Kia’s new EV6, driven | Hacker News Reader

Kia’s new EV6, driven

arstechnica.com

35 pointshasseo95 comments

> A day's driving the EV6 GT left me more convinced than ever that the most expensive, most powerful version of an EV is often not really any better than the cheaper version.

> Partly that's down to cars having too much performance for the public road, and it's always more fun to drive a slow car fast than a fast car slowly. And more powerful versions of EVs always suffer in terms of range efficiency.

I will never understand who needs cars this quick. The marketing of EVs seems to be all around 0-60 speeds, but 90% of the people I know are infinitely more concerned with price, charging speed, and range.

The same reason all cars seem to have 160 mph speedometers.

Because EVs are expensive they must appeal to the market who is willing to spend more and that market needs cars to be fun.

Fun as acceleration is not really the interesting part of car fun. That's tight cornering, well-balanced front and back, feeling of total control and precision of big chunk of metal and similar. I do mean on regular roads and not just tracks, there its even more crucial.

But this requires from manufacturer much more than just slapping a heavy battery and putting the power of it straight to the wheels... whole platform needs to be fine-tuned in many aspects to achieve this. In normal price category BMW delivers this better than most peers in their classical models like 3 series. I had one for 10 years, only 200 HP V6 diesel but it was an excellent car for the driver, I properly enjoyed every drive that wasn't about cities and traffic jams. I certainly never felt I needed more power. Also very well balanced mechanical connection of steering wheel to straight to front wheels gave the connection to the car that no modern electronic cars including Porsche can deliver (and EVs are not even trying in any of this regard).

There are problems with this though, most buyers willing to pay premium are in traffic jams and cities, so you are not getting most of the value brands like BMW deliver. Then you are only left with acceleration part (well not that much in those traffic jams). Also it requires driving skills that take years to build with just driving the car (certainly for me, I wasn't using full potential of the car for maybe first 5 years of ownership), unlike just slamming gas pedal and holding steering wheel for your life.

> That's tight cornering, well-balanced front and back, feeling of total control and precision of big chunk of metal and similar.

That is nor really the interesting part of car fun, neither is acceleration.

Going to barely accessible trailhead high in the mountains, fording streams, going on a narrow mountain road, that what makes car driving interesting. I always look in a car 1) what is the biggest tire I can fit, should be at least 33 inches 2) ground clearance 3) suspension travel.

Thats not the interesting part of car fun. The part that is fun to me is to drive a couple hundred miles with the car doing the lane centering and passing for me, so I arrive fresh.

On a highway I don't care for lane centering and passing, I want car to drive itself while I am taking a nap.

That would be a fine next step. Can’t buy today though.

Can but it's a coin flip whether you reach your destination or end up in a ditch.

In that case, I can't understand why so many EVs are ugly-ass crossovers.

Who the hell has said to themselves well, the Ford Mustang is great, but it would be much more fun if instead of being a 2-door convertible, it was a practical family car and had 4 doors so you can help little Khaleesi into her car seat?

Who are these car designers saying the Lotus Elise is an iconic 2-seater roadster with a very low driving position, but you know what would be even more fun? A 4-door crossover with a much higher driving position, so our elderly and overweight customers can get in and out without straining their knees?

Lotus make a 2-seat roadster EV https://www.lotuscars.com/en-GB/evija. So they're trying to cover different segments.

I’m in the market for a car and the short answer is my partner wants room

>A 4-door crossover with a much higher driving position

Wonder how weight distribution (batteries placed within frame at bottom) of EVs impacts driving.

EVs generally have very stable cornering as they don’t roll much due to the low weight and they have a 50/50 weight distribution. Having said that, they are heavy and so are not nimble in switching directions.

Cars are unpopular, crossovers are popular. That's what the people want.

Then 90% of the people you know want a non-GT Kia EV6. There are different trim levels for the EV6 and you can pick the one you like the best:

https://www.caranddriver.com/kia/ev6

Complaining that you don't like the performance version is a bit odd. You don't have to buy it.

It’s their one trick, the operation of electric motors mean that you get Max torque immediately so they can put power down at the low end very effectively. So yes, we all know we want price, charge speed and range, but marketing is about selling what you have, not redesigning the product. It’s like the clip from mad men when they decide to advertise cigarettes as “Toasted”. You’d like to say they don’t cause cancer… but you can’t, so you say something else instead.

