Vorner's random stuff

Choosing an electric vehicle

I’ve ordered a BEV (Battery Electric Vehicle), Hyundai Kona with 39kWh battery (that’s the smaller one). EVs are still not considered „proper“ cars by many, at least here in Czech republic (actually, there’s even a lot of anti-EV propaganda in the media, probably because a large part of the media is owned by people who also own petrol stations and similar). A lot of not entirely accurate (or outright lies) information about EVs circulates here.

In the expectation I’ll have to explain my sanity in relation to that decision, I’ve written down few notes here. Why buying a car in the first place, why it should be an EV and why specifically this one.

Preliminaries

I’m going to talk about prices in CZK. For reference, these days one USD is about 20 CZK. Nevertheless, the wages here are also lower than in US (using direct currency conversion) or let’s say Germany. Therefore, what seems like cheap for some folks out there doesn’t necessarily have to be considered cheap here. Furthermore, there are no tax deductions for buying an ecological car and incentives here are mostly just symbolic ‒ like not having to buy a highway permit (which costs 1500 CZK per year), or cheaper city parking.

Additionally, cars here in Czech republic are not exchanged as often as in maybe US. The average age of a registered car is 15 years (which means that for every new car, there’s one that’s 30 years old). That’s in part due to the above wage difference. In part, a car here becomes member of the family with similar status and emotional attachment as a pet and one doesn’t want to let it go or let it die. And there’s a long tradition of fixing stuff instead of throwing it away.

Also, I fully admit that choosing any kind of product ‒ including a car ‒ is in large part done by emotions, feelings and impressions. Liking the car is as important as making sure it makes sense in the given context. I won’t go into much details for the „feels right“, as it’s very personal. Let’s stick to the easy to describe „check boxes“.

Why buying a car

The first thing is, do I (or we, as a family) need a new car? We already have one, an 11 year old Peugeot 308 SW. It’s not outright bad, but it’s starting to show its age, visits the service somewhat more often lately.

And we are planning to move from Prague to a small village near Mladá Boleslav. There’s not much public transport, each of us may need to visit Prague (60-70km away) something like once a week and even shopping will have to happen by a car in Mladá Boleslav.

Having just one, somewhat aging and unreliable car for all that, with a baby that might need an unscheduled visit to a doctor and the car being away with the other parent, seemed like suboptimal solution. In addition to that, I’d like to start a software consulting business in a bit larger scale that now and visiting clients (in Prague and elsewhere) might introduce yet more traveling.

Therefore, it was time to start looking ‒ especially because the lead times of ordering a car are really long these days.

Why an EV

This wasn’t an upfront decision. For me, EVs were somewhat interesting thing of the future. They felt slightly less awkward than ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) cars and I wanted to have one eventually. This might be in part in somewhat more ecological feel of them (I’ll leave discussing if that really is the case for the Internet, not here). But large part is the comfort of charging it at home without having to visit some petrol station, possibly better driving experience (folks on the Internet seem to agree on that one), but mostly, it’s a nice technological toy that feels more elegant than the heaps and heaps of workarounds stacked onto each other of the ICE.

But I didn’t know I wanted one right now. After all, if it was just a toy, it would be really an expensive one.

We started looking and trying cars out. As it quickly turned out, the mass consumer segment cars have gotten significantly downgraded over the years in terms of available engines. The usual option is something like 1-litre 3 cylinder turbo petrol mild hybrid something. Even though it has higher kilowatt rating than what we have now, it just doesn’t feel capable of real-world driving.

Now, I don’t need a racing car with 0-100 km/h in 3 seconds. But sometimes, when joining a highway, I might need to squeeze into a traffic and have only the joining lane to accelerate to the speed of that traffic. Or need to overtake a truck. Or something. If I flatten the gas pedal at 3rd gear at 50km/h, want to accelerate to 80 and nothing happens for 5 seconds (besides the car suggesting shifting to 5th gear to save fuel!), that’s just outright not a safe car to drive in traffic (not even speaking about comfort).

The fact the 11 year old car drives better when it’s malfunctioning and using just 3 cylinders of its 4 (that was one of the reasons for the service visits) than a brand-new fully functional cars is quite telling. And the current car even has lower consumption (real world one, not talking about what the manufacturer says) than what we’ve tested (and we tried several cars) is another point to the whole picture.

Of course, we could try out some of the „sport“ versions of the cars. But that increases both the consumption and the price. Playing a bit with the available configurations, selecting the sport variant, giving it a decent engine and few of the packages (nothing crazy ‒ heated seats, parking camera, basic set of assistants), the price just kept on growing. And it grew to a place where it was more than comparable to a price of a cheaper (new) EV. As it turns out, EVs in their „basic“ configuration often have similar equipment level as almost full configuration of an ICE (for some unclear marketing reasons of the manufacturers).

