Can anyone get gas at Costco or only members? I thought it was limited to members & have therefore never even considered stopping at one. BJs makes you swipe your membership card/enter the # at the pump; I just assumed that all of the membership clubs worked the same way.
Who has noise restrictions on an as-purchased car? ICEs are pretty quiet & EVs still make some noise from the tires.
Lots of places restrict engine/ Jake brakes on trucks but I’ve never seen a limitation on cars; though there should be limitations on fart can exhausts!
Every time I pull into Costco I get all smug about not needing to buy gas.
I also wouldn’t be too concerned about old gas. It takes me from October to April to burn off one tank of gas in my motorcycle, and I’ve never had any problem. I don’t put in any kind of stabilizer.
I only drive my ICE truck about 1200 miles per year, so 3-4 months between gas. The longest I went on one tank was from October 2020 to August 2021, and it was fine.
Yes, you have to use your membership club, doesn’t mean there aren’t a LOT of people with memberships, heck, prior to the PHEV, we calculated that the gas savings were paying for our Costco membership with the shopping being the the “bonus” to us.
This came up in a British / EU forum, I have no idea of it’s veracity, but I vaguely recall something similar being mentioned in a later Top Gear or similar program.
Is the difference in gas price between Costco and the nearest cheapie gas station all that much? Even if it’s ten cents/gallon you’re saving maybe $1.20 not including the bit of gas you burn waiting around. Doesn’t seem worth the time to me.
I’d say around $0.20+ per gallon compared to the places near us, and with decent gas, not some cheapie “Sleazy Dan’s Fell-outta-dah-back-of-da-tanker Gas”.
Not to mention, it’s actually closer to me than many gas stations, and the closest pumps to me are all of the higher cost option.
That aside, no, I absolutely pick “off times” as suggested to go, because I agree, waiting 20 minutes to save $3.00 isn’t a good tradeoff.
Also, the cheapest non-Costco gas stations only offer the best price for cash, while Costco is credit/debit card only. And while the Costco stores are now verifying at the entrance that the card belongs to the person visiting (previously people would visit Costco with a friend’s card), I don’t think anyone is checking at the gas pumps.
Our EV comes with a way to tame that down when you don’t want that performance. I’m surprised others don’t. Some modern sport cars come with a chill/tour mode and some motorcycles are coming with the option as well.
I was quite surprised to hear about the demand for Costco gas as I’m not a member and never have paid attention to it. There’s one a couple of blocks from my office and when I went to lunch, all the pumps were empty. When I came back from lunch, all the pumps were occupied and each one had 2 or 3 waiting. Timing is everything, I guess.
What drive mode are you using. I keep mine in (off the top of my head) Engage, with 1 Pedal turned on. I’ve never had the feeling that the car is getting away from me. My Kia Niro, on the other hand, would take off pretty quickly. In fact, if there was any water on the ground, the wheels would spin if I wasn’t careful.
If you don’t have 1 Pedal turned on, try it. It means the car drastically slows down when you lift your foot off the accelerator. That might make it a bit easier to moderate since you’re not jumping back and forth between the gas and brake.
I love one pedal driving. I rarely have to hit the brakes. Now when I hop in our old Subaru (it mainly sits these days), I’m often dismayed why it isn’t slowing down when I let off on the gas.
One of the advantages of having a Hybrid is less time at the pump. This was true with my Prius and now with my PHEV Pacifica which is nearing 90000 miles. I too use Costco gas and fortunately, because of other activities I am doing near it, I am always getting gas at non-peak hours.
Also, I have recently figured out the optimal way to get the best charging for my daily routine. The Pacifica only gets about 30 miles on the battery, but I have managed to find several free level 2 chargers that I can use before my return trip and I can get over 60 ev miles in a day with the right timing and planning. I am still hesitant to go electric with my other vehicle since that is the one used for the long trips, but it is in the back of my mind…
Unbridled, without one pedal driving, which makes me seasick.
No, it’s not the car’s fault that it’s dangerously fast, it’s entirely mine. It’s hard to resist. If I’m first at a red light that turns green, I’ll hold back so that I don’t look like a butthole, but I’m still way, way, out-accelerating everything else there.
But if no one’s around to criticise me mentally, I floor it. And it’s fun. And if I’m on a two lane highway and need to pass, I floor it, and that’s probably the only circumstance that others might say I’m an asshole, even though I’m not really an asshole, but just overtake quickly. Strictly speaking, hitting 90 mph while passing is illegal, but I let it coast back down to 60 mph or whatever the local speed approximately is.
