Living with BEV's in the United States in 2025: What is it like?

[mattlach]

@Abub

That is another area of wildly different use case. Here in the flyover states ( for the non-miles fluent that means all of the USA other than New York and California ) I probably drive twice that. Still probably comfortable in the “modern” BEV ranges but I’m sure there is a divide between rural and urban needs.

Yeah, I used to drive way more, but ever since going hybrid at work in March 2020 my annual mileage has dropped through the floor.

Myy only concern is that if my employment situation changes in the next three years before my lease is up, I may need a vehicle I can put more miles on. But that is a lease issue, not an electric vehicle issue.

I think as long as your typical daily driving round trip is within ~60% of max range (to stay within the 20% → 80% battery optimization range) and don’t live a vagrant lifestyle where you can’t charge at home overnight, a battery electric vehicle would be just fine.

with my Audi A6 E-Tron Quattro (still a mouthful) 60% of the claimed range is 200 miles. I can’t imagine ever having a living and/or work situation where I would need to regularly drive more than 200 miles per day.

The bigger issue would be how often you take longer road trips, and what the public charger quality and availability is like where you need to take those road trips.

Road trips and public charging can be great when everything goes right, but can also be pretty bad when things don’t work out. (Non-existent, broken or overcrowded chargers, being the most common issues)

Imagine driving to another city for a trip after having verified that your hotel has a charger, only to find out when you get there that it is broken.

That type of experience is not that uncommon unfortunately. At least not here in the U.S. Maybe it is better in Europe.

[rjsams]

@mattlach

I kept wishing that someone would just make a normal mid to large size sedan, just electric instead of gas. The Audi A6 E-Tron is the closest I have seen to date (Except maybe the Lucid Air*) and that’s why it was time for me to jump in now.

That should be a very good car. Porsche did most of the dev work on the platform (PPE). I came close to buying a Taycan but I never could get over the large size. Still after test driving one my RS5 felt like a antique. Never like the Tesla’s myself.

I was at the refuel race at laguna seca when a bunch of Tesla’s were there. Many of them broke down. They never left me with the impression they were reliable or well made if you drove one hard.

[twin_savage]

EVs from a two wheel perspective:
Electric bikes have come along way in the past couple decades, range and power are up but unfortunately they lag behind ICE in these two categories enough to put off most prospective buyers.

I’ll give an anecdote of the first blocker; One common scenario motorcycles run into are group rides that can go on for more than 100 miles which necessitate quick fuel stops due to the aggressive nature of some of these rides, ICE bikes will have their range decrease from perhaps 150miles to ~80 miles due to these conditions.
I rode a Zero SR/F with the 17.3kWh battery recently and the range dropped from the manufacture’s stated 176 miles (to be fair this was a city figure, but this is what the dash initially showed my range as) to less than 40 miles on a mountain run which made me drop out of the ride because I couldn’t keep up.

The other issue I had with the Zero SR/F was that it just felt plain slow, the specsheet said it had 111 horsepower, but it felt like maybe half of that. Cycleworld actually dyno’d a slightly older version of the same model and got 100hp and 146.5lb*ft out of it so Zero isn’t lying.
My butt dyno pegged the Zero at about as fast as a 650 twin which has half the horse power and a third the torque… looking up 0-60 times a Kawi 650 twin is slightly faster than the Zero so that does check out.
I think what is going on here is that the lack of a transmission is hampering EV performance. I suppose this could be helped if someone just came out with an EV that had an appropriate amount of hp, perhaps 250-350hp, then the lack of transmission would be masked since you’d be near the traction limit at slow speed presumably.

[mattlach]

@twin_savage

I think what is going on here is that the lack of a transmission is hampering EV performance. I suppose this could be helped if someone just came out with an EV that had an appropriate amount of hp, perhaps 250-350hp, then the lack of transmission would be masked since you’d be near the traction limit at slow speed presumably.

For bikes you may be right.

The only EV cars I have driven with any regularity (both my better halfs ID.4 and my Audi A6) accelerate really fast.