So we tried one too (if for no other reason, we were curious how it drives, when people keep praising it). And sure enough, it is much more convenient to drive (no gear shifting ‒ not even automatic one, very smooth and immediately available power and very agile).

Why Kona

Apart from the „feels right“ feeling, there are some very rational reasons why we chose that one.

First, its lead time is reasonable ‒ only 4 months. Some other cars (EVs and ICEs) have over a year right now.

Then there’s price. If we skip anything that doesn’t fit at least 4 people (so a family could travel in it) or is afraid of highways (max speed of 90km/h or so), there are some 3 models in about the same price category. That’s Hyundai Kona, Nissan Leaf and Renault Zoe (all considered in their lower configurations). All of them are in around 800 000 CZK (most importantly, below somewhat psychological 1 million). There are some others, but they seem to be mostly very close technological siblings.

Nissan fails badly on the charging front (it only offers 1-phase charger, which doesn’t go well with our future plans of having photovoltaic on the house and offers the ChaDeMo fast charging connector, which is dying out in Europe ‒ it’s fine now, but might not be in 10 years).

I’ve found some bad reports about Zoe’s crash safety, compared to the other two (though it seems all three are better than most of the stuff on the roads around).

Kona has the further advantage of having an active thermal management of the battery. That means it will likely degrade slower and is capable of multiple fast charging sessions in a row interleaved by highway driving. Without the active management, the first charging is fast, but heats the battery and it takes a long time to cool down. In other words, the fast charging capability of Leaf and Zoe effectively only mostly doubles its range, but Kona extends it for as long as the driver is willing to hop the chargers.

Furthermore, Kona is being manufactured in Czech republic, has a good selection of non-premium colors and the Hyundai dealer seemed the most knowledgeable/enthusiastic about EVs.

All in all, while the Kona doesn’t excel in many things (it has really good consumption and that’s about it), it is at least outstanding and OK in quite every parameter. And it has this feeling that it’s simply a car, nothing more, nothing less (while owning a Tesla feels like some kind of declaration of something and Ionic 5 is this alien-looking tea serving room on wheels).

Why not a used Tesla

I’ve discussed the options with several friends and a quite common recommendation was to buy a used Tesla. There were enough reasons for us not to.

First, we wanted a new car, not used one. That’s possibly not fully rational, but, well… And a new Tesla (Model 3 Standard Range) starts at some 1.3 million. For that price, the selection is much wider. While there probably isn’t a single car to beat Model 3 in all parameters, many beat it at least some. If you’re looking for an EV (or any car) and have such budget for it, it’s worth looking at the alternatives ‒ Hyundai Ionic 5, Hyundai Kona in the higher configuration, Kia EV 6, ID.3, ID.4, Škona Enyaq… and I’ve probably forgot some (but I was looking at these, even though I didn’t want to spend as much ‒ maybe as the next car in few years).

Nevertheless, even ignoring these reasons, as there’s a lot about Kona that feels right to me, there’s a lot about Tesla that feels very wrong. It’s not like anything of the below would in isolation be a problem, but it draws a general bigger picture. And yes, it is personal. It feels somewhat similar to the Apple products ‒ some people are almost zealots about it and for some it doesn’t even enter the list of products to consider.

Could we afford it?

After that experience of trying it out, we started to discuss if we can afford it. And I don’t mean only price (that’s easy enough to check), but according to other parameters. We did rule out the pricier options ‒ we probably could afford it, but didn’t feel like spending that much on a car. At least, not right now.

So, pros and cons of the Kona. Pros are already listed above.

On one side we really liked that car we tried out (it was the bigger-battery Kona, we eventually ordered the smaller-battery one; I know the difference is not just in the range, but also in the available power, but the car felt somewhat too powerful anyway).

On the other, there’s the list of potential issues related to EVs. Some of them are solved and not relevant any more (while they might have been with older models), some are addressed on non-technical level (if statistics about battery long-term degradation isn’t enough, there are really good warranties about them ‒ the manufacturer bets their own money on the battery living long) and some were outright lies from the very beginning.

There were two left. Cargo space and range. Note that both of these are to some extent solved by some of the more pricey models listed above (EV6 is good on both, Ionic 5 or Enyaq is outstanding on both, Kona with the large battery is great with the range, as is Model 3 for those that consider it).

Cargo space

Kona is a small car (but I already consider it a proper car as size goes, not like a Smart For Two or similar kind of shopping bag on wheels ‒ I mean, these are fine for some use cases, but you don’t put the whole family in them even if you try hard enough). Most of the time it is an advantage. I’m not particularly good at parking or squeezing through spaces.

Nevertheless, if you open the trunk and look inside it, you start to wonder if you can squeeze in a briefcase. Now, that’s in part optics and its a bit better than it looks like, but it’s not great.

We did try squeezing a baby pram in there (and succeeded, though with little bit of a tetris game).

However, there are few more options.

