Yeah, our vehicles are good for now. I consider them young. My Wife and I are both 62 and it’s going to become too much to deal with where we live. Not sure where we will go though. It’s all over the board.
Congratulations on using up a car. And my condolences also. I have to call a shop and tell them I’m not going to invest in a transmission rebuild for my old Chevy Trailblazer. I’m going to miss that car. It was no Subaru, not much chance it would make it to 200K miles, but I’m going to miss him.
One problem is that the PHEV RAV4 is popular enough that I believe you’ll have to pay above MSRP to get one. There are rumors that the new version of the Subaru Forester is going to have the same hybrid powertrain as the RAV4, perhaps including the PHEV option. And the Forester is available in a “wilderness” edition with higher ground clearance.
Thanks @TriPolar - I bought it used (20k miles) in 2004, and kept it all this time. Other than usual 30/60/90k care and oil changes, it’s had few issues, except the damn leaking head gaskets (which I did replace at 90k), and here we are again.
@Dewey_Finn - that’s the sort of info that prompted me to open the thread. Since we’ll still have an ICE in the existing Rav4, getting the BEV first was our intention, so we’ll likely have more options in 3-5 years for the second. I am not blinded by brand loyalty, but find that Subaru has historically given good bang for buck, and if they release a PHEV with a decent range, it would get that extra bonus love from me.
I rented the EV6 for a couple of weeks a year back and its on the shortlist for when I replace my gas car. I’m torn between it and the Mustang Mach-E, although I suspect there will be even more desirable options in a couple of years when I’ll likely end up doing this.
I also took a rented Toyota RAV4 hybrid (not plug-in) on a road trip around Iceland a couple of weeks ago. It felt like a very different sort of car to the other two you mentioned and was very well suited to the often gravel roads I took it on. The Kia and Hyundai feel more car-like to me. Which personally I like better for something I’m actually going to buy, but the vibe I got is that the person considering those would be different to the person considering the RAV4. Definitely get in them and see what feels good.
I thought most large-ish pure EVs these days came in an AWD and R/FWD version, with the AWD versions having significantly more power and quicker 0-60 times (with a range penalty).
I’ve driven a lot of the SUV/crossover-ish EVs on the market now, and I think the Kia EV6, Hyundai Ionic 5, Mustang Mach-E, VW ID.4, Polestar 2, and Genesis GV60 are all fine machines in that 2-300 mile range category. Some of them I like and some of them I don’t but it’s largely for subjective reasons or the specific set of features didn’t quite align with what I specifically wanted. I’d pick the EV6 or Mach-E out of that list personally.
The Cadillac Lyric on paper looks compelling (I haven’t driven it yet). With one caveat: GM seems to be going down the “let’s monetize our customers by forcing them onto our proprietary infotainment ecosystem by removing CarPlay/Android support”. If they keep at that I’m out. Teslas haven’t really been on my radar, recently for reasons uninteresting to this thread, but before that I just kind of felt “meh” about them. Maybe they’re too common here. I also really hate only having the central console, so only the S and X would be viable for me (I have driven the S, and it was nice).
My wife recently got the Kia Niro EV. It won’t be right for you (no AWD option and it’s smaller than what you listed), but we came into it with a similar viewpoint: that’ll be the daily driver for her and we’ll use the gas station wagon for the long road trips. It turns out that we’ve used the Kia for our long road trips, including camping trips with a Thule box on the top and a bike rack at the back. That works out to the Olympic Peninsula here in WA state, etc. and where I know I’m gonna go through a town with an Electrify America. It may not be great for more remote locations.
Non-Tesla on-the-road charging is still irritatingly awkward, with CCS chargers being frustratingly unreliable. Electrify America is the only supplier where I’ve had a 100% success rate (and by that I only mean I found at least one working charger). That’s from a small sample size though. If I was planning a long road trip that relied only on smaller outfits (a couple of chargers in a Wendy’s parking lot, etc.) I’d probably take the gas car. Hopefully this’ll get better as more cars move to Tesla’s NCAS plug and support at the supercharger network (and hopefully that’ll spur some more reliable competition).
With the advent of Amazon delivering just about anything you could imagine picking up in a personal vehicle we don’t really care about cargo capacity (just us, no kids, and lizards, snakes and cats don’t take up much space) - so a car-like ride is fine by us. Clearance is helpful, but don’t need to be all that much. The Rav4 was a pick due to a reasonably generous all-electric range and AWD, rather than the SUV form factor.