Both of these vehicles accelerate fast enough to give me a slight amount of nausea if the vehicle suddenly gets full throttle without warning.

My A6 E-Tron Quattro is claimed by Audi to do 0-60 in 4.3s (and it’s not even the S6 variant ), and while I have yet to actually launch it (I tend to drive like a grandmother in my old (middle) age I believe it. Even the more pedestrian ID.4 is claimed to hit 60 in 4.9 seconds.

I can see this being more of a challenge with bikes though, where weight might be more of a concern due to how you ride them.

But yeah, the EV and ICE comparison is interesting there.

In a theoretical drag race between two equally powered vehicles, one ICE and one EV it usually shakes down something like this:

1.) EV’s usually get a jump off the line as the accelerator in an EV is simply a torque switch. There is no wait for torque like there is form an ICE engine. This disadvantage can be minimized by the ICE driver by using some launch techniques that are not nice to transmissions, but if you regularly do that your car is likely not going to last very long

But that jump off the line is brief.

2.) After that initial jump, an equivalently powered ICE car will usually have the advantage due to gearing. Definitely in first, probably in second depending on the vehicle, but unlikely in third.

As the ICE car has to shift up in gears, eventually the advantage shifts back to the EV. The ICE car gets less torque at the wheels with every shift, but the EV has the same gearing the entire way, and the torque curve over electric motor RPM is surprisingly flat.

3.) Then at some point (usually about 130mph, but it depends on the model) the EV will hit its max speed and refuse to continue accelerating. Here - of course - the advantage once again shifts back to the ICE vehicle.

Either way, I guess the way I feel is that both of our EV’s now are WAY faster than I need them to be. I gave up my “go fast” car guy membership card years ago. These days I am more interested in getting from point A to point B without wasting gas/energy/tire tread, and doing so in reasonable comfort.

For that purpose, I really don’t need to accelerate from 0-60 faster than maybe 6.5s. That is enough to comfortably merge onto a crowded highway. That’s really the only time I use my cars performance anymore.

I would have bought a slower model, but the only slower models are RWD, and I really don’t want to scale the steep hill on our street getting home in the snow in a heavy RWD vehicle.

20’s me loved fast cars, but at some point in my early to mid 30’s I almost completely lost interest. Now that I am in my mid 40’s performance doesn’t matter to me at all, other than being able to safely keep up with traffic.

[TObject]

As many others, my deterrent is I do not want the hastle of istalling the wiring. My breaker panel is on the different floor on the opposite side of the dwelling. Wiring would be expensive… If not for that I would have probably already bought an electric as second vehicle.

[rjsams]

We lived with a L1 (15 amp) charger for years. If you drive less than ~50 miles a day it’s viable, over that probably not.

[nutral]

What we haven’t talked about here is lithium cell age. With current cells this is improved by management but i do think that 90 percent figure will get reached far before that 480k miles because the cell ages over time, especially in light use.

The big age accelerator of lithium batteries is being empty or completely full. cycling close to empty creates resistance and staying full or near full loses lithium material. The batteries in EVs are specifically chosen to be more durable but the best way to make it last is to have It not be below 20% or over 80% as much as possible.

[mattlach]

@TObject

As many others, my deterrent is I do not want the hastle of istalling the wiring. My breaker panel is on the different floor on the opposite side of the dwelling. Wiring would be expensive… If not for that I would have probably already bought an electric as second vehicle.

@rjsams

We lived with a L1 (15 amp) charger for years. If you drive less than ~50 miles a day it’s viable, over that probably not.

Yeah, I agree, it is possible, but it isn’t fun.

It takes discipline to remember to plug things in, and it is also annoying to have to plug and unplug if you have any unplanned activities.

Depending on how many hours you are parked at home, different amounts of miles are feasible, but the more you need the more challenging it is.

My better half did this for about a week until I got our LEVEL2 EVSE charger installed.

Using her ID.4 as an example, if we plugged it in 8 hours before she had to leave in the morning, and then went to bed, it could charge about 15%.

