why don’t you drive an EV?

After a great deal of sturm und drang (we hadn’t had a car for over a decade prior), my family leased a Bolt EV in late 2018. With the exception of having massive transmission / transaxle issues about a year in (all taken care of under warranty) it’s been great. Well, we also have to make sure to get the right street parking spot in order to charge it at home, but that’s only been a problem once.

Who else drives electric? If not, why not, or how soon do you anticipate you will be able to switch?

at the time of our last car purchase (v much due to situation out of my control) we couldn't afford an EV and there weren't chargers in my building. Now it's two years later, EVs are cheaper, and there are chargers, but I'm stuck w the car we got >:(

but I will switch at the first opportunity

Last summer I bought a RAV-4 hybrid. It’s the bees knees. I wanted an EV, but I’m a renter with a difficult landlord who wouldn’t let me consider plugging in. Still, I get ~40 mpg, which ain’t nothin.

“ass hat landlord” was not a rationale I had considered before.

The weirdest thing btw is the sloshing sound that the battery pack makes shortly after I plug it in. I assume it has something to do with the thermoregulation of the battery cells. Or perhaps the whole thing is like the mop in fantasia.

I don't own a car, but if I did, I would buy electric. The only thing that would make me think twice is remembering a friend's experience during the California wildfires last year. The Tesla was pretty much useless for getting them out of an evacuation zone due to power outages: they ended up leaving it behind. Vicious cycle, yeah.

i would like an EV or hybrid, but my main use for a car these days (besides a v short commute to work that can also be done by bike but not by public transportation) is stuff like camping/covering long distances in the fifth largest state in america aka not conducive to EV at least until there's a an e-truck with good mileage and ground clearance (aka the rivian, which i cannot afford)

ideally i'd take one of these fellas to work: https://www.urbanarrow.com/en/shorty

and have a not-often used truck for trips outta town

I've got a hybrid Fusion, supposedly gets 42 city/40 highway but the average MPG is more like 35, which is pathetic for a hybrid. though maybe the cold has something to do with that.

will probably be getting a full EV as my next car, whenever that happens

The NHTSA mandates that reversing an EV or hybrid produce a certain amount of noise at certain frequencies to alert pedestrians that there’s an otherwise silent car in motion. For this reason, whenever I back out of my parking spot, some MIDI noisemaker under my hood produces a shriek that sounds like an army of mosquitos.

Supposedly the best thing for EVs in really cold weather is to have them plugged in all the time.

I was stlil under the impression new non-luxury cars are like ~$15k. I am very wrong.

I don't drive an EV because I don't own a car and the car share doesn't do EVs yet. I'm busy building a charging network and trying to covert uber drivers to electric right now.

specific user such as imago

is ~40mpg considered.....good.... in the states

Miles are like twice as long as kilometers. Think of it that way.

here is a picture of the most popular car in america

https://i.imgur.com/vlOVuV7.png

^^ also twice as long as a kilometer.

Coming down a two-lane one-way the other day, one of those trucks tried to get past me, but had to slow down because a Hummer was parked in a space next to his lane. Good times.

da big boys

Gas drops below $1.50 and everyone gets frisky.

lotta litres in a gallon

ballpark 100 liters per

I’m still impressed that they doubled the number of doors on pickup trucks at some point and I barely noticed.

We got a Nissan Leaf last January and we’re very pleased with it. It was a scary step but there has been no downside so far. We still have a minivan for longer trips or hauling stuff.

You know who drives the Tesla on our block? The Pentecostals.

I know, right? Like you didn't think they could be even bigger assholes, but there you go.

our regular car lease is up in 2021 so starting to look around now

got my eye on this https://www.caranddriver.com/kia/soul-ev, successor to https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/a26144426/2019-kia-niro-ev-driven/ from which i steal this:

https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/images/niroev-sidebar-edit-1556807455.png?crop=0.757xw:0.714xh;0.136xw,0.133xh&resize=768:*

also this one i guess but i think we want to the cargo https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/05/another-competent-korean-car-the-kia-niro-ev-reviewed/

If the Kia EVs were available in the dc area we probably would’ve gotten one of those instead.