Which brings us to the Large-ish pure EVs in AWD option. You’re mostly right, but most of those large-ish EVs are also the costly ones! We want a reasonably dependable but more importantly moderately priced option if at all possible. Heck, if it weren’t for the local roads and conditions, my wife spent years loving the micro EVs that are largely a thing of the past, so it’s about getting a dependable EV, with AWD at the lowest reasonable price point, which lead to the above early favorites.
For all who are following along in the thread, the wife has scheduled a quote from a local electrician to examine our garage for feasibility and cost on installing a level 2 charger on her side of the garage, so we’re moving right along. 
That is true. Some of them start around $45k, but add in AWD and you’re already looking at $50k+ at the most optimistic, and it is pretty easy to hit $60k with the options that most people actually want.
There is an awkwardness of timing here I think. In a mature market it wouldn’t necessarily make as much sense to take a “everything will be more advanced in two years so lets wait” stance, since it’s always true and you’ll never end up buying anything.
But my instinct is that while EVs are mainstream enough now not to be ridiculously expensive and still be decent, reliable transportation most of the car companies are still very new at this and often haven’t fully built out their production lines and supply chains. I think we’ll see very quick growth in the upcoming years in engineering capability and competition, and that EVs even in a couple of years will be significantly more cost effective with better specs.
So if you can squeeze a year or two out of that Subaru that might work out great. But if you can’t, oh well, and what is out there now is still pretty good.
EVs are advancing in technology more at phone speeds than car speeds. If you need a phone now, you buy a phone now. You know the one in two years will be better, but you can’t go without a phone for two years, so you’re stuck choosing what is available now. Putting off buying an EV for two years will almost certainly result in getting a better one, but spending $5000 to patch up a dying car might be money better spent on an EV today.
The X with proper tires would be pretty good in deep snow. I was recently driving one on some rutted out roads, so I raised it a bit. It had an annoying habit of lowering itself, though, even at low speeds. I didn’t want it in the highest position, where there isn’t any suspension travel, but in the mid-high position, so I wouldn’t scrape the front when it dropped into a hole.
Due to the suspension geometry of the X, it can’t be fit with larger tires to get more ground clearance.
Anyway, for your specific conditions, I don’t think there is a good EV option. Once your roads get packed down, I would not hesitate to drive on your roads in my 3 with snow tires. Here on the front range, the delay from deep powder to packed snow is short enough that it isn’t necessary to have a special vehicle.
I was getting it a bit muddled up. Depending on the exact details of your long trips, EVs with shorter ranges may be practical. If you’re counting minutes, then no EV is going to be satisfying. If you just care about completing your journey in one day, then I just did a 620 mile day with 9 hours of driving and 1.5 hours of charging. My car claims to now have 282 miles of range at 100%, but just like MPG, I will not get that going 80. On that day my actual range was 234 miles on a full charge. EV driving is not like gas, though, full to empty to full is not the best strategy, so my inter-charger legs were in the 110-160 mile range.
As for snow. I’d rather an AWD with good snow tires, but I’d bet on good snow tires on anything compared to all-seasons on an AWD. You can probably get away with good tires on a FWD car, but often it is worth spending the extra on the AWD for the piece of mind. Still get proper tires for the winter—don’t want to slide your new car into a light pole.
That’s fair. For me, waiting two years (and even longer) makes sense, as tempted as I am by the current batch of EVs. My 2012 station wagon is on the older side but it barely has 75k miles on it, and I think the only non consumable item I’ve replaced is the 12V battery. I’ll likely drive it until it no longer serves as reliable transportation (or a thousands of dollars failure occurs). But I agree, I wouldn’t spend $5k to extract just a couple more years out of it.
That’s a non starter then.
This has been an informative thread. We are a one car household and our current Subaru is now 11 years old with 110K miles (we bought it new). We do take it out on forest service roads often so would want to replace with something that has clearance, plus we live in snow and hillville so the PHEVs are attractive. Nearly all of our usual driving would be all E, but our weekend trips could use the gasoline.
We had also been thinking of a pickup with a pop-up cap for our camping. We are getting older and sleeping on the ground isn’t as attractive. I don’t want to pull a trailer. However, I might have to rethink this if one of the PHEVs might work. It’s typically just two of us and a dog going camping so our Subaru has worked.
Our detached garage already has a 240 outlet so we are nearly set for a plug-in car.
