We have had our EV now for just over a year and 11,000 miles (~4,000 miles in road trips). I want to reflect a bit on what the experience has been like in that time, and how it has changed things.
We bought a Kia EV6, 2024 Wind trim (mid range) with AWD and the tech package. The tech package includes a few cool things, like a 360 camera view, and a few kinda useless things, like a parking assist feature that takes minutes to get you into a parking spot. It also features Highway Driving Assist (HDA)(Kia’s name for it), which is Kia’s version of self-driving. It’s not that, but it is a great feature. More on that later.
The EV6 was the choice for a few reasons. First, it’s decently efficient. Our model came with a battery that’s 77.4 kWh in capacity. On highways (worse economy in an EV, opposite of an Internal Combustion Engine, or ICE car) we average around 3.1 miles/kWh, which equates to about 240 miles in real world range. In the city, we average around 4 miles/kWh, so the range is closer to 310 miles. That 240 number might give someone pause, but in my experience, it’s about 3 hours between stops, which works very well for our road trips. Second, it feels like a car. It’s not a tech experiment that happens to drive. It’s a car that happens to run on electricity instead of gas. That’s a big feature for me w$hen you’re talking about a paradigm shift. Finally, it’s not a fucking Tesla. We drove one just to baseline the experience. Tesla is kinda the default when discussing EVs, so driving one was necessary to figure out where we landed. We also happen to have been convinced to buy an EV because of a road trip in a Tesla. The experience was mid with one caveat—the brakes freaked out on us. This was a year ago, so Elon Musk was already a piece of shit (has he actually ever not been?). There wasn’t a chance we would seriously consider a Tesla. I’m very glad that worked out.
There are a couple things to get used to with the car. The feeling is kinda backwards from a gas car. The power in an ICE vehicle comes from the engine building up to exert enough energy to get the car moving. In an EV, the power is actually being throttled at all times. What that feels like is a bit of a weird feeling when accelerating or braking. Just a different feeling. It’s easy to get used to, but it did hang around a bit for me. The other one that was hard to get over was the anxiety on range. I have no issue driving around in my 4Runner on 1/4 tank of gas, but if that battery indicator gets below 50%, I get a bit nervous. That’s obviously dumb. I am starting to get over that, and I do much better with it on road trips, for some reason.
I haven’t calculated any cost savings over gas, and I don’t really care. I know we’re saving, and I know we were buying an EV this time, so it doesn’t matter. However, consider never actually having to go to a gas station. Like, ever, except for a time or two on a road trip. We have a garage, but have not had a dedicated charger installed. We haven’t needed it. We are able to charge overnight right now (mid-winter), which is more than enough. In the summer, the cost changes significantly. We limit charging to 10p-8a and as a result, have a super low cost rate. We get a rate of $.06 per kW during those hours. If I were to charge from 0-100% during that time, the total cost would be $4.64. For real. If you charge during the day, however, the cost is 6x more ($.36/kW). That’s still a fill-up for ~$30. We generally add about 1-2 kW on a regular working day, and maybe 10 on a weekend. So the cost is almost negligible for the charging. Granted, this is charging at home. It is much different on the road at commercial chargers. The cost per kW is around $.60 in this part of the country, so it’s not a lot cheaper than gas while charging that way. If you don’t have a home charging option, you will not save a bunch of money on gas.
The charging experience has been a B+ experience to this point. Everyone knows this, but it’s the one place Tesla excels. They have a massive network. Nobody else really does. But on to the experience. We got a package with the car that included 1,000 kWh of charging on the Electrify America network. It’s probably the most prevalent non-Tesla network in this part of the country. What having that package did for us is get us used to the EA network on the major highways in the west. Our trips include long stretches of I-5, US 395, and I-80 whenever we go somewhere. EA is reliable and prevalent on those roads. However, some stretches are real sparse. A trip to Las Vegas for us would include zero EA chargers until we got to Vegas itself, so we’d have to rely on other networks. That’s not as easy. Tonopah has a reliable fast-ish (50 kW) charger, but that’s the closest reliable charger we have to Las Vegas. In Goldfield (unfortunately only 20 miles closer) a formerly-broken charger has come back online. But the fact that I can name all the chargers along the route to Las Vegas is a problem. It is simply not that way if you’re driving on an interstate highway.
Another part of the experience, though, is the charging speed. Fast chargers have a wide range of speeds at which they can deliver power. Most EA chargers I’ve seen are 350 kW in speed. That means in an hour, they would send 350 kWh to the car. I only need 77.4 at absolute most, so charging is fast. My car can accept up to 240 kW and I’ve hit that number a few times in real world charging. That means the typical stop at a highway fast charger would take me around 20 minutes total. I’d get a charge up to or just over 80% in that time, which allows for a coffee and bathroom break. A Chevy Volt, however, is limited to 50 kW, so the time to charge my car from 10-80% would take over an hour with the Volt’s architecture. Factors that limit charging speed include things like the battery’s temperature (cold is worse) and its current charge state. They slow down as the battery is filled close to 100%. Charging speed makes no difference when charging at home. But on the road, where time is a factor, it does matter.
Aside from gas cost, you save on maintenance. No oil changes. Just brakes and occasional fluids. And tires, of course. The brakes are another really cool feature. We have lost about 6% of the brakes in a year. So replacement of those will be somewhere around a decade between. The regenerative braking system is an improvement in vehicles. Our car has an Auto Regen feature. It uses the radar to slow you down at a stop or in traffic, even without engaging the HDA. So I’m cruising along and a stop is ahead with a few cars. All I do is take my foot off the gas, and the car slows based on the distance between you and the car ahead. It gets to about 5mph and I have to take over to completely stop, but it does the major job. I love this feature.
The HDA is a pretty solid system itself. I use it every time I’m on the highway. Here’s what it does:
- Adaptive cruise control
- Lane assist
- Lane change assist1
- Adaptive speeds
- Probably more that I’m forgetting
1 I have not used the lane change assist feature. I plan on trying it as soon as I can, though.
The killer features are the lane assist and adaptive cruise control. With HDA activated, the car will literally drive itself on a highway, adapting to the speed of curves and staying in the lane. If you take your hands off the wheel, it yells at you to put them back on. And it actually does do that. But the ability to offload a bit of the driving to the car itself is a nice feature that leaves you far less tired after a long drive. The feature also doesn’t claim to do things it doesn’t do (e.g. just about every Tesla feature). It works very well in my experience. I had a trip back from Nevada City a few months ago that included time on I-80, which was down to one lane with construction. I put HDA on and set the speed to the speed limit and never touched the accelerator again on that part of the road. The car kept a safe distance and the speed changed as necessary. With HDA on, the car will come to a complete stop on its own if the car ahead is stopped. You have to engage it again to start the car moving.
A couple of things on the car could use real improvement. First and foremost is the radar system in the rain and snow. Any snow on the ground will almost surely clog up the radar’s ability to see ahead. That leads to warnings on the dash that are a bit excessive. Both of those things could use help. The car makes noise at you kind of a lot. It’s not a deal breaker at all, but it’s more than your ICE car, from my experience. Other things I dislike are personal preference (I wish the steering wheel controls were flipped).
My experience overall has been excellent. Despite US politics, EVs are here to stay, and I won’t buy another ICE car again without an absolute need. I probably left out a lot of the experience, but this is my year. If you’re considering but have some questions, I hope this has helped you figure some things out.