> It’s their one trick

Two other tricks of the EV6 are:

- 18 minute 10-80% charge time in ideal conditions (which is very good)

- Vehicle to load capability. You can run appliances off the battery. If you're desperate you can charge another EV (but it will be slow).

Those are neat! Are there any EVs you can tow behind another vehicle and have that charge it's battery?

Yes, all EVs with regenerative braking. You can also charge it by rolling it down a hill.

Tow charge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaGVoB4Zn-Y

Another tow charge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gxi4sn3KXg

Gravity charge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5k5wAaDZw1o

- 18 minute 10-80% charge time in ideal conditions (which is very good)

Having to wait almost 20 minutes on a 60 minutes commute is far from ideal.

That time is very good when one recharges at home or during a long trip or at destination (office / mall / etc) while doing other things. But in the last case it takes away a charging spot until the owner comes back. How is that managed now?

> Having to wait almost 20 minutes on a 60 minutes commute is far from ideal.

Yes, you'll need have enough battery to get there or charge before you leave.

> That time is very good when one recharges at home

You won't get that charge time at home unless you decide to put in a 350 kW charger at your house, which will be expensive.

An 18 minute charge time on a fast charger can support about three cars per hour. There still need to be better batteries that can sustain higher C-rates to make fuller use of the existing 350 kW chargers and future 400 kW chargers and beyond.

For a future, high C-rate battery with 100 kWh usable capacity, 10 to 80% would be 70 kWh. If it could charge 10-80% at a flat 350 kW then that would take 12 minutes. At 400 kW it would take 10.5 minutes.

Battery swaps can currently be done in 6 minutes. Swapping in a 100 kWh battery charged to 90% in 6 minutes is equivalent to a flat 0-90% charge curve at 900 kW:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmWL1hZQmD0

> Having to wait almost 20 minutes on a 60 minutes commute is far from ideal.

You will either need to only charge once a few days, or if you are lucky, charge overnight at your home or during work. No car will need to be charged every 60 minutes.

For commuting, you charge at home with a much slower charger than this. You start each morning at a high charge %, and never stop at any charger at all.

The fast charger is for road trips - at the moment, the number and reliability of high-speed charge points is probably a bigger constraint than the relative speed of this model versus others.

a 60 minute commute (aka at most 70 miles or so, likely much less door-to-door) does not use 70% of the battery. Not even half that.

It will, day after day.

In a city where people park on the streets because there are no or not enough personal parking slots (very common in Europe, don't know in the USA,) it's either a (metered?) charger for every public parking slot or a boring 20 minutes stop every few days.

Have 41Mm on my Ioniq5 that has the same “superpowers”. Have used 350kW charger only once in that time. It was fast, but in my use case (30Mm/yr) hardly is needed. You always leave home with full tank. Usually 10m top-up while visiting a loo at the 50..150kW charger will do the trick for longer journeys. Maybe it is my “old” age, my bladder can not stand longer than 6h driving without stops.

As for the V2L — thus I have used lot more. Have had power failures at home where I switched all the critical systems to the car, have “taken electricity” to my father in law, have use it to power tools outside (mitre saw, for example) and boiled tea with a 2.7kW kettle.

Bigger for me, is the charging network layout... I have done a lot of road trips in the past decade or so, and have often stopped where there are there are at least 5-6 or more cars waiting for the ~6 or so charging spots... even if it's 20m of extra wait, that's close to a half hour to get a spot then another half hour, give or take. Not sure I'd like that.

I know a lot of people that love their EVs for daily commute. And before I started working from home full time, had been considering it. At this point, for the tank every couple weeks that I use, I'd just assume stick to petrol and keep my car longer.

A car's 0-60mph time has been used to advertise how quickly a car accelerates long before Tesla was even founded.

With that much torque things will break faster...

Think like: It is not the speed that kills, it is the sudden stop.

Like the VW automatic transmissions. Here in Europe, no one will trim VW with diesel and automatic transmission because the torque will kill the transmission.

> no one will trim VW with diesel and automatic transmission

Passat 2.0 TDI SCR 7-speed is a diesel automatic transmission that is offered as standard. What are you talking about?

> no one will trim VW with diesel and automatic transmission

Majority of diesel cars in Germany, AFAIK, are sold with automatic transmission.

EVs don’t normally have a transmission to break. just reduction gears which are beefy.

They know how much torque they're dealing with so they'll just spec heavier components to deal with it.