The “we don’t want you to drive the car away in this condition” came 3 months ago. So I’m currently at the stage of saying a quick prayer every time I start it. It is still slowly leaking oil from the gaskets, but it hasn’t gotten any worse, still, it could possibly go at any moment. And I strongly suspect that the usual Colorado Winter weather, where it would be left outside at work in sub-freezing and occasionally sub-zero temps would be the end of it no matter what. So, yeah, some urgency especially as many EV models have noticeable waits.
And as for everyone’s prediction, yep, they were saying $3.5-4k to repair, without opening it up in detail, so $5k is almost certain by the time they were done. Even the most generous estimate of it’s value is below that. Sadness.
So at this point, before it fails completely, we’d rather trade it in for some token amount towards the new vehicle, and save the funds that would otherwise be spent keeping it limping along.
Thanks for removing the confusion @echoreply. As for the annual long drive, I’ll share some more who/what/why for my reasons, but anyone can feel free to skip. Basically the drive is Central Colorado Springs to Las Cruces NM. It’s where my father and step-mother (in their mid 80s) live, and due to the lack of regional airports, cost, and security, is roughly the same time to fly as drive!
Longish Possibly Dull Summary regarding Flying vs Driving
So to fly would involve driving to Denver, park, shuttle to airport, go through security, fly to El Paso Texas, rent a car, drive to Las Cruces. 90 min + 30 min + 90 min + 120 min + 30 min + 60 min or 7ish hours at a dead minimum, 8-9 if I allow for actual likely traffic, roadwork and additional time wasted in security or just getting through DIA. The 630 mile drive is almost all interstate, with breaks historically only for gas and occasionally a spare coffee (we bring snacks) is normally 11 hours with road construction, the slowdown through Albuquerque, and the gas/restroom stops.
So it’s doable, if long for a single day, but only just IMHO. I did check that there seems to be adequate charging (especially for Tesla) along the way (hooray for sticking to the Interstate) but the distance combined with charging times (especially if it’s not Tesla) seems likely to force it to unworkably long times for a single day.
Since our general plan is to visit over a 3 or 4 day weekend (drive down, have dinner with folks, stay 1 or two days, and then drive back each drive taking up pretty much one whole day) it would require major reshuffling of work / holiday times, and as my lovely wife just started this new job, would be pretty unworkable for the near future sadly.
Anyway, I agree that in a better world, I’d be able to put it off for another year or two. Inventories in the post-COVID / chip shortage world are barely improving, and costs are still near the highs, so yeah, it’s a sellers market. But I’m trying to look on the bright-side, we’ll get a reasonably mature option right now, but in the 3-5 years we expect the other existing ICE vehicle to last, we’ll hopefully have options for a more advanced or less expensive (!!!) BEH/PHEV with the range and features we want for the second car.
I would never consider flying for only 630 miles. Flying is WAY too much of a hassle.
@ParallelLines - we also get to start any flight with a 2 hour drive just to get to the airport.
20 hours of driving would be a hard no from me. The airport is 12 minutes from our front door; using an Uber and TSA Pre-Check we can be through security in 20 minutes.
My wife and I were once on our way to the airport for a flight to Yakima. Seatac airport is about 1.5 hours from our house. Yakima is about 150 miles further. We cancelled the flight on the drive and just continued on to Yakima. Stopping in North Bend to charge.
That said, I’ll typically fly to Spokane (283 miles from Seatac), but drive to Portland (165 miles). So I guess around 200-250 miles is the point I consider flying.
We lived in Bellevue for a bit, and Seatac was never convienent. We drove a lot when we lived there, but I’m older now and less tolerant of long drives. We did a trip to my nephew’s house recently, 7 hours each way. It wrecked us, more than any long flight ever did.
My Wife likes long drives. I can take them or leave them. I hate the airport though. We have driven The 1500 miles Breckenridge > Pittsburgh a number of times. 750 miles a day is no problem for us. We’ve done 1000 miles in one shot.
It helps to have a good vehicle, and two drivers. I’ve actually done the 1000 mile drive quite a bit. But with two drivers.
And now with Sirus XM, that helps. I did one 1000 mile trip in a pick-up when the speed limit was 55mph. And we had only one tape for the 8 track. I can pretty much recite Jesus Christ Superstar word for word now. 
The fly vs drive is always nuanced depending on your driving tolerance, availability of direct flights, and now the EV charging factor.
