes about 21mpg), but this does not seem to be in Subaru’s plans.

This review very closely resembles my own experience. I would add that if you’re going to state or national parks and camping, you may wish to consider a camping spot with an electrical hookup. I did this last summer at the state park at Devil’s Lake in Wisconsin and used the available adapter for this type of plug. I think it’s the NEMA 14-50 adapter, which I connected to the Mobile Adapter that came with my car (today it’s an accessory a customer must purchase). This easily provided enough amperage to charge at normal level 2 rates, in other words charged to 80% (or more if I chose) overnight.

A buddy of mine and I met for a couple nights there to go cycling (amazing area to ride a bike!) and we were both able to charge up our MYLRs. Something to think about. Level 1 wall outlet charging (110V) is predictably slow but not useless if the car is sitting overnight or for a long time.

I haven’t used another brand of charger than Tesla’s Supercharger network but if I were going to remote areas I’d definitely have a plan in place. Also, I’d buy the adapter kit they sell for virtually all outlet types.

I have now taken two serious road trips (Chicago to the Florida Panhandle and Chicago to Dallas) and a host of day trips of up to 400 miles each way.

Agreed completely on Tesla’s automation - it is nowhere near ready for prime time. I’m not really convinced it ever will be.

Lots to love about the car and plenty that drives me nuts. But I’m invested in this one so I’m not going to change for a while.

Originally Posted by Carbonita

Phantom braking a non issue in the past year.

This is not my experience. It’s still an issue for me.

[mstateglfr]

Originally Posted by Smitty2k1

Curious what you're driving now. Chevy Bolt is under $30,000 MSRP and that's pretty affordable for a new car these days. Also curious what you need a 500 mile range for rather than the existing 300 mile ranges?

I'm not an EV owner myself but I don't see any shortcomings from the current fleet.

I know this post is 6mo old, but since the EV thread bumped back up I say it and can say that situationally, EVs that meet price and intended use havent exactly been easy to come by for some.

I had to buy a car in '22, wanted to get it by the start of September.
- started reading up on current EV, PHEV, Hybrid, and ICE options in Feb '22.
- decided on a compact utility EV and started looking in summer '22. My state didnt have any(Hyundai Ioniq5, Kona Electric, etc) at all because all EVs were being allocated to states with air emissions laws.
- I tried dealers in IL and CO and all refused to sell out of state or had 12-18mo wait lists.
- Adjusted what I was looking for and decided on a compact Hybrid utility like a RAV4 or CRV. Again, none in my state...like at all. And all dealers had 8-15mo wait lists.
- I tried 12 dealers in IL for the hybrids. Some wouldnt sell out of state, most didnt have any and had a long wait list, and 1 actually had a RAV4 in stock that they would sell to me for $15,000 over list. I did the math and at that price I would have had to keep the car for 16 years before I would break even on that car when compared to a new Subaru Crosstrek ICE vehicle. That is considering purchase cost, listed MPG, and gas at 25% higher than current price.


So I bought a new Subaru Crosstrek sight unseen from a local dealer and it arrived 2 months later. Funny- the trim level is the same as my wife's Subaru Outback that is 5years older, but the Outback has nicer amenities(power hatch, power passenger seat, rear seat heaters, rear air, rear usb plugs, nicer quality buttons). My Crosstrek has all the sight safety features instead and while that is nice, my mindset is firmly in the 'features' side of value instead of safety. Funny how that works.


Anyways, a Chevy Volt was never in consideration due to lifestyle and vehicle use.
We didnt consider other EVs because the ones we were looking at were already $44-50K and everything we found that would fit our wants was more.
If my Crosstrek vehicle was offered as an EV at the price I paid, I would have gotten that. If it cost $4000 more as an EV, I would have gotten the EV.
Unfortunately, the Crosstrek PHEV model seemed to exist on the internet only as it was killed off and I never saw inventory for it(regardless of location).


Now- local dealers have EVs and news reports quote dealers as frustrated that they cant sell em. Everyone that could afford them and had the infrastructure to use them apparently has bought EVs. Now that they exist in lowly Iowa, there is clearly an overstock of them overall. Funny enough, the closest Ioniq5 is still 190mi away from me, just checked.

Anyways, point is that between inventory challenges these last 3 years, cost changes these last 3 years, and apparent market saturation/adjustment, what is true for someone now might not have been true for someone a year ago. Or vice versa.

[mstateglfr]

Originally Posted by AngryScientist

I hope to never own a car that has automatic emergency braking. The issues you are experiencing really sound like a serious safety issue that Tesla should be taking much more seriously.

My Subaru Crosstrek has automatic emergency braking, but I can disable it.
You can disable the Tesla emergency braking too.

Mine is a lowly ICE vehicle and not a luxury Tesla, so I assume the parameters for engaging braking are different, but I havent been frustrated with the emergency braking yet.
I have had the car for 16 months and I think its auto engaged 5 times. I think 4 of them were me fully knowing how fast I was driving and knew the car in front of me was turning so I had room to continue at the speed I was going. My car disagreed.