Meanwhile Ford has apparently been hard at work building an unlistenable banshee that only runs for 45 minutes on a single charge

https://jalopnik.com/my-brain-cant-process-the-noise-the-seven-motor-ford-mu-1844483324

Yay for crazy R&D though

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/07/kia-denies-report-that-the-soul-ev-is-cancelled-for-america/

we have to change cars next november (lease runs out). this was top of my list. looks like it's not going to be an option :(

was really hoping a 3 year lease was going to get us to a world where there were more options for family sized evs.

The good news is it’s not like you can go anywhere

I’ve been driving Hyundai ioniqs around recently. That’s a nice mid-size family car. Enough room in the rear seats and a good sized hatchback boot. Slightly lacklustre DC Fast charging performance is compensated for being a really efficient car. (More km/kWh)

Supposedly the best thing for EVs in really cold weather is to have them plugged in all the time.

(Roy Scheider voice) you're gonna need a longer extension cord

why don’t you drive an EV?

Because we have a rock-solid old Subaru that seems destined to make it to the age of 30, but if it dies eventually, I'm thinking we'll go EV.

BTW we recently learned that the Chevy Bolt is apparently designed such that the box for a 55” flatscreen TV fits PERFECTLY in the back with the seats folded down. Like somebody had to have made a CAD volume with just those measurements and made sure it would fit.

https://www.carboncounter.com/

i'm actually considering getting rid of my car, as i am fully remote now

at least the pandemic has brought on a few good things

loooool https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2021/03/29/vw-volkswagen-name-change-voltswagen-electric-cars-tesla-competiton/7048576002/

*looks at calendar* uh premature 4/1 still seems more likely.

haha apparenty nope

We know, 66 is an unusual age to change your name, but we’ve always been young at heart. Introducing Voltswagen. Similar to Volkswagen, but with a renewed focus on electric driving. Starting with our all-new, all-electric SUV the ID.4 - available today. #Voltswagen #ID4 pic.twitter.com/pKQKlZDCQ7

— Voltswagen (@VW) March 30, 2021

lot of americans taking the opportunity to get priggish about VW's history while the most prominent car company in the US *right now* is run by a space fascist eugenicist.

would definitely drive an EV voltswagen microbus while wearing my patagonia baggies, grateful dead shirt, and merrell hydro mocs, for peak west coast awfulness, but it will cost around my annual salary so unfortunately it will only be a terrible dream

well apparently it *was* an april fools joke but now everyone is talking about their involvement with the National Socialist German Workers' Party so good job i guess?

Is buying a new electric car every few years better for the environment than maintaining an old car? I may have a bias as my car was built in 1973.

making an EV is marginally worse for the environment than making a regular car and much worse than making no car.

https://tnmt.com/infographics/carbon-emissions-by-transport-type/

making and then driving an EV is probably better than a clunker after a few years, but it's going to depend on how much you drive, etc.

I’m not buying a non peer reviewed study with that disclaimer attached.

Try this one that uses the Argonne GREET lifecycle emissions model.

https://cgscholar.com/bookstore/works/the-climate-change-mitigation-potential-of-electric-vehicles-as-a-function-of-renewable-energy

No car is definitely better but if you have to use a car it’s considerable better to use an EV

the disclaimer is pretty clear that it's back of the envelope, and nothing more than back of the envelope can be said in response to a vague question about whether to replace an existing ICE car.

but fwiw the abstract of that paper says:

"The lifecycle EV carbon emissions for a vehicle powered by the 2016 US grid is 30.82 metric tons... An average internal combustion engine vehicle (25.4 miles per gallon) is responsible for 68.38 metric tons of carbon dioxide over its lifetime"

which is almost exactly consistent with the back of the envelope calculation which says an ICE car produces about twice as much CO2 as an EV if you amortize manufacturing costs. and it's a whizzy infographic that doesn't cost $5 too.

Is buying a new electric car every few years better for the environment than maintaining an old car? I may have a bias as my car was built in 1973.

― Peter Greenaway's Fleetwood Mac (S-), Tuesday, March 30, 2021 8:44 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

old cars - basically anything pre-90s iirc - are significantly worse for the environment in terms of emissions than regular ICE cars

No doubt. I barely ever drive anyway so I guess it's a moot point.