The trunk has a double bottom (well, technically a triple one). You can put stuff under the floor of it, or just take the floor out and enjoy few more litres of space. And you can take another filling foam organizer for stuff out of the depression that would have held a reserve wheel if the car had one and enjoy even more (though weirdly shaped) space. This gets Kona from „Is there a trunk at all?“ category to something about average.

Hyundai decided not to take advantage of the empty space in the front where an ICE is for the other flavors of Kona (Kona exists in both ICE and EV versions, but unlike some other cars that were ICE cars retro-fitted with batteries, they at least designed it from the start to hold both; it’s still not as good as a platform designed specifically for an EV). But the space is there and people on the Internet share guides how to built a DIY „frunk“ (cargo space for the empty area there). I’m not sure if I’ll go into that, but it could hold all the wheel repair kits and reserve lights that one has an obligation to carry around and nearly never uses.

And then there’s the option of putting a roof box on top of the car. Hyundai probably suspects the car doesn’t have much cargo space and offers one in a good discount to Kona, so we accepted this offer. When we need extra space (which is seldom), we can put it on and have a nice, small car the rest of the time.

Range

Range is usually the first question of curious people (as in, „Will it be able to get from that village to Prague?“). The reality is, the range is much better than most people tend to believe. There were times when the EVs didn’t have much range ‒ the first generation of Nissan Leaf had claimed range of some 120 km. That’s not much, but it was still usable in some use cases.

This smaller-battery Kona claims a range of 305 km. I’ve also checked a lot of real-world tests, reviews, „races“ across Europe to see this number is not made up marketing but somewhat realistic. That range obviously depends on many things (and EVs in general are more „sensitive“ to things like bad weather or driving style). But even when counting in a 20% battery degradation (that’s what the warranty guarantees after 8 years, statistics suggest even smaller one), bad weather, not charging to 100% and some safety margin, it should still be able to get to Prague and back quite comfortably.

Getting to Prague and back (and to Mladá Boleslav, but that’s closer) will be what the car will be doing most of the time. From that point of view, the range is OK.

But maybe we would like to drive somewhere further away, from time to time. So I’ve done some more research.

I’ve went through the places we’ve been to by car previously (the ones I remembered), assumed I’d charge to 100% before a longer trip and tried to calculate/guess if it would be possible to go there and back on a charge, single way or there would be a need to charge on the way.

It turns out, the journeys that would not make it there and back usually included at least an overnight stay, so some kind of slow charging would work. The need to stop for a charge would have happened about 30 times during the 6 years we own the current car (if it were that Kona) and we made a stop most of the times, for a rest, refreshment and similar. About half of the places we stopped have an usable charger now, during the other half we would have to stop at a different place. Maybe the stop would have to be slightly longer due to the charging, but not significantly (Kona doesn’t offer that modern „when you return from the bathroom, you find a charged car when you get back“ charging speed, only „buy a tea and enjoy drinking it in comfort“ speed). In very few instances, it would have forced more stops than we’ve actually made.

Yes, doing this just on very unreliable memory is not very scientific. And yes, it would involve a minor inconvenience from time to time (possibly twice a year), but compared to more comfortable charging at home and better driving experience, it feels like favorable exchange. None of the journeys we’ve done would be impossible, some of them would have to be slightly better planned or would add an additional hour to a 8-hour drive.

After this research, it seems an EV is a good option given our driving patterns. It doesn’t have to be for everyone, but note that this is the smaller-battery version and with charging speed that’s no longer considered top of the line.

And yes, we are still keeping the old car. As a backup, in case the above calculations were terribly wrong somehow (Better Route Planner seems to insist on giving me way more charging stops ‒ but it seems to be a common pattern for everyone doing a review of the Kona, that the computed consumption is almost double compared to real-world driving and therefore the number of stops is almost double of what’s needed in practice) and in case we need to haul some big cargo. Or, if we need to haul some dirty cargo, like construction material. After all, we are going to move into a newly built house, with the garden not yet finished.

In conclusion

The car haven’t arrived yet, but we are eagerly waiting for it, hoping it’ll work out great. Given our plans, driving patterns and budget, it seems good a reasonable compromise (considering all the cars on the market, not just EVs).

Is that a car for everyone? No, of course not. There are limitations to it and the effect to which they annoy one very much depends on the situation. Some of them are solved by other EVs (though they might be pricier), in some cases EV doesn’t make sense (at least not now).

Would I be buying this car had I have more money? Probably not, the price does play a role. But the bigger-battery Kona would be pretty high on the list to consider. I simply like the car and reviewers agree that it’s good car for even long-distance travel, as it compensates its slower charging speeds (comparing to today’s best) by very low consumption (for some unknown marketing reason, the manufacturers/dealers almost always lend the highest-configuration version of each car to the reviewers, I don’t know what they’d have to say about the smaller-battery variant).

I won’t try persuading you to buy an EV. But if you’re looking for a car, I’ll be as bold as to suggest you at least consider and have a look at what’s on the market.