Which car(s) are you referring to? I’ve only driven a few pure EVs–our Lyriq, a Blazer loaner, a Nissan Leaf, and a quad-motor Rivian R1T. Even the Nissan had that electric torque punch, the Lyriq is QUICK, and the Rivian is just stupid. Drove a top-line Sienna hybrid last week and THAT was underwhelming. Down with CVTs.
How is the Rivian stupid?
It’s a 7000# truck that runs 0-60 in 3-ish seconds. It’s seriously fun but I’m not sure about smart!
I’ve heard really good things about the rivian. I would find it hard to park in the city, though.
I guess i test drove some Toyotas and the Chrysler Pacifica. I really wanted to buy the Pacifica, but it drove like a truck. (And i was coming from a Honda Odyssey, not some nimble little thing.) Turns out i dodged a bullet on that, as it was also a very buggy car. A friend got rid of his when it literally caught on fire as he was driving his family down the highway. No one was hurt, there were obvious symptoms of trouble before it completely burst into flames, but it scared the bejesus out of him.
What’s “fun” mean to you? Serious, not snarky. Light steering? Stiff body and suspension? Hard cornering? Strong acceleration? Mongo braking?
Before hearing the answers I’ll suggest that strong acceleration is the enemy of range. If you drive an EV (whichever make, model, and trim) like a limo it’ll go a lot farther on a charge than it will if you drive it like a dragster.
At least some EVs have settings for that so you can make limo-style driving all it will do. Or at the tap of an icon, turn it into the 0-60 in 3 seconds ICE-eating monster it can be. The marketing folks will talk out both sides of their mouth, but good bet limo mode is the default setting when the car wakes up. Good bet also that all the government range tests and advertised range claims are made in limo mode.
The Lyriq at least will parallel and back-in park itself, fyi. Not sure about the Rivian. The R3 is going to be a hoot. Hot hatches for the win!
I like a responsive car. I don’t need to break records from zero to 65, but i want it to move faster as soon as i increase the gas. And i like the breaks to respond fast, too. I also like a tight turning radius, but that’s not about fun, that’s about getting into tight parking spaces and making u-turns when i overshoot my exit. 
Yeah, probably it’s all about fuel efficiency.
I think fun-to-drive is related to responsiveness. Most sports cars are fun because inputs to the steering wheel and pedals are immediate and precise. A tight suspension and loud exhaust keep the driver informed. To me, that’s all fun.
Some (most?) drivers don’t want that; they want relaxed and forgiving controls, soft suspension and a quiet engine. To me that’s boring and it removes me from the driving experience. I feel like I’m in a transportation appliance.
My wife has gone from one to the other. She had a Miata and loved the thrill of a twisty road with the wind in her hair. It was a great car for her, then.
But it wasn’t practical. She replaced it with a Plug-in Prius, from which Toyota had removed all the fun. I hated it, but she liked the higher driving position, storage, ease of entry-exit, and she enjoyed getting the most EV range possible before the engine kicked on. It was a great car for her, then.
Now she has a Tesla Model Y. It’s normally fairly sporty, but she uses the softest suspension, steering, and acceleration settings. I find it boring, but it’s a great car for her.
That’s not going to help if the space is literally too tight for it to fit, or if i can’t open the door once it’s parked. I park in tight city parking on a regular basis. Sometimes, i let my husband out before pulling into the space because there won’t be space to open a door on both sides.
I do miss the parallel parking feature of the c-max, though. It did that much better than i can.
You should test drive a pure EV–the easiest to access are likely GM (Lyriq, Blazer, Equinox in order of cost) or the Ford Mach-e. The responsiveness of any of these and the ease of one-pedal driving is crazy. I get in my 395hp truck and you have to wait for the tranny to kick down and RPMs to rise. It’s annoying.
I test drove that car. And hated it. No fun at all.
I don’t need engine noise, but i do like the car to be responsive.
Agreed!
My GF has the same car set up the same way. For the same reasons.
