Answering your electric vehicle questions (after 10,000km in a Kona EV)
The deep-dive into your questions about the Kona Electric and EV ownership generally in Australia. After 10,000km in the Hyundai Kona Electric, let’s have a civilised conversation…
With 10,000km clocked up on the mighty Hyundai Kona Electric, let’s have a proper conversation about when electrons and mobility collide - now and in the future. Let's talk about cost, practicality and economic rationalism, via a thick wad of comments, from you.
So, do EVs really add up?
No, I’m not. I got this from a stirrer in the industry the other day. I would retort that we all live in a world full of risk. Low probability, high consequence risk.
Kona electric was introduced in July 2018, in Australia. That’s 31 months ago. There are 75,680 of them being recalled globally. There have been 12 reported fires.
So let’s call it an average of 35,000 Kona Electric vehicles in service for 31 months. Seems fair. That’s about one million vehicle-months, right? And 12 fires. That’s one fire for every 90,000 (ish) vehicle-months in service.
Seriously, the kind of people who get scared by this kind of ambient risk have no idea about risk. It’s more dangerous to check your Twitter while you’re crossing the street.
Incidentally, it was recently announced that the battery manufacturer, LG Chem, will bear the bulk of the estimated $900M (US dollars) recall cost - with reports claiming 62-70 per cent of the financial burden will be borne by LG Chem. Of course, the reputational impact will be almost wholly attach to Hyundai.
Two points there.
A) It doesn’t have to be ready now, because unless we’re all a simulation running in the Matrix and someone changes the code overnight, it will take decades for the fleet to evolve to full (or even majority EV composition). And the grid can evolve as the fleet changes. And, of course, full electrification is a complete fantasy.
And B): On the grid, it kind of is ready, because we do it during the day. If charging happens overnight - no problem. When you run the numbers, we only need 10 per cent more total power generation capacity - hypothetically - to replace every passenger vehicle in Australia and run EVs across the board tomorrow.
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There is certainly going to be a lot more choice for EVs in the future. And with its fancy new Ioniq brand, Hyundai is going to be substantially better at customer support than Tesla. Not hard though, really.
Of course, Tesla has cult factor going for it, thanks to the magnetic pull of Electric Jesus. He is quite charismatic if you’re scientific illiterate, and therefore many owners are predisposed to forgive their miracle Teslas for their many and varied faults.
As for affordable EVs, don’t hold your breath on that one. Tax payer subsidies are the only known way to achieve that, currently.
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Your feedback: cracking some nuts
Thanks Joey, I do strive for that perfect smugly-arrogant doucheness. It’s the journey, not the destination, that counts.
With all due respect - none - I remain on-message with respect to those ‘divorced from reality owners’. Not all EV owners, clearly, just the evangelical nutbags.
Anyone who thinks they’re saving the planet, or that owning a Tesla makes you somehow superior, or that EVs have already killed internal combustion (and we’re all just waiting for news to get around) - that’s a complete fantasy.
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Every 1000kms in a Kona Electric is going to cost you about $36 in Australian electricity. Most people drive about 15,000km per year, according to AusStats. That’s about $540 - a lot less than your current equivalent petrol vehicle.
Of course the EV Kona is about $25,000 more expensive than the equivalent petrol 1.6 Kona. So it’s pretty hard to make an economically rational argument, as you’ll see in a sec. (Keep scrolling.)
The smart way to do this is to get a second-hand EV at the same price as the equivalent ICE car and then start making the ‘savings’ by charging rather than buying petrol.
Bruno, dude, you have to be quite affluent you have to be to afford a Kona EV. And the affluent you are, in general, the more energy you consume, and the more energy you consumed getting affluent. Presumably.
I’m not entirely sure how the green ethics of affluence works, except to say that I personally find affluent shitheads in Teslas completely nauseating.
You get affluent by charging more than something is worth over, and over, and over.
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Okay, 26 cents per kilowatt-hour is pretty reasonable for primetime electricity in Australia. (A bit more in South Aus, a bit less in Queensland and Victoria.) But yeah, ballpark.
That’s about $16 per full charge, from dead flat and that’s about 3.6 cents per kilometre - about the same as a cup of coffee for driving 100km.
The combined cycle lab test economy on a 1.6 turbo petrol Kona is about 6.7 litres per 100km - real world about 9 litrea per 100km.
Petrol was about $1.26 per litre last time I looked, that’s about 11.3 cents per km in a petrol Kona. As discussed previously is 3.6c/l for the Kona EV compared with 11.3 for the petrol. The difference is 7.7 cents per litre, which you save driving the EV. THis means, unfortunately, you have to save $25,000 in 7.7 cent increments ever time you drive 1km.
That’s 325,000km of driving just to break even, in terms of operating costs. Therefore there is no economically rational justification for buying this car. You have to just want one.
