The first 1000 miles - owning an EV

 We purchased and EV.  A Hyundai Ioniq 5. We've driven in about 1200 miles so far.  Here are some early thoughts.

Our EV

It's a car. It has four doors, seats, accelerator, brake, steering wheel, etc. etc.  Step on the brake and hit the start button and it turns on.  Shift into D and it goes.  It's a car!  But...

It's ridiculously quiet.  The loudest sound is road noise and it's pretty well insulated.

It's smooth.  There is zero vibration or harshness from a gasoline engine. It's noticeably absent.

It's smooth, fast, and lots of fun to drive.  We used to have an Audi Q5.  It was fun to drive. This is better.  In fact, I often say, "This is the car the Audi was trying to be."  Why?  Having the battery low and in the center of the car is ideal for handling.  Low center of gravity.  Low polar moment of inertia (weight not out past axles. closer to the center - why mid-engine sports cars are sought after).  This makes for quick and secure handling.  Power is super smooth.  No shifts.  Power is linear and  predictable.   No surprise downshifts or unwanted upshifts.  No lag.   Acceleration is mind-bending and all 300+ HP are available all the time at any speed, instantaneously.  I haven't floored it, yet.

You can do one-pedal driving - if you want to.  Or not. It's easy to set up for one or the other. How much regenerative braking is available when you back off the accelerator is variable using the "shifter" paddles on the steering wheel. One pedal driving means that letting your foot off the accelerator slows the car using regenerative braking.  You can make the smoothest of stops and starts using one pedal driving.  Most trips I don't touch the brake pedal at all, except in reverse.

It's a Hyundai, so the controls and displays are very similar to our Kia Telluride - part of the reason we chose it over other EVs - shallow learning curve and generally easy to use.  Kia is owned be Hyundai.

It has some EV weirdness.  Flush door handles that flip out when you approach with the key.  Regular old door handle would be better and the aerodynamic argument is dumb - it's a tiny, tiny advantage.  There is a lot less weirdness than in a Tesla, however.

It's range in local driving is much more than advertised.  The claim is 262 miles.  Actual range is 310-330 - and this with significant AC load - it's been hot! 

The regenerative braking often captures 50% of the energy spent on propulsion.  The more stop and go, the higher the percentage.   In the trip below, 14 kWhs were spent moving the car - 9 net with 5 recaptured in braking, so 5/14 or 35% was recovered on this trip.  Another two were spent keeping the car cool, the lights on and the 12 VDC battery charged.  A total of 11 kWh for 44 miles of driving is 4 miles per kWh - about 50 cents of electricity.

This was a trip to the airport and back.  Quite a bit of highway driving

It's sooooo cheap to run.  Cost per mile for energy so far is about 3 cents.  Put another way, it's like having gas at 90 cents per gallon. 

Charging at home is really simple.  But, you do have to have a home charger installed on a 240 volt circuit.  A clothes dryer circuit would be plenty and there are devices that allow you to switch between your clothes dryer and EV charging.  We had a ChargePoint charger installed and can charge at 11KW (240 volts, 48 amps).  Charging from 20% to 80% takes about 4 hours.  Plug it in in the evening and unplug in the AM.

An EV battery is not a gas tank.  You don't "fill-er-up" and drive to almost empty.  You just top it up after most days you do any driving at all.  It's a little bit better for the battery's overall life to keep the charge below 80%, so we rarely go above that.  If it's above 60% at the end of the day, I'll skip charging unless a there's a lot of driving to do the next day.  You start every day with "a full tank" without ever having to plan or make a trip to the gas station.

For what we sold our 1999 Expedition for, we purchased the home charger, had an electrician install it and had a Stealth Hitch 2" tow hitch installed for my bike rack. 

Old Ford on it's last day.

Doing a road trip requires quite a bit more planning... The winning solution requires that you plan to charge and take a rest break at the same location.  It looks like a 15 minute stop every 150 miles would do the trick - the Ioniq charges really quickly on the fastest DC chargers.  That's likely going to be a bit longer than trips in the Telluride, but not by much.  We haven't taken a trip that requires topping up at a fast DC charger yet.  There are quite a few trip planning tools out there - ABRP app for one (A Better Route Planner) - and I've planned a few hypotheticals.   I'll let you know about how that goes that in a future post. Full disclosure - we still own the Telly.  It has 3 row seating, hauls a lot and is best for road trips where we take the dog.  But, for all our day trips, it's the Ioniq that we go to.

So, that's the first 1200 miles.  So far, tons of fun!