A big step up from my old Ford fiesta, just look for the deals
https://movingtotheuk.co.uk/cost-of-living-in-the-uk/average...
If they are driving then they are currently potentially spending a couple of hundred pounds a month on fuel for a subcompact car. We are breaching the monthly cost of a car loan to move to electric purely in the cost of petrol.
> My Hyundai Kona EV (64kWh) (2022 plate) was £18K
Completely fkn tone deaf.
Many people don’t have the elasticity in their month-to-month expenses that is assumed here.
You can get a used Hyundai Kona EV from Hyundai for under £15k.
https://used.hyundai.co.uk/en/used-car-search/hyundai/kona/k...
Even going off your £18k price, a car loan search shows it would be under £200 per month. Not sure where they pulled £600 from.
But filling up my wife's compact Peugeot 208 (I think?) was £75 over the weekend. Filling up twice is almost the same monthly cost as buying a larger electric SUV.
It definitely seems like it would be worth investigating your options.
I used to have a diesel Renault Clio, thankfully I don’t have it anymore at the current £2 per litre for diesel.
On the commute into Edinburgh today, there’s plenty of newer cars than mine and quite a few EVs, so some people are buying them.
Also, EVs have been around for quite a few years now so it is no longer necessary to buy them new.
https://www.acea.auto/publication/report-vehicles-on-europea...
What do you do when, say, the insulation on the motor’s windings disintegrates over night on a whole production run of thousands of cars.
Or the batteries turn out to a fail at some yet to be revealed number of charge cycles.
ICE engines eat themselves in many more different kinds of weird ways: timing chains and belts, coolant leaks, any number of problems with valves and actuators. They're extraordinarily complex devices and it's a testament to engineering genius (and persistence) that we've made them this reliable. But they fail much more often than batteries or motors. They have many more moving parts. It's just the devil we know.
I've got two EVs. Basically zero problems. I've known one or two people who have had issues, but never with the drive train. Always something dumb like the "infotainment system" or (for a Tesla owning friend) stupid buzzing and vibration they couldn't make go away and stupid problems with door handles.
The Tesla weirdness is part of why I went with Nissans. They're 100% normal cars except for the electric drive train. All the other parts can be purchased at AutoZone and everything else can be worked on by a normal mechanic.
There's some mechanics in my area that have been learning how to do stuff with EVs like aftermarket battery upgrades on older models, but it's a bit expensive. Mine are 5 and 13 years old respectively and both batteries are fine. The 5yo one is the same as the day it was bought. The latter's lost some capacity but still very usable as a city car.
Also just about the only shade tree mechanic EV. Even swapping a battery is doable by the typical car guy. Rebuilding one isn't much harder due to no cooling.
You don’t know that. None of the most recent EV sales are even ten years old yet.
We don’t know what the common failure modes are.
file:///home/blarsen/Downloads/How-durable-are-electric-vehicles-BVRLA-report-by-New-Automotive-September-2026.pdf
Your download folder path is leaking : D
The main batteries most often have a 8y/160,000km guarantee. (Some even more.) There a enough affordable, used BEVs that are only a quarter through that milages and age.
In the US the people who can afford new cars generally want massive SUV's. Meanwhile a lot of the people buying used cars often would prefer a bare bones small vehicle with fewer years and lower miles than something fancier or larger but with more miles. But of course those aren't available since nobody buys those things new. Which leads to the ridiculous outcome that a lightly used Honda Civic is basically the same price as a new one.
Yes, obviously your average person buys a second hand car and new car prices(all of them, not just EVs) are out of reach.
But the article is about sales(as in - new car sales) - and your average Joe Smith buying a new car is increasingly likely to buy an EV because among other new cars, EVs have actually became affordable.
Kalispell MT to Minot ND -- 688 miles between chargers
Anything in Alaska that isn't along the route from Anchorage to Fairbanks
Much of Ontario 11
All of Newfoundland
Of course, they're not high traffic routes, but these are places you can still easily find gasoline.
Furthest I can see on 11 is 250km.
Newfoundland has a ton of chargers.
Did you even check before posting?
We're talking about people taking long rural trips -- stopping at a 50kw charger adds 50% of time to an 8 hour trip -- nobody driving a gasoline car would stop for that long. You'd need a 250kw charger to do what a person would normally do on a trip like that -- stop, piss, stretch your legs and get some fast food. Nobody who drives that route wants a 4 hour layover at the Speedee Mart gas station in Ainsworth, Nebraska -- if they can get the charger to work.
But yeah those 10 people that regularly drive those routes should probably stick with their ice vehicles.
You’d need about 135 kwh total energy at 15kwh/100km efficiency. Assuming you leave with full battery - thats about 60kwh or a bit over an hour of charge at 50kw.
More importantly, these highways can be closed at unpredictable times for an unpredictable duration. It is not guaranteed that the route you planned is the route will take.
Go check one of the charger maps and get back to me with a distance of 400 miles between charges.
It's not necessarily 'normal', but it did happen to me last year.
Vacation in St Ignace Michigan. Stayed at an AirBnB rental.
