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In April, when we were eagerly awaiting our first electric car I wrote about how excited but also a little anxious I was. And although I was tuned into the world of YouTubers reviewing electric cars including “real world” road trips I wasn’t sure how it all would turn out. Well, turns out it’s actually all pretty easy.

I want to split this into two main sections, one about the day-to-day charging and one about charging while on longer trips e.g. Berlin to Hamburg (300km) or really long trips like Berlin to Austria (around 900km with a stop over).

Public City Charging

If you don’t have a garage or own house where you can plug in your car you will have to rely on the public charging infrastructure, like we do. This category definitely depends a lot on where exactly you live. For us we have a total of 8 charging slots around our place that are easily walkable. By that I mean that the distance is similar to how far you would park your car and still feel like you have parked around your home, albeit those would be parking spots you would not call great.

The good thing as well is that you don’t have to guess which of those spots are free, you can just look it up in an app. There are many apps you can use to look for / pay for charging. So when you feel like you should charge the car you look for free spots and you park your car there and charge. For us this is only necessary about every 2 weeks if we don’t have any longer trips in between. In summer maybe once a week if we make more weekend trips outside of town. So charging around our area is easy and we only rarely have to do it. Easy. Now let’s get into the more nitty gritty.

With Kia you get a plan that for the first year has no base fee (after that it is EUR 4.99, at which point we will most likely cancel it) and each kilowatt hour costs 59 cents. Almost all city charging has a limit of 4 hours after which you have to pay about EUR 6 blocking fee per hour. If you charge through Kia this limit weirdly is only 3.5 hours. Which means that after three and half hours you better move your car, which is a little bit of a pain.

But here comes one of the weird things about charging to kind of save the day: the price and the other conditions like blocking fees depend on the app / charging card combined with the provider of the charging station itself. So for example I learned just a couple of days ago from talking to another EV owner that if you use the “EWE Go” app you do not have any blocking fees 🤯 (I still have to confirm that). Or if you use the “E.ON Drive” app you don’t have blocking fees at night (22 - 9) and it costs 54 cents instead of 59 - but only on four of the available eight chargers in our area since those are from E.ON themselves. As you can see it definitely gets complicated pretty quickly but on the other hand you do have many options.

Another one of those city charing options are fast(ish) chargers at retail locations. For example you can buy your groceries at Lidl (a discount super market) and charge the car in the meantime for 49 cents per minute at a maximum speed of 50 kw. In practice for us it only charges at around 30 kw which means that in about 30 minutes of shopping you will still get 15 kw. Not too bad. One other possibility around us is a proper fast charger (four 350 kw spots & four 150 kw spots) at Bauhaus (a DIY market) where our car can go from 10% to 80% in under 20 minutes when you get one of the 350 kw spots). Although that is with a caveat too. Most fast chargers are built such that one box has two charging cables. The box itself delivers 350 kw, but if two cars are charging they share the 350 kw.

So as you can see there are some details to figure out but overall I found the experience to be very easy in day-to-day life.

Highway / Long Distance Charging

Taking longer trips in an EV definitely requires more planning than with a combustion car. For one the range does significantly drop when you are driving at highway speeds, even at regular 130 - 140 km/h. Plus the charging infrastructure is still sparse compared to the ubiquity of gas stations.

One thing though that was really not a problem for us is the time it takes to charge the car. The Kia can take up to 240 kw and at least in the warmer part of the year that we have had the car for this was also realistic. And so was the the Kia claimed 10 - 80% time of 18 minutes. Now of course when you compare that to filling a gas tank which takes about 5 minutes including going in and paying it is still long. If you combine the break with going to the bathroom, goofing around with the kids and stretching your legs a little the time is already over and when you arrive at the car you might be at 85 or 90% already. This does highlight one more weird thing about range though: Unlike on your first stretch, where you have ideally started with 100% of charge, on your consecutive stretches your charge will be somewhere between 80 and 90% so your range will be even less (the reason is that he the last 20% and especially the last 10% of charing are way slower, so on the go you usually don't do it).

The EV6’ built in route & charge planing software is ok but not great. The interface looks old and it is sometimes hard to parse, so I was looking for an alternative and found ABRP (A Better Route Planer). It is an app for your phone where you set up which car you drive so it can estimate the consumption and you can then plan your route and charging stops in the app and use it through Car Play (for example). To make it more exact you can also get a small dongle that you plug in to your car’s OBD port that will then send the current state of charge to your phone. This worked pretty well overall, although the estimations (even though we have the aforementioned dongle) were not always perfect. In winter we will probably have to use the built in route planer (at least as secondary navigation in the background) because only when you do that will the car start pre-heating the batteries before you get to a charger. Which is what you want so that you can start charing at a fast rate right away. We’ll see how that will go.

Great things about EVs

So with the (much less pronounced than I thought) downsides of EVs out of the way let’s talk about why they are great.

The coolest thing is knowing that you are not creating local emissions while driving. It just feels friendlier to everyone around you. Now I know that for cities the right answer is not switching from a combustion car to an EV but to public transportation / bikes, which we do for the most part, but when you do drive it still feels much better.

Second: the utter silence of the thing. It is so nice to cruise around and hear the music or the outside when the windows are open. It does feel truly magical, especially when switching from a diesel which was always audible.

Next up would be the immediate acceleration when you need it. No matter how powerful of a combustion engine car you had when you wanted to accelerate the engine needs to rev up, which usually means to first switch down gears and then rev up. That all takes time. An EV just goes. Now we don’t have a particularly powerful EV and still the power feels like more when you need it.

Lastly I want to mention pre-condition the car. When it is super hot (or cold but we have not had that yet) you can pre cool / warm the car before you get in. In summer it was enough to do that 5 minutes before you reached the car and it would already be much better than without it. This would be even better when you can charge at home where your car is plugged in when you do the pre conditioning, but even so it is great!

Knowing my blogging cadence, the next time I’ll post an update here we’ll be past winter time and I can tell you all about how it is in the cold time of the year.

👋