For me, if I’m driving alone (huge factor) I get really uncomfortable physically, mentally and concentration-wise after about three hours, and tend to want to nope out at over six (distance of normally 200-400 miles assuming highways or interstate). In that way, it works with most EV options, because it gives me an excuse to get out and away from the car!
With my wife (or presumably another interesting pleasant person) it goes up a good bit, 6 hours feels fine, and I’ll manage 11-12, so duh roughly double. But now you’re starting to feel those stops adding up, whether it be stretch, coffee, food, bathroom or (new) charging stops. Sure, you can, should, and do combine a lot of those, but once you’ve been on the road all day, you just want to be done!
The longest regular trip I’ve done is the one listed earlier, but the longest I’ve done multiple times was Colorado Springs to Dallas TX (my mother, brother, sister-in-law, niece and nephew are there). 740 miles. Damn that sucked, but we were planning to go from there to visit friends in Austin after, and detour through Albuquerque NM on the way back for more friends, so, yeah, exception.
But that was a back breaking (literally, wife torqued her back) drive, just barely feasible as the one looong day drive we did it as. And a quick review it wouldn’t be impossible in an EV, but the comparative paucity of charging locations once you leave Raton NM until you hit Dallas would make me uncomfortable. Lots of calling ahead / app checking to confirm working condition and availability would be wanted. At that point, I’d prefer to rent or borrow, or take a PHEV if / when we get one.
The Cruces trip, following I-25 the whole way would be less nerve wracking even in a BEV.
But, the whole Dallas trip worries in a BEV are probably moot. It’s such a shitty drive (lots of pretty ugly / boring / empty Eastern NM through Panhandle driving) that flying is sooo much more attractive. Especially because even with the small size and poor marketing of the Colorado Springs Airport, I -can- get direct flights to Dallas at a reasonable cost, without having to stage through DIA and wasting hours of flight times, layovers, and additional cost.
Anyway, update. As tomorrow is the day for the estimate on ease, cost and timeframe for setting up a level 2 charging system for the wife, we spent much time talking about the choices. Sadly, we’re mostly past (not completely) the era of generous incentives to purchase, but may be able to secure some for the Hyundai.
The Kia EV6, as suggested by multiple individuals and sites is likely to fall by the side due to difficulties of simply securing one without paying a premium, which is sad, because it works best for me visually. Not my car (well, not as a daily driver) so my minute preferences aren’t much of a big deal anyway.
The Tesla 3 and Y did get a revival round thanks to the thread. With the price cuts, they’re quite competitive. But looking at the online images of the interior (exterior is great) they just look… cheap and slapdash. And the stench of Musk was annoying to me, but even worse for the wife. So, yeah, they’re dead last for now.
The Rav4 remains the leading contender for the future possible PHEV, but despite the American range-paranoia, it’s not needed at this time, so wasn’t a likely choice for our immediate needs anyway. We’ll of course reevaluate as we hit the end of life for the remaining ICE vehicle, or in the planned 3-5 years no matter what.
So, the Ioniq has a clear lead as things stand right now.
So the discussion has shifted to purchase vs lease. Now, historically, we’ve always been purchasers, rather than leasers: see me driving my Subaru into it’s grave! But a very good point was made upthread, in that in some ways, it’s more like buying a phone than a traditional car, as the technology is changing at that speed. But still, leasing makes us both uncomfortable… probably end up on the purchase path unless you folks or others can make a convincing argument.
This is where I think the EV has a hidden advantage. The forced stops every 1.5 to 2 hours really help with my driving stamina. For me at least, I feel much better at the end of 8 hours of driving with with 1.5 hours of breaks (so 9.5 hours total on the road), than just pushing and doing the whole thing in as near to 8 hours as possible.
I know people have different road trip styles and preferences, I’m just saying that for me the forced pacing leaves me feeling better at the end of the day, than just pushing through in as short of a time as possible.
I’ve done that route a few times, and is pretty easy in a Tesla now that there is a charger in Clayton, NM. There are adequate chargers along 287 to get from Amarillo to Ft. Worth. without any scary stretches. I do agree that the drive itself is pretty dismal. The billboards along that road is what prompted my (at the time) 8 year old to comment “Texas is just guns, steak, and Jesus”.
Once the Walmarts all have DC fast chargers, and Tesla chargers are fully open to other cars, I suspect far more off-interstate routes will become trivial in most EVs.