(at higher charging speeds like DC fast charging, and in some cases even level2 home charging, the charging speed varies based on condition and charge level, but with level 1 charging it is so slow it is pretty much linear at whatever amount of power you can pull from the wall, which in this case is likely going to be 120v 12A (limited by the 20% rule for continuous loads)

15% in her car with a 82kWh battery (77kWh usable) and a typical mix of highway and city driving is about 30-40 miles.

This is totally doable, but you cant forget to plug in every night.

The issue becomes if you go for a few longer drives or use more than that. It doesn’t take much before it is completely impossible to charge back up overnight.

Lets say you had a long day with a lot of driving, and get back home from work at 6pm and have to leave for work the next day at 8am. That’s a max of 14 hours of charging.

In that time (provided it isn’t too cold or too hot, so some of the wall power has to be used to heat or cool the battery) the most you are going to be able to charge is from ~55% up to 80%

So that 25% of battery charge might give you about 50-65 miles of range.

But this assumes you have nowhere to go after getting home from work, so you can charge that whole time, and not spend additional battery on errands.

This might be fine if you have a sub-50 mile daily drive, but the problems start if you - I don’t know - do an IKEA run one day, and suddenly you drain the car to way below the 55% you can recharge.

It’s not really the end of the world. You don’t necessarily have to recharge everything you use in one day that same night.

If your longer drives are infrequent, you can plug it in, charge whatever you can before leaving for work the next day. You may not get to 80%, but that might be fine. You can just use whatever you use on your short commute the next day, and then continue to charge the next night, and provided you don’t do back to back longer drives two or more days in a row, eventually you’ll get back up to 80%.

But this does require discipline to remember to always plug in the car when at home and not in use, and requires more planning and care around vehicle use. You can’t just get in and go without thinking about whether or not you have any other long drives coming up, and if you will be able to charge fast enough (that is - of course - unless you stop at a public fast DC charger)

This is of course largely a North American phenomenon, as most other places on the planet aren’t limited to 120v 15A in regular outlets.

In Europe they can charge more than twice as fast in their regular outlets, as they are 230v 16A. It actually winds up slightly more than twice, as there is no strict 20% de-rating requirement for continuous loads in Europe. They can most of the time pull the full current available (usually 16A) so since they are 230v this means they can actually charge 2.55x faster than we can in regular outlets. (though they might want to leave a little bit of a safety margin there, so they don’t have nuisance breaker trips. I have no idea what max current it is typical for car chargers that plug in to regular household outlets to pull there)

Actually, I just googled this a bit. It turns out that the so called “Granny Chargers” (what they in the UK apparently call the little plug in chargers that come with the cars typically limit current to 10A to avoid problems with long extension cords and homes with older electrical systems.

So while theoretically possible to charge at a full 230v 16a from a household outlet, this is rarely done. Still, even at 230v 10A they can charge ~1.6x faster than us from regular household outlets.

So that makes the situation there a little bit better, but not as much better as I thought.

[mattlach]

@nutral

What we haven’t talked about here is lithium cell age. With current cells this is improved by management but i do think that 90 percent figure will get reached far before that 480k miles because the cell ages over time, especially in light use.

The big age accelerator of lithium batteries is being empty or completely full. cycling close to empty creates resistance and staying full or near full loses lithium material. The batteries in EVs are specifically chosen to be more durable but the best way to make it last is to have It not be below 20% or over 80% as much as possible.

Yeah, I did address it briefly, but it is much more difficult to quantify.

I agree, the full 480k miles is unlikely to be achieved due to additional degradation simply from aging, but from I have read that aging is pretty slow.

From what I have read, we are talking 1-2% per year in most real world scenarios, but there are many variables here, including state of charge and other storage conditions like temperature.

If you charge it up to 100% and let it sit, it will likely age much faster just sitting at 100% than it would if you left it aging at 40%-50% charge.

Also, if you regularly park outside in high heat degradation can be a much bigger problem, as heat accelerates the degradation. A worst case would obviously be full charge sitting in the desert at 60C/140F

So if you live in a hot climate, it is probably a good idea to have an air-conditioned garage.