> no one will trim VW with diesel and automatic transmission because the torque will kill the transmission

That's just because it's a crap transmission or it's tuned to be crap.

Nobody needs that much acceleration, but it helps drive home the fact that EVs have real advantages over combustion cars beyond not destroying the environment. And while you’re not going to stomp the pedal to the floor at every green light, instant torque is very nice.

I like EVs but isn't mining for Lithium still destroying the environment ?

Mining for lithium is destroying the environment much less than mining for oil is. But yes, going without a car completely is better than driving an electric car.

Isn't Lithium obtained from salt-water evaporation pools?

Yes. The anti-lithium thing is a Big Oil campaign that people are falling for. They frequently use pictures of _coal mining_ as Lithium.

Lithium is mostly made the same way as salt - just like you said. There are a few pit mines, but we also do that for .... everything else. Including oil!

Caring about pit mining and watersheds is so 1972. Get with the times granpa. We care about carbon now. /s

All mining is bad for the environment to an extent. The total environmental impact of EVs appears to be substantially less than ICE vehicles, all things included.

Thanks

It's less than great and largely a mixed bag. I'm honestly surprised that desalinization and hydrogen research never made the jump as it seems more sustainable. Also, somewhat concerned that the electricity generated for most EVs is mostly coming from fossil fuels as well (natural gas in the US which burns cleaner, but lower efficiency to electricity).

I think it will take a combination of things. I think the geopolitical controls over Lithium supply are probably more concerning, as is the availability of resources in and of themselves, which won't meet demand and will drive up costs.

I'm also concerned about the sheer number of products being shipped in small batches everywhere all day, at least in the US... I see an Amazon/UPS/USPS driver on my small street alone many times a day. It just feels very inefficient and wonder if this is just worse than taking a couple steps back away from convenience.

You can't really successfully market based on your weaknesses, now can you? Price, charging speed and range are all inferior to ICE vehicles and will be for some years still. And you also can't ignore the democratization of supercar acceleration that electric brings. It's the strong point of electric, why would they not show case it?

Germans.

Since you are limited by top speed on public roads, the important variable becomes average speed. You improve that with good acceleration and fantastic brakes.

See also: People buy power but use torque (acceleration).

I don't really know but guess more powerful electric motors don't cost that much more than less powerful. With ICE cars going from reasonable 200hp to say 600hp requires lots of stuff - large displacement at high RPM or turbos, better cooling and gearbox. It seems that with electric cars this kind of power is essentially free.

Have you ever merged onto an expressway behind someone doing 20mpg? It's terrifying.

Acceleration makes merging onto expressways safer.

In the current situation where EV prices are at least 10K USD higher than non-EV equivalents you pay up-front more than you save (gas vs. electricity) in the next 5 years... It is currently economically better to buy non-EVs...

But cars last a lot longer than 5 years. And most people buying a used car are going to care about running costs a lot more than people buying new cars, so I expect the used EV premium to be substantial.

Any TCO analysis for keeping a new car for 5 years is going to be dominated by the trade in value. That's going to be a lot higher for EV's than gasoline cars, so I assert that you're better off financially buying an EV even at a $10k premium.

Aren't the drive battery packs the single most expensive part of an EV? Anyone buying a used one with any kind of substantial mileage can expect a harsh loss of range.

Sure, if you buy a Nissan Leaf.

To expand on this a bit, Nissan Leafs (Leaves?) are the only electric cars produced in significant quantity that rely on passive cooling for their batteries. Heat is the main enemy of battery health. So you can easily find an old Leaf who's max range is literally half of what it was when brand new. It depends a lot on how hard it was used.

Other EVs on the road are much better at managing battery health, such that it will never make sense to replace their main battery outside catastrophic events. If your electric car is going to die, it will almost certainly be from a bad collision, like any car.

Anyhow, the Nissan Leaf compares poorly on a lot of fronts to any modern EV available in the U.S. Most people in the market for an affordable EV should probably look at the Chevy Bolt first (now that they fixed the battery flaw that caused them to burn down). But if you're really looking for a cheap used EV and in the market for a Leaf, get yourself a Bluetooth ODB2 dongle and an app called LeafSpy to check on the battery health before you buy it.

The primary reason that EV's have a fast 0-60 is that it's related to a spec that you and most people care about: charging speed. Supporting a high charging speed is expensive. But once you've got a high charging speed you've got most of what you need for a high discharging speed. And then you have most of what you need for a fast 0-60.