I don’t really mean to get to 90, it’s just the speed the car’s at by time I’m done overtaking. I can work on moderating that. The fact that I think it might kill me if I don’t moderate my behavior is evidence that I acknowledge the problem. Thankfully, in day to day driving, I’m just another car stuck in the same traffic as everyone else, so this isn’t a quotidian issue.
So, I don’t get your comment about this being your last EV because they are dangerous. You acknowledge there are easy, and sane ways to make them less dangerous, but you can’t control yourself? I asked if you were being sarcastic and you said no.
I have motorcycles that are crazy powerful. But, I know of ways to contain and control that power (it’s basically called self control). Are you truly saying that if given an individual transportation mode that is powerful AND there are easy ways to keep them safe, you cannot control yourself from unleashing the full power?
I admit that I unleash the full powers of my motos, but I do that in places I know that I can do so. And I love it.
Finished the road trip as planned. 580 miles with very short side trip to the chargers - no difference from the adjacent gas stations. Three stops, could have squeezed it in two stops (starting at 90%) but would been on fumes (electrons?) at the finish. Between a breakfest sandwich, sushi roll lunch, and a major bathroom dump (not from the sushi); the car was ready to go when I got back. Fast chargers at Electrify America. In practice, not a whole lot of difference between the 150 and 350 KW plugs. The 150s seem to overperform at 170kw, the 350s get only to the 220kw range.
Ah, yes, the sarcasm. You’d quoted the whole passage, rather than only the bit about this being my last EV, so I misunderstood. Yes, only the part about this being my last EV is sarcastic. The whole bit is obviously humor, though.
So why not use a different mode? You’re using the most aggressive mode and then worried you’re going to get into an accident because it’s too aggressive.
At least turn on one pedal and try that out. I know it’s really odd to get used to, but after a day or two you’ll have no problems at all*. Like I said before, with that turned on, you don’t have to move back to the brake to get the car under control, just take your foot off the accelerator.
If not that, one of the other drive modes.
*One problem, creeping forward can be tricky. For example, trying to make sure I’m far enough into my garage without going all Kool-Aid man through the back wall takes some practice.
Yes, except for your asterisk. Ridiculously easy to control in our EV.
I love one pedal driving. Driving up 420 or I5 through Seattle used to give me leg cramps going back and forth. Now, it’s easy. And that assumes I’m not using the adaptive cruise (I typically don’t…some day I might fully trust it).
So, i didn’t have concrete EV plans, but i desperately needed a rental car, and Avis was willing to give me an EV. So i took it, from the Norfolk VA airport to the Charlottesville VA airport.
They have it to me with only 108 miles in the battery.
It’s actually a huge pain to drive an EV on road trip when you are completely unprepared. There’s a learning curve for finding changing spots.
I downloaded a random app (damn, i deleted it yesterday and didn’t remember its name). It didn’t work well on a phone, and really wanted you to use a laptop with a big screen. I was spending a night with friends, so I did, and filtered out the fast charging places that weren’t at dealerships and stuff, and found 3 reasonably close and in the right direction. They suggested that one of the malls was much nicer than the other two. So I went there. Had trouble finding the chargers. All 4 were in use. Waited for one to clear. Plugged in. More than an hour later, i had a nominal 240 miles in the battery for my 180 mile trip. Pricing was opaque. (I looked at my credit card bill later. $55 for 150 miles. franchise is EVGO) The road to my hotel at the other end was mostly 70mph. At some point, i realized i wasn’t going to make it on one charge, and i no longer had a laptop i could use. So i put it in cruise control and slowed down to 55. I limped into my hotel with 30 miles left. Fortunately, the event i was going to was at the insurance institute for highway safety/highway loss data institute, and i gambled that they would have a charger i could use. I won that gamble. But i did have to download another app to use it. That app was buggy, and i had some trouble getting it to start, and ultimately it didn’t charge me for the second day of charging. But i put another nominal 220 miles for what should have been about $11 if they’d charged me. I could easily have finished my trip with my first $5 charge, but wanted to leave the battery full-ish for the next renter.
All in all, it was manageable. It would have been fine if I’d owned it and spent a little time planning. I enjoyed driving it, and the car would have been great for my normal driving and charging at home. Some little kia, maybe a Kia Niro?