If you are lucky to park at or under ~25C/80F and keep your average charge close to that 40-50% figure, the annual degradation from aging is likely going to be closer to 1%

I mean, this does mean you get to that magic 90% level in ~10 years, but the battery doesn’t just go “poof” once it reaches 90% capacity either.

I’m a little bit less concerned about this. I just got rid of my 2017 car I bought in 2019. So it’s an 8 year old car that I bought 6 years ago.

I probably won’t run into this issue myself, but if you do make a habit of keeping cars much longer than 10 years, it could be a potential issue. Again, they are not going to go poof overnight, but you may see noticeable less range after the 10 year mark.

In the scenario Abub mentioned above, wanting to keep a car for 5 years after it is paid off, as long as your finance period isnt’t too long, this is still within th e10 year range. It used to be that typical vehicle finance periods were 48 months, but they have slowly crept up over the years. 60 months are not uncommon at all now.

So, if you were to - say - finance a 3 year old off-lease model over 60 months (5 years) and then keep it for 5 more years after it is paid off, that brings you to the 13 year mark. The car is probably still usable, but the total range will be a little bit less than 90% of what it was when new.

[rjsams]

@mattlach

Using her ID.4 as an example, if we plugged it in 8 hours before she had to leave in the morning, and then went to bed, it could charge about 15%.

The ID4 is also middle of the road on efficiency. That same energy will go a lot farther in some other vehicles, for example Lucid. On the other hand a truck will use even more.

Our first 2 BEVs were small little short ranged things. We got them because we wanted the HOV sticker in CA. The L1 was fine for them, but for a larger vehicle it’s a much bigger issue. A 4 mile/KWh vehicle is much more viable on an L1 than a 2.5 is.

The new place had a 20A 240V socket. I bought a the wire to do a 50A upgrade, it’s only about 2m from the main panel in the garage. That was more than a year ago, the 20A L2 has been good enough I have never made time to do the upgrade.

[mattlach]

@rjsams

The ID4 is also middle of the road on efficiency. That same energy will go a lot farther in some other vehicles, for example Lucid. On the other hand a truck will use even more.

Yeah, It probably gets 3.5 miles/kWh around town and about 2.8 on the highway. (I’ll never get over how weird it is to me to get better mileage in the city than on the highway)

@rjsams

We got them because we wanted the HOV sticker in CA.

Is that still a thing over there? I vaguely remember Mass having a provision like that. There used to be lots of little perks like that but now they seem to mostly be gone.

@rjsams

The new place had a 20A 240V socket. I bought a the wire to do a 50A upgrade, it’s only about 2m from the main panel in the garage. That was more than a year ago, the 20A L2 has been good enough I have never made time to do the upgrade.

That’s nice.

Do you guys just alternate charging or do you have one of those dual head units?

I bought our Grizzl-E charger before I had considered buying my car, so when I did I was just thinking about charging one car.

240V 40A (actual 40A, I put it on a 50A circuit so I could max it out) seems to be pretty decent. Mostly she charges it about once a week from just over 20% to 80%

So her car charges easily overnight once a week with that use. 20% to 80% comes around in about 5 hours.

Mine would probably be a little longer, with my larger battery, but I also drive a little less due to my hybrid work arrangement.

As previously mentioned, for now I am DC fast charging 100% of the time, simply because of the free 1 year plan that came with the car. Once that year is up, I’ll have to decide what to do charging wise.

Since neither of us need to charge more than once a week, we could totally get away with just alternating the cars.

it is tempting to look at one of Grizzl-E’s DUO models though. I think it is pretty cool how thy dynamically share the available power on the circuit between the two charging vehicles.

Sadly the DUO is still only 40A though. So, if we ever charged at the same time, the two cars would share the 40A.

They offer an 80A model, but that is single head only for some reason. One would think more current potential would be good to have with a dual head model.

Even so, having a dual head model would be convenient because the charge time is less important than the ability to just be able to plug it in and have it be done in the morning without intervention (like switching cars)

Maybe they will come out with a new, dual head model with more than 40A at some point. If they do, it will likely have a NACS /Tesla plug though, as that’s the direction the market is going in.

