The Experiment is Over
I'm done with EVs
In October 2024, I acquired a new BMW iX-50 EV after driving one the prior year and becoming completely enamored with the car. I installed a 48-amp wall charger at home, and for day-to-day driving, the car was a lot of fun. At the time I said it was probably the best car I’d ever owned. It was crazy fast and it could do everything I needed for most of my driving. The at-home charging made it very convenient.
I bought it primarily as a dog car. Something that could get haired up in back in the seat protector enclosure and where my dog was in reach. It seemed to be perfect and for a long time it was. This was until I had to deal with charging away from home.
The car claims a 320-mile range. That is in perfect driving conditions. Add extreme weather, heavy winds, and the numbers drop. I was driving back from Kansas City with 200 miles of range, but by the time I drove the 150 miles, I had less than ten miles in reserve, all because of heat and strong winds. That meant the range was considerably less. For the purposes of planning, it means leaving an adequate margin for two things. One is to just get there and back, and the other is to hunt for a supercharger that is both working and without a line. You could be in real danger when traveling with a dog in very hot weather and no available chargers.
This meant that for planning purposes, I’d plan on only a distance of about 120 miles from home on a full charge, with 240 miles round trip and an adequate reserve. At one point, I thought I had enough margin to get home, yet I had to stop at a regular charger just ten miles from home and wait to have access. That stop and wait took almost an hour to go the last ten miles. Since then a few more chargers have been added, but the uncertainty of it all shattered my confidence here in Missouri.
This also meant I couldn’t go for a long day drive with my dog without some risk. Given what I’ve experienced, and because of my own temporary physical limitations, the use case dropped to just local trips of less than three hours. It also meant I had to remember to keep it charged and not charge to the 80% recommended charge if I wanted to be spontaneous.
By the time it was all done and I had so many use cases, I decided that an EV just isn’t practical for my lifestyle. For someone else, it may be the perfect car, but in my real world, they are not convenient or practical enough. Almost, but not enough.
I’m now getting rid of the iX-50. It will likely be replaced with another BMW ICE (internal combustion engine) and the reason I’m sticking with the brand is because it’s been very good to me and I like driving all of them. If you want an EV, I can’t recommend the iX-50 enough, but if you live in rural Missouri as I do, any EV is coming with some limitations. I wanted it to work out and when I bought the car, I thought for sure I’d add another EV and even considered a Tesla.
I no longer think FSD (Full Self-Driving) is all that close. What Tesla is learning is that the learning tail is much longer than they ever anticipated. There are just so many scenarios that could go wrong that they couldn’t possibly imagine. I wanted FSD in a big way, but the more I learn, the farther it is away.
I’ll admit, I’m a little disappointed by how it all turned out. I wanted to like EVs and maybe if I still lived in Seattle, I’d feel differently, but maybe not. It’s not the car I’d risk for a trip to Winthrop or a run to the ocean. It’s not that they don’t have chargers. It’s that I’m not confident in the outcome with an EV.
I’ll get lots of hate mail over this. The EV crowd tends to wear it like a religion and they can’t see that my experience is unique to me and not anyone else. At least I can say I gave it a shot.
Claude Opus 4.6 did predict my next car. It did it in two steps. It first narrowed it down to four before picking the most likely of the four. I did make an offer and it was rejected, so who knows what’s next. I’ll tell the full story when it’s gone and I have a replacement. Right now it could still be anything.