In early 2018, when our beloved 2007 VW GTI started developing electrical gremlins in a stereotypically German-car way, we bought an e-Golf to replace it. Since then, whenever I have to drive a gas car, I resent the gas car’s clunky, jerky clatter and relish my eventual return to the e-Golf’s smoothness and quiet. If I still owned a gas car, I’d resent the gas station fillups and oil changes and fiddly expensive maintenance schedule too. What all the articles say is true: EVs aren’t just better for the environment, they’re an inherently nicer motoring experience.
That said, they have their limitations and quirks, and in four-plus years of EV ownership we’ve gotten a fair bit of experience with those. We’ve also been casually researching new EVs, and occasionally test-driving them, since last year, with an eye to either upgrading ours or (suburban lifestyle privilege!) getting a second car. This post draws on both experience and research. Note that for a variety of reasons we have never wanted a Tesla, so the advice here may not be applicable to the Tesla-verse.
Key points:
If you value straightforward, usable interfaces, you may prefer an EV that is the electrified version of a gas car, rather than an electric-only model.
Unless you live in a very rural, cold, and/or mountainous area, any new EV sold today will have plenty of range for non-roadtrip trips, i.e. >90% of all trips. If you are buying an EV for roadtrips, consider its efficiency and max charging speed as well as its range.
Home chargers take a bit of planning to install properly, and you definitely want one. Consider one that helps you time charging to support grid balancing, and perhaps even one that lets you discharge the car battery to power your house.
But for roadtrip use, do keep your slow 120V charger in the car as well, plus an extension cord. And make sure you put the EVGo, Chargepoint, and Electrify America apps on your phone.
I want a car, not a science project
At the time we bought our car, the major compact/midpriced options were the Tesla Model 3, Chevy Bolt, Nissan Leaf, and the e-Golf. The Tesla was a bit longer than ideal for navigating challenging urban street parking spaces; the Bolt and Leaf weren’t really our style. But the biggest thing the e-Golf had going for it was that it’s just a VW Golf with an electric motor, so it looks, feels, and drives like any other Golf.
It annoys me no end that most car manufacturers, following Tesla’s lead, choose to incorporate all sorts of gadgety “futuristic” design nonsense into their EVs. The door handles aren’t real door handles, the buttons aren’t real buttons, the gauges aren’t real gauges, etc. Everything is a screen and every control is touch-activated in nonintuitive, fake-feeling ways and half the things you want to adjust are hidden behind random menu options. The VW ID.4, which replaced the sadly now-discontinued e-Golf, is egregiously bad in this way, as is the Ford Mustang Mach-E. From what I can tell the recently introduced Hyundai Ioniq 5 and Kia EV6 are similar, which is a shame, because performance- and features-wise they look amazing.
The e-Golf is not like this and I am immensely grateful for it. Every control is nice-looking and solid-feeling and just where it should be, as befits a car that has been refined over seven generations and four decades. If you want a commodious, spacious (for its size) city car and don’t care about roadtrips, I can highly recommend looking for a used one (make sure to buy a 2017 or later model to get reasonable range, though). Failing that, the Kia Niro and Hyundai Kona are similarly available in both EV and gas versions and so probably have good usability too. We also really liked the Volvo XC40 Recharge we test drove: it’s a bit more touchscreen-centric than the e-Golf but the UI is extremely pretty and thoughtful and the Google native integration works beautifully. The Volvo is pricey but super fast and luxurious, and we were tempted but for the space-inefficiency— it is bigger outside than the e-Golf but feels smaller inside— and power inefficiency, as discussed in the next section.
Miles per charging-minute matters
The e-Golf’s rated range is 125 miles, and I can almost always match this and usually exceed it in both city and short-range highway driving— but living in San Francisco helps a lot here. Four things are notorious for eating EV range:
High-speed driving, especially driving more than 70 mph. This reduces all cars’ range to some extent, but because EVs have fewer other sources of energy waste than gas cars, they are proportionately more affected by air resistance which typically increases with the square of the car’s speed.
Large elevation changes, i.e. climbing mountains: same deal, gas cars suffer from this too but EVs proportionately more.
Cold weather, which requires extra energy expenditure for both passenger cabin heating and battery heating.
Stuff you put on the car that increases air resistance further: racks, cargo boxes, trailers, etc.
For Bay Area folks, the classic combination of all of these is a ski trip to Tahoe: a long stretch of 75 mph highway (once you get out of the traffic jam on I-80…) followed by a big climb up into cold mountains, all with skis on top of your car. Apparently effective EV range going up to Tahoe can be as little as half the rated range, which makes it totally infeasible for us. We instead use our urban privilege and rent one of the several Zipcars available within walking distance of our house when we want to go skiing.
For flatter, warmer trips we do try and take the e-Golf when possible, and within California it’s almost always possible due to the broad availability of fast chargers. We’ve gone as far south as Malibu and as far north as Mendocino without trouble. But most roadtrip aficionados probably want a less charger-tethered vehicle, especially for rural areas.
If you’re thinking about a roadtrip EV, evaluating just how roadtrip-friendly it is can be a bit subtle:
For long trips, what matters is not just how far you can go between chargers, i.e. range, but how much longer your trip becomes due to charging time. This is especially true because most fast chargers are still not in particularly pleasant places to stop: the modal charging location is in a back corner of a megamall parking lot.
Charging time burden is inversely proportional to the product of two quantities: how many kWh you can add per minute of charging and how far you can go on each kWh. Fast-charging vehicles save you more time overall, but so do efficient ones. Big batteries give you more range, but can add enough weight to decrease efficiency.