If it costs a few hundred extra to support a fast 0-60 and you can charge $10k-$20k extra for the feature....

I think the root cause is just the market asking for oversized battery packs. That enables both the large instant current capability and high charging speed, without requiring too much additional cooling (it's all spread out). You still need to add the oversized current driving capabilities in the electronics that you wouldn't strictly need for fast charging, which is DC and bypasses most internal electronics anyway.

Oversized? There are very few EVs that can get 200 miles real range in the winter. Really need another 50% on top of that.

I think this comes down to market economics more than product design. Many manufacturers have been production limited by cell supply for a long time. You _could_ make cars with extra large battery packs for those who live in exceptionally cold climates, but it's a limited market, and you'd be taking away cells from shorter range models. E.g. you're likely to make more money selling 5 cars with a 60kwh pack than 3 cars with a 100kwh pack.

Few probably need this - but it could be at home on the autobahn - were you'd want to be able both drive at high speed, and change lanes/overtake other cars at high speed.

I read this a lot. Until you're in the USA and you're on an on-ramp that immediately merges. Then having < 5 seconds to 60 is nice for everybody's safety and comfort.

...just don't merge? Something tells me with such a window to merge in you are probably looking into to mirrors and not accurately estimating the distance of the car from you either. Also don't rely on this because the road condition is not going to guarantee you get up to the needed speed in time(cold tires or undesirable road surface conditions). You don't need a sub 5 second car to safely merge.

Eh, sometimes thats not an option if the an onramp doesn't create a new lane. I've lived and driven in California, Western Europe and New Zealand. Many (not all) California onramps come from tight cloverleafs or they are metered with stop lights, so you have to accelerate quickly to avoid going into the stopping lane (which will be covered in gravel, if it even exists). I never had this problem elsewhere.

I invite you to stop here: https://www.google.com/maps/@34.9773012,-110.5310232,3a,75y,... when there is traffic coming in behind you.

Please don't say: "oh it's a quiet road", I took the first example I could find of this kind of onramp.

Looks like you have plenty road to get up to speed there or slow down if you need to before merging but don't have a lot of area to merge.

I drive in NYC. Some of our merge lanes are pretty short also...if you can't merge you stop and wait...yes you're supposed to yield and not stop but guess what, if you simply can't merge what are you going to do run into a vehicle?

This model seems more sport oriented so the people targeted at are probably more concerned with speed, handling, etc than charging, range, etc. Price is universal concern though.

Same price as a model Y performance, 60% of the range, and they don't mention the full charging speed (although it appears to be similar, the model Y with the new batteries appears to be 15m 10-80%).

Also, same 0-100 speed.

The years tick on, people keep arguing that the traditional manufacturers are launching the Tesla killer "any day now", and they still can't beat the golden triange.

Faster to steal too?

Nah, EV (and new ICE) kias and Hyundais can’t be stolen as easily as the 2014(?) to 2021 models (where the non keyless entry models lack immobilizers and alarms on that little window) Better have a garage though, since if it has a Kia badge, it will have its windows smashed anyway.

So the performance version is way faster but less fun. For even more fun, I’d drive almost any car with a manual transmission over one of these appliances.

Transmission? whers the fun in that? Try riding a horse like real men.

A horse? Where's the fun in that? Try long distance running, from before horses were domesticated

Running? Swinging on vines. Hoot!

Try doing a big bang and starting the universe!

Again?

Ha ha you youngsters and your time dimension and causality

Fun analogy: horses have about four distinct "gears" (gaits), and there's a certain amount of skill in achieving smooth transitions between them.

Skill for the rider or the horse?

Skill for the rider. For me 3th gear was the most difficult.

That one time I killed the clutch was rough.

Absolutely agree - I still drive my old mini one because its just way more fun than any car ive touched since then, other than pre-1995 porsches, i enjoyed some of those.

I wouldnt give the direct feedback of those controlsy and the manual control, for anything.

1970s BMWs - 2002 style -- are great fun as well. 1970s was the golden age of German Auto Engineering.

Yup, before the accountants took control.

I agree! After all, my 2002 mini is technically a BMW ;)

I have an old mini, 135i manual and ride a motorbike, you could say I’m an enthusiast. but I’d take an EV today if it weighed less than 1.5 tonnes, affordable, had awd and wasn’t essentially an SUV with no clearance.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with electric to my mind, but attaching a heavy and huge battery pack is like building a car with a permanently attached boat trailer. Takes the fun out of things a bit. Touch screens can also go.