Would be slightly annoying to need an adapter to charge our cars, but it is what it is I guess.

[rjsams]

Because the panel is in the garage we will be adding a 2nd charger when my car gets here. I had the Q4 etron which went back as a lemon due to the AC. However, since we both WFH at the moment we decided to wait replacing the 2nd car until there was a need or something we really liked came out on the market.

I’m currently on the wait list for a Cayman BEV. We want to get back to having a sports car in the family but there simply are no good options right now.

The HOV sticker was a thing in CA, they stopped doing it a while back.

For the charger, the DUO is a good option. You will be surprised how rare it is for both cars to need a lot of charging overnight. You almost never go 0-100%. 20-80 is much more common and that takes a lot less.

[mattlach]

@rjsams

For the charger, the DUO is a good option. You will be surprised how rare it is for both cars to need a lot of charging overnight. You almost never go 0-100%. 20-80 is much more common and that takes a lot less.

Absolutely. I was just thinking it would be nice to - if we ever need to charge at the same time - be able to just plug them in and not worry about unplugging one when full and plugging in the other.

And since I already ran 1" conduit and hardwired my charger, it would be fairly trivial to just replace the wiring with something slightly thicker if need be.

I currently have it wired with 6 gage stranded copper THWN2 which according to ampacity charts in the NEC is good up to 75 amps (though I’d have to derate it to 80% of that, so 60A for actual continuous charging.

To step it up to 80A for sharing between both cars (if a product like that launches in the future) I’d need to step up to #3 wire, and three stranded #3 wires still fit in a 1" conduit without over-filling.

So doing that at some point in the future, ought to be pretty straight forward. I’d need a 100A circuit and breaker, but that is pretty straight forward.

The biggest challenge would like be to re-do my custom box offset bends which were a real pain in the ass to make fit the Grizzl-E charger.

[rjsams]

My only comment on that would be to wait a bit and see if you really need to do the work. It’s easy to overestimate the burden of charging.

Seems like a good plan and you are setup to make whatever adjustment you will need in the future.

[SWPadnos]

@Abub

One thing I am hearing from you, and this is kinda a common mindset from EV enthusiasts, is that you buy new cars and that you buy them on a whim. I think the vast majority of people buy used cars.

I wouldn’t say that, but you can be the judge
My wife replaced her 2005 Honda Accord when she got the Bolt in 2020. She would have kept that car if it hadn’t started to need a lot of service. The Bolt cost about $33k after the dealer/manufacturer discounts, and the $7500 federal tax credit reduced the cost to $25.5k. That’s just a little higher than most similarly-sized ICE cars were at the time.

I replaced my 2011 Chrysler Town&Country mini-van in December of 2023 when I bought the Tesla Model Y. It was rusting out, so it needed to be replaced. After considering the (advertised) range, tow capacity and cost of a variety of EVs and ICE or hybrid vehicles, I decided on the Tesla. The starting cost was $50k, but that was reduced to roughly $35k by a combination of federal, state and power company incentives. There aren’t many ICE vehicles that could compare to the comfort and performance of the Tesla in that price range.

My sister replaced a dying Subaru, which they had bought well-used and kept far beyond its time, with a used Bolt. This is a 2023 model that they just got a couple of months ago. I think the cost was about $19k. That’s more than they would have paid normally - they generally would get several-year old, high-mileage Subarus and run them into the ground. Both my sister and her husband love the EV, and aside from some teething issues with charging on trips, I don’t think either of them would go back to an ICE vehicle.

A good friend recently replaced his leased Chevy Bolt (3 years, $211 per month I think) with a purchased used one, for about $17k. Same car he had leased, just in a different color.

All of us have taken road trips, across the US (between Vermont and Wisconsin, about 1200 miles each way) and Canada (as far as Nova Scotia), and we have almost never had problems with range. We have had anxiety about it (most notably when we went to a memorial service for a friend in Boston, and had to drive fast because we left late, so we had worse range, and the chargers were all in use, and and and …), but in the US and Canada, driving across upstate New York, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin, we have always been able to find chargers at reasonable intervals. We made the trip to Wisconsin in 2 days, which is the same as it would have taken in an ICE vehicle. The time on the road was a little longer due to charging time - maybe 11 hours to Cleveland instead of 10 hours - but it wasn’t noticeably worse than any of the times I’ve done the trip in an ICE vehicle, and you can get more variation due to traffic than the hit from charging.