Actually I'm not even sure why I felt the need to reply to this thread, but hey, ILX right?

otm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mb6H7trzMfI

otoh the xiaomi cars are good

trump is a coward who will never let these in tho

Yeah if the Chinese electric cars start being imported to the US, it would be a huge deal.

FWIW, I am thinking about getting a Polestar 4. I appreciate there's manual door pulls so I won't be trapped in the car if it's on fire. But I've never seen one on the road, as far as I know.

if i were looking at an ev id be going used, theyre so cheap!

and if you get a new one itll be cheap soon too

ive seen a couple polestars on the road pretty easy to miss theyre def not flashy but thats cool imo

re xiaomi cant be buying a car by a phone company as reviewed by a guy who reviews phones tho its just not right

tablet taped to the dash

uhg tech reviewers are the worst theyre like wow features

he thinks seat bolsters are a g wagon thing

"the self driving doesnt work on all roads in the US i assume its better in china"

...

"the self driving works"

also i know weve had this discussion but repeatedly calling it a $42k car like wow this feels like a $60k car without mentioning that the reason there are tariffs on them is because the US is accusing the company of selling at a loss, feel like its worth a mention we dont know if its true but it would explain a lot and it makes sense since china is in the midst of an ev start up frenzy

i've taken a few rideshares in chinese EVs they are really nice

i agree that a $42k car in china probably would cost closer to $60-70k in america just cuz it's very expensive to have car dealerships here, a repair network, etc. cause of american salaries

"the self driving doesnt work on all roads in the US i assume its better in china"

what's really cool is that in a lot of china cities the traffic lights are IoT basically so cars can access that info for self driving purposes

like i remember sitting in an EV and watching a timer countdown to when the traffic light would turn on the car's GPS...

here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmFGRIqyGPo

Wonder when the haxxors are going to hack the traffic lights in China to make all the self-driving cars think they are red.

Whenever the fuss over Taiwan turns into a hot conflict, I reckon

Polestar lent me a Polestar 3 last week - fantastic car, if I ever had the urge to own a car it would be high on the list. I really need to finish writing the article.

There’s so many security holes in cars, especially EVs right now. There’s couple of gaping exploits in charging- one that allows you to disable a charging session remotely with the right radio frequency and one that Qualcomm left open - essentially the default setting in the comms chip that is used in almost every car an charger is set to allow it to be reconfigured and or bricked by anyone with 100 bucks worth of electronics and a raspberry pi.

And this goes without mentioning that almost no communication between car and charger is encrypted and so can be man in the middled quite easily. Then there’s unencrypted and easily cloned RFID cards used to activate charging.

European charging networks are seeing about 25% fraud right now, per a source at a charging aggregator. I can believe it.

There’s some shockingly old and vulnerable software on connected cars of all types out there.

Anyway 8 out of the top 10 selling EVs in Australia are made in China, the other 2 are Korean. Toyota (scumbags) and Nissan have basically thrown in the towel and will be importing EVs made by their Chinese JVs. Turns out they are pretty good and people will buy them given the chance.

I’m trying to get my hands on a Geely next.

I didn’t realise Geely actually made cars under their own brand name

European charging networks are seeing about 25% fraud right now, per a source at a charging aggregator. I can believe it.

― Ed, Wednesday, December 10, 2025 8:22 AM (fifty-four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

thats wild, just people stealing the charge or

yeah that's crazy, would love to read something abt that

I'm renting a car to drive ~900 miles for Christmas and it would be cool if an electronic car would do the trick but I cannot be stopping for an hour to recharge every 100m or whatever.

not the best road tripping tech its true

Electronic? Electric.

My friends who live approx 75 miles from NYC got an electric car but it has an under-100m range, so it can make one trip but not both ways, and they can't recharge it in NYC. They got rid of it and got a regular car instead even though they didn't really want to.

Most EVs made in the last 5 years have 250+ miles of range and they aren’t degrading that fast. Sure there are older vehicles with lower range out there and as thy say YMMV but given you need to stop every 2-3 hours in any case to rest, pee etc. Car range passed bladder range years ago.

Where it falls down is availability of decent fast chargers. However where they do exist, with most EVs - in the time it takes you to pee and grab a snack or whatever you’ve charged enough to drive to your next rest point 2 or 3 hours up the road. Something like a polestar 2 will add 120-140 miles of driving in 15 minutes - ample to get you 2-3 hours down the road to your next break.