No proper EV charger on-site at the rental, admittedly maybe the owner had an extension cord or something. Still, Then we'd be charging at a fairly low rate of mileage gain.
One day trip was 100 miles each way for optimum route. (Only charging stations known are near the AirBnB)
Another day trip was 76 miles each way for optimum route. (Only charging stations known are near the AirBnB)
The shortest day trip was 50-ish miles each way, but a whole thing happened where my wife left her phone at the restaurant so it was a total of 200 miles driven that day. (There are charging stations at both points for this one, but none in between.)
BTW, when I say 'optimum route' for the first two, I mean that for at least one of those the trip wound up being longer because of road construction.
I know one could say 'Well plan out charging in the morning'. But at the end of the day that just messes with the rest of the itinerary for a vacation where one could instead be exploring what you actually went on a trip for.
I'm not saying this because I don't like EVs -- I do -- but I'm saying it because we have to address these problems to get higher adoption.
You are raising issues in this post that I would guess impact less than a hundredth of a percent of the driving population of North America. These are really not issues we need to be concerned about and they are very easily solved by installing more chargers. It's a solved problem without demand.
So bluntly I don't understand the points of your comments at all. Is there places where it will take longer to drive an EV currently yes. Is there are two points in the mainland us where you cannot reach because of a lack of chargers no. Do 99.99% of people find themselves in these areas in a given lifetime? Also no.
They aren't shifting goalposts, they are being pragmatic and honest. The typical person who lives in the UP is going to be ready for the worst case scenarios (or, otherwise, just stay home.)
> It's a solved problem without demand.
There's not enough demand to make solving the problem economical for these niche cases. And enough people in the US still have to deal with these niche cases that we are where we are.
No it isn't being pragmatic and honest it's trying to find some weird edge cases to argue that his original claim(which was false) is actually technically true because under conditions X, Y, Z which impacts basically no one ever an ICE is required. It's silly. 350 million people in the country and you're coming up with situations that impact a few thousand of them a year as if thats a legitimate concern with EVs. Nothing honest about that.
Coming up with a situation where you make the worst possible travel plans, make the worst possible choices and still it's workable with an EV is not the argument you seem to think it is.
So, either:
A- I have to go find a charging station, and pray to god that during a peak tourist weekend there is an open spot, so plan the wait into every day and hope my plan in the day schedule and pray it doesn't get disrupted by the other tourist traffic.
or
B- I would get maybe 60-ish miles of range added each night leaving the thing plugged in when we are at the AirBnb.
I want to be clear about this, I'd be fine with an EV if the charging infrastructure made sense, as it stands today however the ideal state for me and my wife would require a plugin hybrid and an EV or a Plugin Hybrid and a Hybrid.
At no point was there any risk of them being without charge even on their longest driving day.
That is an entirely normal scenario for someone visiting many of the most popular outdoor destinations in the US, especially in the west.
Planning a vacation where even after travelling to your accommodation you require at least 10 hours of driving over a 3 day period just to get to the places you actually want to visit is absurd and uncommon.
Since you're trying to be pedantic about trying to calculate the drive time for the distance, I'll note that (short of the unexpected WTF re-trip) it would have been less than 10 hours; I-75 speed limit is 75 in most of the UP, and the other main corridor roads have a speed limit of 65, because it is so sparsely populated.
For better or worse, the Upper Peninsula is this thing that your typical car-owning family who lives in the state can actually do an inexpensive but beautiful trip around.
It's a region that is only about 42,500 Square Kilometers but only has a population of about 300K. Thus the infrastructure gaps.
On the plus side, that means it's still a pretty drive at least. :)
I grew up in Ontario and I'm familiar with the area. It still seems like an absurd trip plan but you do you.
Though we're back to the fact that even in your worst case the most that can be said is it would be slightly more inconvenient given current charger network. In reality you'd problem just do a better job picking a base location or not choosing one given the distances if you were really worried.
I could do it in a 2002 Jetta. Why can’t I do it in a vehicle 25 years newer?
Like I said though, the whole convenience isn’t just single trip range.
If there's a charger close enough to a restaurant you'll eat at, that sounds convenient, and I've seen a lot more chargers on my long distance drives... but usually not at the restaurants I want to go to.
Now I am stuck in line ups for gas because I can’t decide I don’t need it. This is true even just around town.
Maybe it’s a first world issue. It gets better all the time though. Maybe next car.
Not if you have the right plumbing and a bottle with you.
I've also been on 24+ hour trips where we switched off drivers every 6 hours or so. Stopping too long for too many times on a trip like that adds up.
Human endurance is more about the end-to-end time. Breaks barely help at all.
I've done a few road trips (2023, 2024, 2025) where It was 10 or more hours of driving without even factoring stops in.
Fuel-ups can be as fast as 5 minutes, if you have a co-pilot to run in and grab whatever else you need from inside while you travel. Might have one or two longer breaks in there for a proper lunch.
> Human endurance is more about the end-to-end time.