My point is that none of these purchases were on a whim, and all of us tend to drive cars until they’re no longer usable, rather than until a shinier one comes out.

The tax incentives were instrumental in making these purchases viable for us, and with those going away, the landscape will change. It’s too bad that range anxiety and other bad press has slowed the uptake in the US. If EVs were being made in the same numbers as ICE vehicles, they would (should) be much more competitive on price. If people in the US would think more about long-term TCO rather than initial cost, it would be a different picture.

[SWPadnos]

@mattlach

I think as long as your typical daily driving round trip is within ~60% of max range (to stay within the 20% → 80% battery optimization range) and don’t live a vagrant lifestyle where you can’t charge at home overnight, a battery electric vehicle would be just fine.

Please be careful with this kind of comment. Calling anyone without a detached house with driveway a vagrant is the exact reason why people look at EV “evangelists” as elite and out of touch.

A person with a million-dollar condo with 3 parking spaces still may not be able to install a charger in a shared garage, and that’s a far cry from living a vagrant lifestyle.

[mattlach]

@SWPadnos

Please be careful with this kind of comment. Calling anyone without a detached house with driveway a vagrant is the exact reason why people look at EV “evangelists” as elite and out of touch.

Honestly, I was thinking less about renters, and more about what my life was like when I was in my 20’s, on the road all the time, visiting friends far away from home, often not parking at home overnight.

The biggest EV enthusiast I know lives in a condo. He petitioned the board to let him install an EVSE charger at his parking spot where he previously parked his Bolt and now parks his Lyriq.

I may own my home now, but that’s a relatively recent thing. Prior to where I live now I always rented. There were some more urban apartments that only had on street parking that would have posed real problems for EV charging. But there were also some where there was a small driveway and an outdoor receptacle. There, I could have pulled off level1 charging.

The last three places I lived prior to owning my current home were all rented, yes, but they were rented single family homes. Level1 charging would have been no problem at all. I may even have been able to pull off charging at 240v 24A from a nearby 30A dryer outlet without having to modify anything.

And in all three of those locations I was on very good terms with the owners. They were all single property landlords, who were forced to move for work, and decided to rent out the home they already owned rather than sell it because they wanted to move back some day.

I served as a small time care-taker, and was trusted with doing minor home repairs (after discussing with them) in exchange for discounts on the rent. It saved them money and effort, so they were pleased with me, and had I asked about installing an EV charger, they would likely have been OK with it after reviewing plans to make sure there would not be any problems.

So no. I don’t have a problem with renters at all.

There was a time - however - when I was fresh out of college, living in a city 150 miles from where all my friends were due to that being the only job I could find. My little tenement actually could have been used for level1 EV charging due to the driveway being right out front and there being an outdoor receptacle, but this was over 20 years ago, so EV’s were rare to non-existant.

I had a bit of a tough time adjusting to post college life, not constantly being around my group of friends. At that point I was frequently on the road, especially on weekends, often visiting friends and couch-surfing. Regular overnight EV charging would just not have worked. This is the more vagrant lifestyle I was referring to.

All of that said (and this is WAY off topic) I will say this. There is a lot of legitimacy to the complaints about housing affordability these days. I too had to spend McMansion money to buy a modest starter home 15 miles outside the city, and it took me until I was in my early 40’s to be able to afford to do so.

That said (and this is going to be a little controversial), a lot (not all) of those I hear complaining about being unable to afford buying homes actually have reasonable incomes and should be able to afford a decent home. They are just being completely unrealistic about the location. They look at the price for homes for sale in city centers or close in suburbs and say “I could never afford that” and then just give up.

In a way, it is a but of a immature perspective, still clinging to the young persons city center lifestyle when they are supposed to be growing up.