The article I’m dragging my feet about writing is on the Google maps route planning software in the polestar (also Volvo, Renault, Nissan and others) - which is truly the best out there. It’s really good at telling you where when and how long to charge for.

What I want to take them to task about is not making it available outside the car so people can simulate their journeys and get comfortable before driving an EV. Yes there’s tools like A Better Route Planner but people overwhelmingly use Google to find and navigate to stuff.

yeah that's crazy, would love to read something abt that

― challopvious (sleeve), Thursday, December 11, 2025 1:47 AM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I’d love to write it. I’m not paid enough for my writing to do proper journalism, not that that seems to stop me spending far too much much time on articles. I really should pitch these somewhere better, but I don’t really have a clue.

Most EVs made in the last 5 years have 250+ miles of range and they aren’t degrading that fast.

Oh yeah it was a car handed by from a family member so they didn't get a choice.

Maybe by next year I could rent an electric car with unlimited mileage AND no paying for the gas, which would be amazing! Not sure Route 80 has enough fast charging capacity along the way.

It’s not great - the one at Nelliston by the I-90 is broken, then you have Cooperstown and one by the I-91 junction. Then a bunch in Syracuse.

Google maps currently has a charging station location function that I never noticed until now and there are a lot of signed stations on my route! Less promisingly it looks like about half are "Tesla superchargers" so I'm guessing maybe they don't accommodate non-Tesla electric vehicles. Maybe by next year. Tell em to get on it, Ed.

A lot of Tesla charging stations are open to non- Tesla vehicles- and most of the US car industry is moving to the Tesla style plug. Still need an adapter with a lot of cars. Would be interesting to know if a rental provided one.

^ yes afaict the Hyundai Ioniq can charge at Tesla stations

(Ed idk if u follow Commercial Solar Guy on bsky but he posts good content and relevant EV stuff as well, that's where I learned abt that)

A lot of Tesla charging stations are open to non- Tesla vehicles- and most of the US car industry is moving to the Tesla style plug. Still need an adapter with a lot of cars.

Ford sent me an adapter for free. NBD, works great though I don't use it much because I have free charging at work (and SoCal has a lot of charging stations)

I am not buying a car from a company called 'Bring Yo' Dick'

Volkswagen drops the ID.Buzz after one model year
https://www.thedrive.com/news/vw-calls-off-2026-id-buzz-in-us-and-it-may-never-come-back

thoroughly unsurprised, nobody is ready for the EV minivan yet. Minivans are for road trips

thoroughly unsurprised, nobody is ready for the EV minivan yet. Minivans are for road trips

China says, “we’re ready and you’d better like white leather”

https://xpeng.com.au/x9
https://www.zeekrlife.com/en-au/models/009

honestly fuck automobiles, and especially anybody who is buying a brand NEW one

Fair position.

For me, I've actually been 100% car free for the past month or so. This mostly works fine but there are some things that I simply cannot do: they're too far from transit and they just come up too quickly to plan an alternative.

cars are bad but most places you gotta have em usa baby

had my first ride in an electric car at the weekend. had heard from other passengers that the acceleration was often aggressive, which is probably something you wouldn't really notice as a driver, but it was fine.

car was also full of other bells and whistles that I'd not seen before, like reversing cameras and the like so it felt like the future.

honestly fuck automobiles, and especially anybody who is buying a brand NEW one

― budo jeru, 20 December 2025 14:15 (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

feel better?

my spouse's 2023 Volvo has some built-in self-drive feature that i had no idea was enabled when i started driving it. we were in the mountains of western NC this summer when it kicked in and swerved us so far into the opposite lanes of travel that we were lucky no car was there. immediately pulled over and figured out how to disable the feature.

xp i’m responding to the question posed by the thread title, should i not do that?

tell me how to use the website in a way that pleases you

that's in no way a response to the thread title. it's a brattish little tantrum.

use the site any way you like

tbf if no one bought new cars then there wouldnt be any used ones

happy holidays to all the ev fans and haters

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rc6Txma85Ac

ah very interesting *dunks your video in this fire suppression tank*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNN7TKcy0do

damn that fire got suppressed bigtime