OT: Shopping for and purchasing an electric car

I haven’t done an off-topic post in a while, so here goes! This is a long post that I decided to write for the benefit of other people who are shopping for an electric vehicle (EV); only read it if you’re really interested in EVs!!

We’re a one-car family (or rather, my husband and I are a one-car couple, our university student daughter has her own minivan!), and our much-loved 2011 Subaru Outback gave up the ghost (a bunch of expensive repairs that were not worth doing) a couple of weeks ago. For about the past six months, I had been saying, “We’re never buying another gas car; when we have to replace this car, we’re going fully electric.” Somehow, I was envisioning that “when we have to replace this car” would be maybe two to four years down the road (it had 140K miles on it, which is actually not that much for a Subaru), but unfortunately the universe heard me, and “down the road” turned out to be sooner than we anticipated. I texted my husband from the mechanic and said, “You know how I’ve been whining that I’m the last person in Boulder who doesn’t have a Rivian? Welllll, that may not be true for much longer!!”

A few factors weighed into this decision:

• We live in an area with a pretty high percentage of electric cars, so there are lots of chargers available
• We also live in an area (Denver, Colorado metro) with horrible ozone levels from vehicle air pollution
• We’re in a wind power cooperative, so our home electricity is fossil fuel-free

We also had some major decisions to work out, namely whether an EV would work for our driving habits, which are kind of the opposite of the way the rest of the world drives. Neither of us commutes (my husband works from home; I work at an office outside our house, but there’s very limited parking so I either bike or ride the bus), but we drive up to the nearby mountains (about 75 miles roundtrip) nearly every weekend to go hiking, mountain biking, or skiing, and we take long road trips during the summer (typically to British Columbia, about a 20-hour drive from where we live).

I started by surveying my Facebook friends, a number of whom have EVs, and our neighborhood e-mail list, which is a great source of information about the local aspect: where to charge, available rebates, etc. Interestingly enough, I didn’t encounter anyone who said, “We don’t like our EV,” or “We’re living with it for now but not planning on buying another one.” And many people said, “We had some hesitations, but we love this car,” or “Best vehicle-buying decision we ever made.” Most of all, our friends who have EVs universally assured me that, once you get in the EV mindset, it’s like any other car, but you charge it instead of putting gas in it. So we started shopping, with the following requirements:

• Range of at least 250 miles
• All-wheel drive
• Good winter battery performance, particularly because we don’t have a garage
• Decent amount of cargo space for skis, camping gear, etc.
• Not crazy expensive (all joking aside, the Rivian would actually fit our needs, but runs US $75-95K which is outside our budget)

After doing a bunch of research on Edmunds and MotorTrend (I particularly appreciated MotorTrend’s long-term reviews, where one of their staff members drives the car for a year), we narrowed the list down to the Kia EV6, the Hyundai Ioniq (the EV6 and the Ioniq use the same power train, which Hyundai and Kia developed together), the Volkswagen ID4, the Tesla Model Y, and the Ford Mustang Mach-E. We quickly eliminated the ID4 due to its poor battery performance in cold weather, and decided that our top candidates were the EV6 and the Ioniq, and that we’d like to test drive the Model Y and the Mach-E just for kicks.

My sister-in-law had turned me on to Turo, a car rental service that is like AirBnB for vehicles. We decided to demo an EV6 and an Ioniq, because we wanted to take them on the kind of drives that we actually do, not just drive them around the block from a dealership. This went well and was definitely a good decision. On a snowy day, we picked up two friends in our Turo EV6 and headed up to the mountains for a hike; this gave us the chance to test the EV6’s performance in the snow (excellent), and to see how much battery range it used for this trip (a lot on the way up, not much on the way down, because of the regenerative braking). We then rented an Ioniq on Turo, drove a Tesla Model Y at our local CarMax dealership, and drove a Mach-E with the broker who we ultimately ended up using to purchase the EV6 Wind that we ended up buying (more on this below). Our initial assessments were:

• We loved pretty much everything about the Kia EV6 Wind, with all-wheel drive and the long-range battery. It has a range of 280 miles, a good amount of cargo space, a 60/40 fold-down rear seat (so you can fold one side of the back seat down and still fit two people), and a good mix of manual and touch-screen controls. To us, the interior felt like a luxury car (we’re not car people, so take this with a grain of salt!); super-comfortable seats, excellent safety features like blind-spot cameras (these come with the Kia technology package), heated and ventilated seats (nice to have in an EV because the forced-air systems use a lot of battery power), a “charge search” feature to find the nearest charging station, and various regenerative braking modes to conserve battery power. The Kia also comes with a 10-year warranty, which was really appealing.
• The Hyndia Ioniq wasn’t bad, and it’s mechanically basically the same car as the EV6, but we didn’t love it. Compared to the EV6, the suspension felt tighter/less cushy, and the interior felt kind of cheap and plastic-y. We’ve never bought a brand new car, so if we were going to buy brand new, we wanted to love the car, and we liked but didn’t love the Ioniq.
• The Tesla Model Y was a totally different beast. Teslas use an all-touchscreen interface (no manual controls other than the turn signals; you use the touchscreen to adjust the mirrors, the air vents, the windshield wipers, basically everything). Everyone we know who has a Tesla assured us that you get used to this, but I had some concerns about it, and I worried that the large touchscreen (about the size of a laptop screen) could be easily broken by a lot of the stuff we typically carry in the car, specifically skis. Additionally, the “clean and minimalist” Tesla interior felt to me kind of harsh and cold (I couldn’t really imagine driving people in the back seat on a long drive), and I had some hesitations about how hot the car would get in the summer because of the glass roof. I see what people love about Teslas: the no-hassle purchasing because they don’t have dealerships, the cool navigation features (give it a destination and it tells you where to charge), and the fact that it drives like a sportscar (I floored it from a red light just to see what it did, and it was honestly kind of terrifying). I see the appeal of Teslas, but we ended up feeling like it wasn’t the car for us, and I have a hard time with the idea of giving Elon Musk any of my money, much less a huge amount of my money.
• The Ford Mustang Mach-E is a nice car, and the “made in America” tax credit (which none of the other cars we looked at qualified for) was definitely appealing, plus we planned to pay cash for the car, but Ford offers, at least some of the time, 0% financing for 48 months. I drove one with our auto broker and liked it, but it’s more of a sports car than we’re looking for, and there’s not a ton of cargo space compared to the other options we looked at. Plus, I had some concerns about its durability and reliability, given that we tend to keep cars until they die.

We basically settled on the Kia EV6 Wind AWD long-range model. When it came time to buy, we had not one, but two horrible experiences at local Kia dealerships. The first dealer told us that the attractively priced car we saw on their website was “unavailable,” but as luck would have it (insert eye roll here), they had an “even nicer” model for only $8K more. They also refused to directly answer my questions about what sorts of rebates or discounts might be available on the EV6. We moved on to a second dealership, which, believe it or not, was even worse, in that they advertised a $5K cash discount on their website that they then refused to give us when we went to the dealership to try to buy the car, first telling us we must have mis-read the price (I had a screen shot), then that the discount was only available if we financed the car (it was specifically listed under the “Cash” tab), then finally that it was a mistake and they couldn’t sell us the car at that price. I reported them to the Colorado Auto Industry Division for deceptive pricing practices, and asked my husband, “Should we just move to Switzerland,” (where we have dual citizenship) “…and completely stop driving?” I honestly wondered if we should just give up on the whole idea.

But then…a friend referred me to another friend, who is an auto broker. I honestly had no idea that this service existed, and now that we used a broker, I will also honestly never enter a car dealership again, ever. We used Dustin Williams with H.M. Brown, a large auto broker in Colorado. Within two days, Dustin had found two cars (an EV6 and a Mach-E) for us to try; we immediately settled on the EV6 and Dustin negotiated a nice discount on the MSRP, plus brought the car and the paperwork to our house, and the dealer paid his fee, so there was zero cost to us. This was honestly a great experience and I would recommend Dustin’s services to anyone else in Colorado.

We’ve only had the car for two days (!!) but so far, we love it. We’re still learning about its various features (lots of watching YouTube videos!) and we’re starting to plan out where and when to charge it on a couple of road trips we plan on taking over Christmas break. Our plan, at least in the short-term, is to trickle charge the car at home during the week (we have an outdoor electrical outlet right next to our driveway), using a simple charging cable that cost about $160. This adds about five miles of range per hour, but in our case, the car largely sits in the driveway during the week, so this seems doable. There’s also a Level 2 charger (fully charges the car overnight) at the middle school one block from our house, and with one of our Turo cars, we tested a Level 3 charger in a parking garage in downtown Boulder. This super-fast charging isn’t great for the car’s battery health in the long term, but it’s impressively fast: charged the Hyundai Ioniq from 30%-80% in the time it took us to drink coffee.

We’re planning some ski trips in the near future, and I’ll report back in a month or so on how life with the EV is going!