Most normal people, when it is time to settle down and buy a home have to make sacrifices. I too liked living in the city, but in order to be able to afford a place of my own, I had to sacrifice that lifestyle and be willing to look at homes 15, 20, 25 or even 30-35 miles outside the city.

The refusal to give up on the urban lifestyle in order to be able to afford a home is often the primary problem, and that is a problem of refusing to grow up.

Sure, you probably can’t afford a single family home in New York City. (or in my case Boston, or close in suburbs like Cambridge, Somerville or Medford) Almost no one can.

But, 30-50 miles north of New York City there are some reasonably affordable homes in smaller towns like Brewster, Yorktown Heights, etc.

New York is an extreme example. When it comes to Boston, you can pull this off even closer. You probably only need to go out to the i495 corridor 25 miles away. Lots of affordable smaller towns within a very annoying, but totally survivable commuting range of Boston.

Yes, you won’t live with a Jewish Deli on the corner, and cant take the subway home from the bar on the weekend, and if you work in the city the commute is going to be BAD, but those are the types of sacrifices you have to make when you grow up. You can’t have this one lifestyle in this one place in your head and refuse to change. That’s how you wind up never getting a home and renting for life.

The truth is city living is a luxury that very few can afford once they are past the phase of their lives when living in tenements seems acceptable and a reasonable sacrifice for the city experience. And that’s just a fact of life.

And I know because I want through it a few years ago too, after we decided that renting was unsustainable, and we needed to buy a place. We viewed so many homes, and bit by bit the dream was crushed. We went from larger closer in to smaller and smaller places further out. It was depressing to realize that neither city nor close in suburb living was going to be a reality, but it was a part of growing up.

And this is nothing new.

I grew up in a small town of about 10,000 people, an hours drive from the closest city. It was a great childhood, but it wasn’t until I went back there as an adult after having been away for 30 years I realized how desperately boring the place was as an adult, and the sacrifices my parents had made to have a home there. My dad having a terrible hours long commute into the city, and my mom (who was a city girl) feeling isolated and bored.

Heck, my uncle who worked in lower Manhattan in the 80’s and 90s bought a house in southern Connecticut, and had the worst commute of any person I have ever known.

These are just the sacrifices you have to make when you grow up and start making long term rational choices instead of short term emotional ones.

[mattlach]

@Abub

One thing I am hearing from you, and this is kinda a common mindset from EV enthusiasts, is that you buy new cars and that you buy them on a whim. I think the vast majority of people buy used cars.

I’m not sure about the vast majority.

Lots of people buy new cars.

But I know, I was raised to believe that was one of the dumbest financial decisions you could ever make, and that only a fool buys a car, any car, new.

But if you think about it someone has to buy them new, or there wouldn’t be any used cars.

It seems like the average car in the U.S. goes through about four owners in its lifetime. New to used car sales are at a into a ratio of 3:1.

Up until the electric Audi I just got I had never bought a new car.

Apart from my first car (my college beater), every car I owned followed roughly the same formula.

1.) Buy 2-3 year old used car, often off-lease, often CPO, usually with between 20k and 35k miles on it. Finance it over 48 months.

2.) Put about 100k miles on it over 3-5 years.

3.) Rinse and repeat.

The pandemic kind of messed up my cadence though.

In the summer of 2019 I bought a 2017 Volvo S90 T6 with an amazing 16k miles on it.

Then 6 months later the pandemic hit.

I didn’t go in to the office for like 2 years, and rarely went places outside of work wither. When I started going in again, it was only like 2-4 times a month.

6 years later that Volvo had less than 50k miles on it, which was highly unusual for me.

When I found out about the good lease deals to be had on electrics right now, I decided to give it a try.

But this is the first time in my 45 years I have driven a car the same year it was manufactured

I hear what you are saying about battery electrics maybe shortening the lifespan of used cars, and I think it is probably true. This is also why they depreciated as much as they do, because people have such concerns about battery longevity.