People actually spend a great deal of cognitive bandwidth un-necessarily justifying everything that might be construed as a status symbol. Mainly to themselves, but also to their significant someones.
There’s no economically rational case for a Hublot watch, a Burkin handbag or a pair of Christian Louboutin shoes. Or an EV. And that’s completely OK. You’re allowed just to want stuff because it makes you feel good.
I’d suggest it is oddly liberating to detain yourself with choices designed only to make you happy, and telling the rest of the work to go fuck itself. Because there is often a huge internal conflict between the things that really make you happy and the terrible burden of trying to keep everyone else happy/impressed.
Not giving a fuck what other people think or say is a real skill. And, at this, I am Yoda.
Fast charging is really good for long trips. But, unfortunately, although, as Rheingold pointed out, even Coonabarabran - that quaint last bastion of alleged civilisation before Dingo Piss Creek - has a fast charger, Australia’s rollout of EV fast charging (and hydrogen) infrastructure remains pathetic and inadequate, in comparison to a developed country.
Things to see and do in Coonabarabran: The NRMA DC fast charger. The end.
I did use that term to define our species in my initial review. Petro-sapiens is who we are. It is not out big brains and cleverly oriented prehensile thumbs that sees humanity on top.
Chimps have opposable thumbs. Dolphins have big brains. They’re not on top. And it is good being on top. It’s the best, if you’re a species.
The thing that puts us on top is our relationship with thermodynamics. We are the only species on earth that has access to grossly more - orders of magnitude more - energy than we derive from our food.
That energy is almost exclusively hydrocarbon-based. It’s why you and your beer gut are free to luxuriate through this video now, instead of busting your arse in a field all day long, just to feed yourself, before dropping dead in your 20s. That’s pretty much how it was for the majority of human existence. The pre-petrosapiens part.
Hydrocarbons are the best thing that has ever happened to humanity. You EV nuts don’t have to like this, because it’s a fact.
Most servos in Australia (that’s a ‘filling station’ if you’re not from around here, or a ‘gas station’ in America) - most are in fact operated by Coles and Woolworths, and they exist only to pay minimum wages to maximise shareholder returns and pay shithead CEOs bonuses they emphatically do not deserve. So there’s that.
On the death of the servo: If we magically start selling one EV for every internal combustion car, this year, that would be roughly 500,000 EVs a year.
This is Fantasy Island stuff already, right? Because in 2020 about 5000 EVs were sold here, including Tesla. So we’d be talking about an immediate 100-fold increase in EV sales.
But if we did that, magically, every year, 500,000, it would take roughly a quarter of a century to get 12 million EVs on the road here, and that’s roughly how many internal combustion cars are out there now. So, the death of the servo is hardly imminent.
I’m sure there’s an EV miracle diet just waiting to be launched. Plug in and get thin. But I’m confident junk food will somehow find a way.
Kona Electric has a tyre pressure monitoring system, so it checks the pressures probably more often than once every second. And it beeps and flashes up a warning whenever a tyre gets low.
I carry a 12-volt compressor and a tyre plug kit - because there’s no spare tyre. I’m a bit ‘Baden Powell’ like that.
This is typical of the anti-EV nutbag cheap shots I get. Steeevo here has ticked practically every box. Everyone’s a critic.
In fact, EVs have their place, but they’re not for everyone. Towing, heavy loads, long trips - far more suited to hydrogen fuel cell EVs of the future, frankly. That’s in its infancy now. (Both the vehicles and the fuel infrastructure are very new. But fuel cells date back to the Apollo moonshots. The technology is solid.)
On these other critical points: 10,000 kays in a year is what I managed in that EV, roughly. OK - it was a pandemic. I tend to charge up when the battery is at 25-ish per cent. So at that point I need about 50kWh of electricity.
It takes about seven hours. I don’t actually (quote): ‘wait all night’ - I just dream about Poontang Island and lifting travel restrictions, and recharging just happens in the background. As to (quote) ‘every single day’ my 10,000 kays and typical recharging at 25 per cent capacity has resulted in about 30 recharge events for that car. In about a year.
That’s about one recharge every 12 days, on average. Hardly a daily grind.
To the matter of ‘unless local yobbos unplug it for you’: Yobbos won’t be unplugging the car as a prank. The recharging plug locks into the socket when you lock the car. It’s part of the car’s locking system, and I’d suggest cutting the cable for kicks would be a bad idea, before anyone suggests it. 240 volts at 32 amps. 7.7kW. And, yeah, it’s protected by a core-balance relay - but are you really prepared to roll the dice on that?
Toyota RAV4 is the best-selling medium SUV in Australia, offering good resale value and envious fuel economy. If you need an enormous boot and a simple, functional family vehicle, RAV4 is hard to beat.