Exploring the Electric Future: A Personal Journey
One approaches a significant birthday trip with a certain level of expectation: good food, better company, and perhaps a modicum of vehicular reliability. My wife’s 30th in St. Louis promised all of this, save for the last point, which was left entirely to the whims of the rental car gods. Opting for the ‘mystery car’, a delightful euphemism for ‘whatever’s left on the lot’, we anticipated anything from a compact sedan to a mid-size SUV. What we received, however, was a rather sleek, if somewhat bulbous, Hyundai Ioniq 5. An electric vehicle.
Now, I’m not entirely averse to new technology. My homelab, a glorious tangle of wires and blinking lights, stands testament to that. But my usual tinkering involves network attached storage, container orchestration, and the occasional foray into home automation, not the existential dread of a rapidly depleting battery far from a suitable power outlet. This, I quickly realised, was going to be a different sort of experiment entirely.
The Unplugged Reality: A Weekend with the Ioniq 5
The Ioniq 5, for all its futuristic aesthetics, is a car. And like any car, it needs fuel. Or, in this case, electrons. Our existing chariot back home is a 2024 Hyundai Tucson N-Line, so the in-car technology wasn’t a jarring leap. The infotainment system, the CarPlay integration - all familiar territory. Hyundai, bless its heart, has achieved a commendable consistency across its range. A small mercy, given the novel anxieties this particular vehicle introduced.
The driving experience itself was… different. The regenerative braking, for instance. In a hybrid, it’s a subtle art, a gentle deceleration that mimics engine braking. In the Ioniq 5, even on its ’low’ setting, it felt less like a gentle nudge and more like a rather enthusiastic phantom handbrake. It’s certainly aggressive, and while one can adjust, it’s not quite the same fluid experience as a conventional internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle. One might as well have been driving with a perpetually nervous co-pilot stomping on a hidden brake pedal.
Then there was the rather amusing, if slightly unnerving, digital drama of the projected range. This little number updates dynamically as you fiddle with the climate control or other in-car settings. Watching the estimated mileage plummet from 300 to 275 just for daring to ask for a bit of air conditioning in the sweltering St. Louis summer was peak entertainment. It’s a constant, digital reminder of your energy consumption, a kind of vehicular guilt trip that one simply doesn’t get from a traditional fuel gauge.
The Charging Conundrum: A Quest for Electrons
But the real adventure began when the electrons started to dwindle. Our Airbnb, charming as it was, wasn’t exactly equipped for rapid EV charging. My first attempt involved a 120VAC outlet, a 50-foot extension cable from Home Depot snaking across the pavement to reach the street, and the car’s Level 1 charger. The projected full charge time from 60%? A rather optimistic 25+ hours. One might as well have tried to fill the tank with a medicine dropper. This, I concluded, was highly unreasonable. It felt less like charging a car and more like attempting to boil the kettle with a birthday candle.
The next day, a beacon of hope appeared in the form of a Level 2 charger at the local IKEA. A significant improvement, certainly. The projection from 60% to 100% was a mere five hours. Five hours. A substantial chunk of a day’s leisure time, spent loitering in a furniture store car park, contemplating flat-pack wardrobes and the existential dread of Swedish meatballs. While vastly superior to the trickle charge at the Airbnb, it still felt like an absurd imposition on one’s day.
And this brings me to the rather glaring issue of charging infrastructure. The closest public charger, according to the various apps one is suddenly beholden to, seemed perpetually occupied. And when it wasn’t, it typically had only one charging spot, one lead. A single point of failure, much like relying on a single DNS server for your entire network. It’s an operational bottleneck of the highest order.
This entire exercise - leaving the comfort of the Airbnb, driving around in search of an available charger, and then spending five hours babysitting a car at a public station - felt like the antithesis of how a car is supposed to work. Cars, in my limited experience, are meant to take you places, not demand to be taken places like a needy pet. The mental overhead of range anxiety, of constantly checking PlugShare (a noble concept, if only humanity were as diligent with their digital updates as they are with their TikTok dances), and of planning one’s day around the car’s electrical needs, was simply exhausting.
The Twist: A Needy Pet, Not a Reliable Steed
The twist, if one can call it that, wasn’t a sudden mechanical failure or a dramatic breakdown. It was the insidious realisation that the Ioniq 5, for all its technological prowess and quiet efficiency, had transformed from a means of transport into a rather demanding, high-maintenance companion. It was no longer a tool at my disposal; I was, in essence, at its disposal. The car, rather than facilitating our trip, became a significant logistical challenge, a constant, low-level hum of anxiety beneath the surface of birthday celebrations. It was a stark contrast to the effortless utility of our petrol-powered Tucson.
Lessons from the Electric Frontier
So, what did I learn from this unexpected foray into the electric frontier? Primarily, that for my current circumstances, EV life, with its current infrastructural constraints, isn’t quite for me. I try to imagine having an EV back in Southeastern Georgia, where public chargers are as rare as a quiet pub on a Friday night, and it simply doesn’t make a lick of sense. The allure of a Rivian truck or an F-150 Maverick, with their promises of electric torque and rugged utility, remains a siren song, but the practicalities of charging in the wilds of rural America quickly douse that flame.
Perhaps the ideal scenario, for now, is a hybrid approach: one standard ICE vehicle for longer journeys and general utility, combined with an EV for purely local driving. Even then, the utility feels tenuous. The operational overhead, the time commitment, the sheer faff of it all, seems to outweigh the benefits unless one lives in a dense urban environment with readily available, reliable, and multiple charging options.
This little adventure, while inconvenient, was an excellent exercise in practical problem-solving, adaptability, and real-world operational efficiency. It highlighted the critical importance of infrastructure in enabling new technologies, a lesson as applicable to cloud computing as it is to electric vehicles. It also reinforced my appreciation for simplicity and reliability, and the quiet satisfaction of a full tank of petrol.
Perhaps I’ll stick to my homelab for electrical adventures. At least there, if something goes wrong, I only risk a tripped breaker, not a stranded holiday. And the only thing I have to charge is my phone, which, thankfully, doesn’t require five hours at IKEA.