Yep. You also optimize for the drive itself; i.e. metering your overall methods and timing of hydration etc to avoid needing extra bathroom stops, making sure any food eaten can either be eaten quickly, or safely eaten while driving on a long boring highway (i.e. Tacos bad, simple burgers or sandwiches good.)
For an 800-ish mile drive in one day, longer stops make a huge difference from being able to make it all the way through with reasonable daylight.
> Breaks barely help at all.
Yep, too long of a break winds up having a negative effect where you get too relaxed.
Heck, in 2020 I did a shorter drive to a different region, but instead of a Ford Maverick that got 35-40MPG and 400+ miles to a tank, I was in my WRX which got maybe 330-ish miles per tank, and the extra stops definitely had me much more drained by the end of the trip.
(Although, it's also worth noting that the Maverick is a lot more 'comfy' than my WRX from a posture standpoint, which may have been a factor.)
I suppose I get wanting to get somewhere faster, but I honestly don't think Id want to put myself through it vs taking longer and enjoying the journey a bit more.
if you are putting yourself through that regularly you probably do need an ice car (for now, high speed charging and battery size is making progress too).
For the average commuter and vehicle, it would be more convenient.
My family’s closest family is 750km away. Making that a longer trip sounds like torture, but range is getting better all the time.
I also rent, so I’m stuck at 120v charging at home. Does that limit the convenience?
>>Making that a longer trip sounds like torture, but range is getting better all the time.
On the other hand, my sister drives A LOT. Like 1000 miles(1600km) a week a lot. And she was spending a fortune on diesel, so recently got herself a second hand Polestar 2, even though it's a long range model she gets a comfortable 300km before she has to charge it - and I asked her hey do you find charging it annoying. And she says no, because she usually has to stop for a pee every 3 hours anyway, the car needs 15-20 minutes on a fast charger for a top up and then she can carry on. Saves her an absolute fortune in fuel money. She drives up and down the country and so far it just hasn't been a problem at all.
>>I also rent, so I’m stuck at 120v charging at home. Does that limit the convenience?
Yeah, that's going to be the biggest problem I think. If you can't charge at home(or can only charge at ~1kWh/hour of charging) that's not going to be a great experience. Realistically you can only replenish 12kWh overnight using a basic 120V socket and that's just not a lot.
This attitude of dictating others' car needs for them is one of the biggest hindrances to EV adoption and is also why rolling back CAFE regulations is going to be more popular than you think it is.
The general public doesn't like being told what to do.
The current crazy pricing is mostly due to supply that was cut off during covid -- those would all be prime used cars today -- but many were never made, so used car pricing is crazy -- and manufacturers have no incentive to create cheap new cars if buyers don't have other options.
But also the waves overlap so we’d still have about 700k cars in additional supply.
And even if they are still on the road they different enough in quality that they are not affecting the resale price of covid era cars. People do not cross shop 2021 cars with 60k miles with 1996 cars with 300k+ miles.
With a 30 year mortgage the $56K base model payments could be doable.
Although, I don't think the base model will do 492 miles, I'm guessing it's more like 250-300.
I'm still not sure whether GM just completely mis-managed the thing (which GM is known to do) or not. I say that because it is full-size-ish, but that creates the problem of it being a heavier unibody, and when we talk about EVs, 'weight of base vehicle and the batteries to move it' can become a Delta-V-ish problem.
As a sort of example, I'll point to the Cybertruck; it's honestly probably even more 'brick-ish' aerodynamically than the Silverado EV, but it weighs 1000 pounds less (or so) and thus gets 20-60 miles more range than the Silverado EV base despite the battery being not much larger as far as capacity.
Possibly also worth noting though, that Delta-V-ish problem means the Silverado EV in some configurations has a curb weight high enough it can't go on some residential streets.
IDK. GM got kinda-smart with how they handled EVification of their CUVs (i.e. start with midsize, move down, be aggressive on pricing) but the Silverado EV still strikes me as classic GM WTFery
My tesla goes 3 hours at 80mph. I can get to any charger I need. There are considerably more than I ever imagined.
Unpredictable closures of highways can happen in the middle of nowhere after you’ve already been driving for 3 hours. I’ve had unplanned detours of up to 150 miles more than once. It is more common than people expect.
There are stretches of highway where it is 100+ miles between gas stations, never mind chargers, so it becomes a range risk even for ICE cars. I’m not the OP but when I’m driving in that part of North America I try to keep my range above 200 miles for this reason. It has saved me from being stranded more than once.
Alternatively, a backup plan for people with experience in those areas is to use ranch and forestry trails to route around the highway closures if feasible. This requires a vehicle suitable for that terrain. Few if any EVs are.
That said, most Americans rarely do long-haul driving in the backwaters of the American West. But if you do it enough, high ground clearance and reliable 400+ miles range in all weather conditions is a safety requirement.
The only reason I don’t have an EV is that most of my driving miles are like that. I don’t drive in the city where I live. No EV currently made credibly delivers that kind of performance but a lot of cheap ICE vehicles do.
Eventually EVs will get there but they aren’t there today.
Makes a lot of sense