Life with an EV (as our only car)

Back in December, I wrote a post about our recent experience shopping for and purchasing an electric car, in which (after considering the Hyundai Ioniq, the Volkswagen ID 4, the Tesla Model Y, and the Ford Mustang Mach-E), we purchased a 2023 Kia EV6. We’ve now had the car for almost three months, so I thought I’d write a follow-up post with our impressions, especially now that we’ve taken the car on a few winter road trips.

Executive summary: We love this car!

We love the EV6, and we love the EV lifestyle in general. Our hope is to never own another gas car. The EV6’s winter and back-roads performance is similar to, or even better than our Subaru Outback wagon, charging it has been really easy and inexpensive, it has fantastic cargo capacity, and it’s hard to beat zero emissions and never buying gas again. We give this whole experience five stars, and I’ll reiterate the recommendation for our auto broker, Dustin Williams from H.M. Brown in Denver, CO.

Zero buyer’s remorse!

As I wrote in December, we had some angst over this purchase. Our 2011 Subaru was no spring chicken, but died relatively quickly and with relatively little warning, we’ve never bought a brand-new car before, and we only want/need one car, so we couldn’t do the typical “EV as around-town car, gas car for weekends and road tripping” model that a lot of people do to test the EV waters. Additionally, we do a lot of mountain sports activities (skiing, mountain biking, hiking) on the weekends, so we need a “go everywhere” car with all-wheel drive and good cargo capacity.

Really we have zero regrets. The EV6 is pretty perfect for our needs. The cargo capacity is comparable to or better than our Outback. We’ve done several ski days with four adults and four sets of ski gear in the car, and the 60/40 fold-down back seat (where you can still fit two people in the back with the other seat folded down) is way more comfortable than in the Subaru with way more leg room. The “luxurious” features of the EV6 are really great: blind spot cameras, heated and cooled seats, heated steering wheel, collision avoidance system that actually stops the car if you’re about to back into something, preferred driver’s seat settings so that you push the “driver 1” or “driver 2” button and it automatically adjusts the seat and the side-view mirrors to your preferred settings, button to open the trunk from the driver’s seat. These aren’t unique to EVs, but they’re unique to nice cars, which we’ve never owned before!

Everyone who rides in this car, loves it. No kidding. We’ve already had two sets of friends ask to test drive it because they’re thinking about buying an EV6. Everyone loves the EV6!

Charging!

The upside of owning an EV is never buying gas again (and zero emissions!). The tradeoff is wrapping your head around the charging paradigm. Before we bought our EV, every EV owner we talked to, told us the same thing: charging takes a little more planning than buying gas, but once you get used to it, charging is a non-issue. This has honestly been our experience. Additionally, we don’t charge the car at home (this relates to our house, not the car, more on this below) and we rarely pay for charging because there are so many free chargers out there.

EV charging has three levels: Level 1, the slowest, involves charging the car from a normal three-prong 110v outlet, using a charging cord that you can buy for under $200. We have a Megear level 1 charger and it works fine. Our original plan was to mostly charge the car off the outdoor electrical outlet that we use for our electric lawnmower. The obstacle proved to be not the car, but our house: we have a 1958 ranch with the original wiring, and although we have an upgraded electrical panel, the circuit with the outdoor electrical outlet proved not very compatible with EV charging. The lights in the house flickered when we plugged the car in, the switch plate on that circuit got hot to the touch, and if we put any other electrical appliances on that circuit while the car was charging, the breaker flipped. Ultimately we decided to stop using this method of charging, because it seemed only a matter of time before something went seriously wrong (like burning our house down or frying the car’s electrical system).

An obvious solution would be to get a Level 2 charger at home, which we will probably do at some point. Level 2 chargers are what you see at most public charging stations: they’re between the Level 1 “trickle” chargers, and the Level 3 fast-chargers that are almost as fast as pumping gas. However, regular blog readers will know that when it comes to frugality, I’m kind of a black belt, and with a Level 2 home charger install costing $1,000-$2,500, I went in search of other options. An additional factor is that I think it would be very cool to get a bidirectional EV charger, where we can use the car to power our house in the event of a power outage, but these chargers are not yet the industry standard, so I’d like to wait until we can get one at home.

Fortunately, other options proved pretty easy to find, and we are now charging the EV for free other than on road trips. Here’s how that works: the municipal chargers where we live (Boulder, CO) are free. Some of them have a time limit, but some, including a bank of chargers that are a 15-minute walk from my office, do not. So, even though I don’t need to drive to work (my office rent includes a free transit pass, or I ride my bike), I drive to work one day a week and charge the car at the free municipal charger all day. In a pinch, there’s a paying public charger at the middle school one block from our house, but we’ve only used it once in the last month. This has allowed us to delay getting a Level 2 charger at home, because a full charge (about 280 miles) covers pretty much all of our driving needs for the week.

I recommend the PlugShare app for locating chargers. It includes not only locations, but reviews of how reliable that particular charger is. Which brings me to one negative point: with our Kia, we got a freebie 1,000 kilowatt hour charging plan from Electrify America. This is about 3,500 miles of driving, so it’s well worth taking advantage of, except that there’s only one Electrify America charger in Boulder, and it’s constantly down for maintenance. So we’re hoping to use this charging plan on some road trips this summer! Otherwise, the ChargePoint network (which runs the majority of chargers in our area) is extremely reliable!

Winter performance

We did decide to get the same snow tires that we had on our old Subaru: Bridgestone Blizzaks, which are kind of the Colorado standard. They were expensive (~$1,100 with installation), but still cheaper than having the car towed out of some of the remote trailheads where we go backcountry skiing.

Otherwise, the EV6 is a great winter car. It has all-wheel drive, plus an ultra-low-torque Snow Mode for even better traction. We’ve driven it in some pretty hairy winter conditions so far with zero problems. It drives as well as, or better than our Subaru in snow, which is pretty impressive.

Road tripping

By now we’ve also taken the car on several overnight ski trips. I use the app A Better Routeplanner (ABRP) which is owned by the electric car company Rivian, and I’ve been very happy with it. If you buy a Tesla, you get their very robust route-planning system integrated into the car, so you can enter a destination and it will tell you where to charge along the way. If you have another type of EV (or at least with a Kia), you have to use a third-party app to do this. Kia has an in-car navigation app and an in-car charger location app, but they don’t communicate with each other. ABRP is very easy to use, and most importantly, it accounts for elevation, which is a huge factor when driving in the Colorado mountains. So far, I’ve found ABRP to be pretty conservative–we usually get to the destination with more battery power than the ABRP estimate.

EV road-tripping does require more planning than with a gas car. Whether this is fun or annoying depends on your mindset. For us, it’s often kind of enjoyable to plan a lunch stop around charging the car, rather than just grabbing snacks at a gas station. On road trips, we’ll typically plan to drive 2-3 hours (depending on the terrain), then stop for about an hour to charge the car, then continue to the destination where we can charge the car overnight. We’ve stayed at three different AirBnBs with the EV, and all of them immediately said yes when I asked if we could charge the car on their outdoor electrical outlet. We’ve also found many free municipal chargers–this seems to be a thing in Colorado, because the municipal chargers in Salida and Gunnison (both of which we recently visited) are all free, so we scoped out lodging within walking distance of a Level 2 charger and left the car there overnight.

That’s about it! We loooooove our EV!!! As with last summer, we plan on spending the month of July on a workcation in Canada, so I’ll report back on how that goes, as well as whether we end up getting a fast charger at home.