Hopefully this changes in the next generation or two, I really would like to get away from gas.

Yes hopefully! as soon as we collectively get over range anxiety and they sell cars with 50 mile range because that's all you really need when you plug it in at night, most of the time. And bring back the Smart FourTwo sub-sub-compact form factor. All of which will serve to bring the price down immensely.

Calling it "range anxiety" suggests some unwarranted psychological condition that can be fixed with education and thus will go away, as opposed to people's natural desire to not be on a short leash.

They don't want to skip work because they wake up in the morning and when they walk into their garage they see that they forgot to plug their car in last night on the way home from the show. And damn, they need to drop their daughter off for her music lesson (and of course pick her up) - they were planning on getting some shopping done during that time, and it's right after work.

In other words, people are juggling all sorts of stuff in their heads as they run around doing errands already, and want things to be as stateless as possible. Now gas in the tank isn't stateless, but it takes 5 minutes to fill up, so it's effectively stateless, in that you can squeeze 5 minutes any time you want and there are gas stations everywhere. It doesn't require planning. It's not something you have to think about before you agree to give someone a ride -- you can always just get gas on the way. So you don't need to keep in the back of your head what your car battery situation is when someone asks you to go pick up something or take them somewhere. That's the issue, and short of changing family relationships, it's not going to go away anytime soon.

That said, there's certainly a market for fun cars with shorter range -- they used to be called "Weekend cars" -- cars you drive just for fun, but not your daily driver. That would be appropriate for shorter range cars.

Anxiety about range is a real thing. People new to EVs imagine they're going to be stranded, don't know if they can trust remaining range/state of charge indicators (e.g. compare it to their experiences with cell phone batteries), worry they won't be able to find a working charger, are afraid that charging will take hours.

With experience (education), these worries go away. You learn how much real-world range your car can actually do, you learn which chargers around you are reliable, you learn what tools you have available for planning routes, you learn how to deal with running low, you learn about charging curves.

You are repeating some of the myths that cause this anxiety. For example, most modern EVs have enough battery to last a whole week of city driving. You can forget to plug in, even a couple of nights in a row. DC chargers can add 50 miles of range in 5 minutes, so it's not a big deal even if you're dropping someone off.

It is some unwarranted psychological condition that can be fixed with education though, because of the unrealistic high standards for EVs that people still hold. If you won't buy an EV because you're scared you'll run out of juice picking your daughter up from her recital, when it's only 10 miles to her practice, and your EV has 250 miles of range on a full charge, that's what makes for "an unwarranted psychological condition". 250 miles (for a Chevy Bolt), or 402 miles (for a Tesla Model S LR) for a full charge isn't at all a short leash, and with quick chargers, it's a 20 minute stop to get a hundred miles of charge. If you're at the point where you're sitting at home, just thinking up scenarios where some hypothetical EV is going to fail you, that's range anxiety. If you're having to keep your battery status in your head, that's range anxiety. If you're avoiding errands and family functions because of you're worried about your battery, that's range anxiety. If you're 100 miles from home and you've got 50 miles of charge left, that's a realistic worry - go to your nearest charger. Range anxiety is a real thing and the faster we can educate people that dropping off a friend on the way home isn't this impossible 200-unplanned-mile detour where there are no chargers scenario (if it is, then your friends need to get their own cars), the better EV adoption is going to go.

Alas, as utilitarian mass-individual transportation, I suppose there's no doubt EVs make sense. I don't drive much, but when I do, I enjoy having a fully-engaged experience. Soon enough, people won't even be aware driving once required four limbs operating on four different tasks simultaneously, or how that could be pleasurable. Sad for them. More old cars for me.

Is it really fun to lose the race to someone driving an "appliance"?

Totally fine. I’m sure they enjoy pressing the ‘go’ button.

Have you actually driven an EV though? The first time I drove one I was pretty surprised how fun it is.

Anything that doesn’t have two exhaust pipes doesn’t even come close to your median EV appliance as far as pure driving fun is considered.

There's nothing fun in needing to move some stick in a mechanical contraption, especially when driving through a city

Source?

Abut 87% of the US car buyers, evidently.

In 2018 stick was 2% of cars sold and 4% of cars driven (source: CarMax). Hard to imagine they are mostly prioritizing “fun”.

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