I think in this era what is probably going to happen is that second owners of cars will still be the norm, as the much depreciated BEV’s will still be very usable, but unless something changes in the technology, and we can suddenly get much cheaper replacement batteries, that second owner may - after picking up a 3 year old car - only drive it for another 7-10 years before it is sold for parts.

This is going to necessitate there being more new car sales, as the average second and fourth driver are going to need something to drive.

That said, at the same time car ownership is on the decline (slowly).

I guess we will have to see what happens.

[mattlach]

@rjsams

We want to get back to having a sports car in the family but there simply are no good options right now.

I’d be curious about your experience here when you pull the trigger.

I wouldn’t mind ever having a sporty car, but I can’t help but wonder if the sports car experience and the battery electric experience are compatible.

Don’t get me wrong, battery electrics typically have absolutely brutal acceleration in a straight line, but they are also pretty heavy, and I’d imagine that might make them pretty insulated and dull feeling, and would likely impact the handling.

I just don’t know how well a 5,000 lb sports car will handle…

[mattlach]

Well, I just found something out that quite honestly is making me absolutely livid.

So, when I was at the dealer shopping for my A6 E-Tron, I was told that the car came with 6 months of free data, after which data intensive features such as in car wifi, music streaming and youtube cease to work unless you opt in to a subscription.

I specifically asked if I could tether the car to my phone after that, and they said yes.

What they neglected to mention is that many of the cars features are tied to the Audi Connect Prime and Plus plans and cease to function even if you provide a wifi connection of your own if you don’t subscribe.

I feel cheated. I don’t think I would have ever gone through with this purchase had I been aware of this limitation.

If I buy a $5 “smart” lightbulb and provide Wifi connectivity, the connected features of that lightbulb are provided free of charge for life by the manufacturer.

But if I buy a $70,000 car, they think it is OK to charge me an additional $25 per month to use the software features in the car I already bought?

Even features that cost them nothing to implement or maintain (like third party apps in the MMI, you know, Spotify and the like) don’t work with Wifi.

Whats even worse is, in the A6 (and other PPE platform cars I have been told) there is no way to manually precondition the battery for charging without using the built in navigation to navigate to a charging station, and without a subscription, that doesn’t work properly.

This is an absolute outrage. It feels like a scam. I can totally understand requesting payment for the broadband connection, but if I provide my own everything should still work.

Whats next? Charging a subscription fee to use the software in the ECU? An extra monthly fee to use the steering wheel?

I feel lied to, disgusted and furious. It makes me want to go out to the driveway and set the damn car on fire. Heck, it makes me want to book a trip to Ingolstadt in Bavaria and burn down the Audi headquarters.

Over my dead body will I ever pay any subscription fee to an automaker for a car that I own.

It’s not that I can’t afford $25 per month. It’s the principle of the thing. I cannot and will not abide by this kind of manipulation. And I will never accept turning things I used to fully own into subscription models.

This should be illegal. People should be spending years in prison over this.

This may not be EV specific. It appears Audi pulls this bullshit across all of their new cars, but the battery preconditioning aspect of it makes it particularly evil on electric models.

If this is the type of bullshit Audi pulls, then this will be the first and last Audi I own.

And now those smug bastards want me to PAY for the privilege of them spying on me? I don’t think so.

Edit:

So it may not be quite as bad as I thought. The confusion is because Audi has changed their plans around, changed the names of them, and changed what is included with each.

On Newer cars they apparently include what they call “Audi Connect Nav” which includes the connected navigation features (and importantly, the charger integration).

The Audi Connect PLUS plan is still extra. And when it goes I lose access to the App Store, and none of the apps I have installed will function, even if I supply wifi. This is still complete and total bullshit in my book, but at least I can continue to use the car properly.

And I can probably circumvent using those apps completely anyway, by just using Android Auto on my phone. It still leaves me fuming though. If I buy something it should always be mine to do with exactly as I please, and there should be no strings attached to the manufacturer for any kind of subscription plans.

I’m no far right conservative, but this reminds me of that “Great Reset” stuff they were complaining about. “You will own nothing, and you will be happy”. It’s a slippery slope until we get there, and this is where it begins.