The effective charging rate will usually be the smaller of the max rate the car supports and the max rate the charger supports. Our e-Golf has a max rate of only 40 kW, which makes a typical fast-charge stop take most of an hour. Many newer EVs have a max rate of more than 100 kW, a few even more than 200 kW, but the only non-Tesla chargers that support such high rates right now are the Electrify America ones; EVGo and Chargepoint usually max out at 50-60 kW. Hopefully this will change in the next few years, but it’s not obvious that it will.
Efficiency is generally a function of the same things as for gas cars: heavier and less aerodynamic cars get fewer miles to the kWh, and AWD always adds significant efficiency-impacting weight. Drivetrain hardware and software controls also matter, and Tesla has been particularly good at optimizing these along with their aerodynamics to get better efficiency than anybody else. The EPA ratings for EV efficiency are annoyingly given in “MPGe” which is supposed to make them comparable to gas cars somehow. To get miles per kWh, you divide MPGe by 33.7. I find the official rating for our e-Golf, 119 MPGe ~= 3.53 miles per kWh, to be an underestimate; in typical highway driving I get about 3.7 and in city driving at least 4.0 (note that EVs are more efficient in the city since electric motors don’t have the stop-start penalty that gas engines do, so the air resistance effect dominates).
Efficiency especially matters when topping up from a slower charger, which is a common thing to want to do. We’ve gotten extra miles from three main slow-charger sources:
Municipal parking lot chargers for meal/shopping stops when there isn’t a fast charger close to where we want to stop.
Hotels that have chargers for guests. The fancier the hotel, the more likely these are to be oversubscribed, and we haven’t always been able to depend on these.
Overnight charging with the portable 120V charger, when staying at a rental property that has an outlet sufficiently near the driveway. This has proven surprisingly useful, especially in rural areas, and it’s where carrying an extension cord to add 50 more feet to the 25-foot stock charger cable really comes in handy, so you can run the cable e.g. through the front door and into the hall where the outlet is. Make sure to get a heavy-duty cord that can handle sustained high loads.
Public chargers have several recurrent usability problems: they are broken fairly often, oversubscribed increasingly often too, and getting payment authorization to go through so you can actually start charging is a pain due to buggy, badly designed charger UIs. This is why I advise putting the major charging networks’ apps on your phone: they can tell you in advance, as you navigate, which of their locations have chargers that are working and free right now, and tapping your phone to the charger to let the app negotiate the start of a charging session bypasses most of the UI problems.
Of course for non-roadtrip use, if you own a home with dedicated parking, you’ll mostly be charging overnight from the home charger, as discussed in the next section.
Home charging: a worthwhile load to bear
You can use your 120V portable charger at home, but it’s too slow for day-to-day convenience, especially for larger EVs: even an overnight charge will typically only top up 12-15 kW, enough for 30-60 miles of range depending on the vehicle. Home based Level 2 chargers are several times faster, and lots of manufacturers have usable models starting at around $400.
But a Level 2 charger needs a 240V electric circuit, much like the one for an electric clothes dryer, and the higher the number of amps you can get the circuit, charger, and car to all support, the faster the car will charge. You’ll want to talk to an electrician about doing the installation: typically you want to mount the charger on a wall (in the garage or outside by the driveway) as close as possible to where the car will be parked, and there’ll be some conduit to run and a circuit breaker to add to your electrical panel. As with many other big home electrification purchases, like a heat pump or induction range, you might reach the point where you have to install a new panel to get more total amperage available to your house, creating an additional up front cost. If and when you need to do this, you should ask the electrician how big a panel will be needed to electrify everything in your house, so as to pay that cost just once.
We got a Clipper Creek HCS40 installed in our garage by a well-reviewed local specialist in EV charger installs. They charged us $2200: $600 for the charger and $1600 for the installation including all the electrical line-running and the city permit and inspection. It was a pretty simple one-day job. I’d bet installation charges are much lower elsewhere, San Francisco having both exceptionally costly labor and exceptionally costly bureaucracy. I’d also expect and hope that the cost will come down over time everywhere, as home chargers become more common and competition for the installer market heats up.
Our charger works fine and will probably last for decades, so I don’t regret the choice or the cost. But if I were doing the install over again today, I’d look for a “smart” charger which would let me vary charging speeds with time according to the cost of grid power and the availability of local solar power from the rooftop panels. This is good not just for the cost and emissions savings but for the contribution such chargers can make to balancing the electrical grid (and yes, that is a statement in the long-term interest of my employer). Some EVs have a degree of smart-charging capability built into the car. Our e-Golf, for example, can delay charging when it plugs into a known charger, the idea being that then you use cheap middle-of-the-night power rather than more expensive end-of-the-workday power. But its method for calculating delays is weird, it requires you to pre-specify a time when you intend to leave the house each day, and the configuration UI is extremely bad, so I’d much rather be able to control charging speed from the charger itself.
If I didn’t already have the Powerwall, I’d also look for a charger with V2G/V2H (vehicle-to-grid/vehicle-to-home) support which would let me use the car battery as a backup and power balancer in all the ways I now use the Powerwall. These do appear to exist, but I’m not familiar with what it takes to get one actually installed, and EV support for V2G/V2H is still pretty nascent: the F-150 Lightning famously includes it out of the box, for example, but many other EVs either don’t have the right wiring to support it or plan to add it with a software update.