Gotta say, I cant really fault it. When the car decides conditions could be slick/icy, the emergency braking option disengages. I like that and expect that. The car cant know if the road is actually slick or if the road is dry even though the conditions meet the parameters for slick, so its best if the emergency brake auto disengages when the car decides conditions could be slick.

I do like the lane drift warning, even though I criticize the car on a near daily basis for beeping at me. If I change lanes and dont put on my turn signal early enough, it beeps at me and warns me that I am drifting into another lane. It isnt wrong- I should put my turn signal on sooner, I just dont because 25 years of driving habits are tough to change.

[saab2000]

Here’s my person on the street analysis….

They became a hot item in the year or so when COVID was changing markets for literally everything. The companies got on board and developed some great cars and some pretty darn mediocre ones.

These things, from what I can see, depreciate at eye watering speeds now, unlike in 2022 when you could flip a Tesla for a profit. That ain’t coming back. I bought my Model Y at the height of the craze and paid almost the most they were selling them for. Then in early January a year ago the price plummeted. Tesla doesn’t use traditional dealerships so they can set whatever price they want.

So I buy into a car that’s expensive and a month later I’m way underwater on it. None of that matters if I plan to keep the car for a long time and it’s all paid for.

But being expensive items, buyers aren’t going to just turn these things over annually. Most people who wanted to be in the second wave of early adopters are now owners and won’t be replacing them anytime soon.

I’ve often said in this thread that I wouldn’t again trade in or sell a perfectly good vehicle to get into an EV but if it’s really time to get a new car it’s totally appropriate to consider one. A lot of hesitancy is based on misinformation and Tik Tok videos of fires or stranded vehicles and these things aren’t always telling the whole story.

I’ve also said, if an EV isn’t right for you, don’t get one. I’m not on a crusade to convince people to get something they don’t want. I just like to report my experiences as an owner to anyone who might be curious.

As to massive inventory? Yup. That’s a thing. I drive past a local Ford dealership frequently and the front line of cars are Mustang Mach Es and F150 Lightnings, cars that were super hard to acquire a couple years ago. Both of these vehicles get generally high praise.

I’ll be curious what happens to the market going forward. Meanwhile, I’ll enjoy that my energy bills for car charging are a fraction of what I used to pay for gas, even with occasional Supercharging, which is about 3x the price of charging at home.

[Alistair]

Originally Posted by saab2000

But being expensive items, buyers aren’t going to just turn these things over annually. Most people who wanted to be in the second wave of early adopters are now owners and won’t be replacing them anytime soon.

I’ve also said, if an EV isn’t right for you, don’t get one.

That's where we are today. A 2017 BMW and a 2020 Honda, so no urgency to buy an EV. And when I bought the Honda, there weren't a lot of options available with the range we need for camping trips.

This is compounded by our parking situation (community owns the parking spaces, not us). We're allowed to install chargers in our one assigned space, but it's a lot of expense - electric panel is on wrong end of house, need to bury conduit from house to parking lot (concrete and landscaping), etc.

We'll probably get an EV when the BMW is ready to retire, assuming we don't just go single-car (wife will be close to retiring and I walk to work).

[paredown]

Originally Posted by saab2000

Here’s my person on the street analysis….

They became a hot item in the year or so when COVID was changing markets for literally everything. The companies got on board and developed some great cars and some pretty darn mediocre ones.

These things, from what I can see, depreciate at eye watering speeds now, unlike in 2022 when you could flip a Tesla for a profit. That ain’t coming back. I bought my Model Y at the height of the craze and paid almost the most they were selling them for. Then in early January a year ago the price plummeted. Tesla doesn’t use traditional dealerships so they can set whatever price they want. <snip>

Throw in supply chain issues and chip shortages, and many manufacturers skewed (or limited) their production to higher margin vehicles, or dropped outright their "affordable" EVs.

The Chevy Bolt--one of the last "affordables" almost got axed, and then got a reprieve (which seemed to be platform change driven), but AFAIK there are very few options now under $40k except the Nissan Leaf and the Hyundai Kona. VW has some econo box EVs planned for Europe--but no plans to import them to the US.

Where's the Honda Fit of the EV world?

[cgolvin]

Originally Posted by Mark Davison

Note that you can issue voice commands to change the wiper speed. Response can be slow, and voice commands do not work at all in rural areas with no cellular data service.

It makes zero sense to me to put the voice processing in the cloud, not only for availability but also latency. Less than zero.

[Alistair]

Originally Posted by paredown

... there are very few options now under $40k except the Nissan Leaf and the Hyundai Kona. VW has some econo box EVs planned for Europe--but no plans to import them to the US.

Where's the Honda Fit of the EV world?

The base Tesla Model 3 stickers for $39,000, just just barely squeaks into the sub-$40k range.

But, yeah, still no true EV economy car.

My wish list...
- EV Honda Ridgeline - the Rivian exists, but at double the price of the Honda.
- EV Mazda Miata - nothing in the lightweight roadster space today - maybe an EV Boxster in a few years (but also likely double the price of a Mazda).