Not strictly about EVs, but …
I recall a study done back around 2000, maybe 2005 by car makers trying to figure out how to make cars that were “woman-friendly”. Heretofore all cars, even family haulers, had really been designed of, by, and for men. (As with so much of human history and culture). Anyhow, they were making a good faith effort at trying to break that mold at least some.
What they found was that women by and large preferred “easy to drive”. Hardly surprising. But what was surprising was that when they dug into what “easy” meant to lady folks, the answer by and large was “low physical effort.” A car with crap visibility but with light pedal and steering forces was easy, but one with big windows and a stiff brake pedal was hard. Big doors were nice to get in and out of while wearing restrictive closthing, but not if they were so heavy that it took more than minimal effort to move them. Which discovery floored a lot of the design folks.
I think a lot of the creeping electrification of everything like doors & hatches & seats came from that recognition. For sure many cars now have very light pedal and wheel forces required with lots of physical boost and computerized easing and smoothing.
Back to EVs, this sort of easy-fication of operation fits in real naturally with getting rid of the noisy stinky unreliable ICE. So IMO we’re seeing EVs carrying this new way forward more aggressively than the legacy ICE machines can.
IOW, they’re unburdened by
And so they mostly build driving appliances.
My own tastes run right alongside his, albeit I’m not nearly as enamored of loud exhaust as I was in my callow youth.
When I’m in that situation in my Tesla, I open the phone app, push a button and it backs out of the space. Now that’s easy. I love easy.
Is it worse than the standard Prius? I’m not a thrill-seeker car-wise, but I do like being able to really accelerate right off the green when I need to (in order to change lanes quickly for instance. Or when I have a sixth sense that the people around me will accelerate quickly but then move into my lane and stop accelerating.)
Dunno about seats, but electric doors and hatches are all about mothers holding bags of groceries and children wanting to touch a button to open the car – because they literally don’t have a free arm to do that task. I’m kinda shocked that came as a revelation to anyone. I guess the engineers were at work and didn’t see their wives struggle to juggle kids and bags to get into a car at the grocery store.
Anyway, my kids (both a son and a daughter) were learning to drive when we had the c-max, and they did find its responsiveness challenging. You needed to drive it fairly precisely if you wanted a smooth ride. It kept track of how efficiently you regenerated energy when you braked, and my son joked that the parents were better than the kids at the breaking mini-game. But damn that thing was fun to drive.
So my electric vehicle plans are too look for fun, easy parking, and… other practical features.
But I’m still waiting to see if my daughter will move out. I didn’t really want a third car, and i want to keep both something she can drive and a car that can haul my calling gear plus 3 passengers and their baggage for the square dance weekend i run.
Even back with my last car that didn’t have true 1-pedal driving, I’d damn near blow right through red lights when I’d be driving someone’s ICE car and forget how far they coast for when you take your foot off the gas. Now, in my car with 1-pedal driving, I’m always surprised at how good my muscle memory got that I can take my foot off the pedal and stop just about exactly where I want to. I rarely even think about it.
I really didn’t think I’d like 1-pedal, but I was wrong. It’s pretty nice.
As far as the responsiveness, in general with EVs, check the drive modes as well. I think at least some of the modes on some cars are designed to feel more like an ICE car, especially if they’re simulating moving through gears. You can probably change the mode to get rid of that, or at least change it to something sportier. Also, on the EVs I’ve driven, you can turn the regen braking down/off if you don’t want the car to slow down quite so drastically when you take your foot off the gas.
My Mustang Mach-E has the push button doors and IMO, they’re harder to open when you’re holding stuff. At least with regular door handles, you can pull them while you’re holding stuff. On the Mustang you have to push a button and then flip your hand (so your palm is facing down) to pull the handle. That makes it, at best, difficult, to do while holding something. Even if I’m holding my phone I often put it in my pocket so I don’t drop it.
And if I’m carrying groceries, there’s little chance I’m going to be able to pull my phone out, open the app and do something from there before I make it to the car. I know I’m not the only one annoyed that you can only remote start it via the app and not the fob. Someone suggested the reason for some of those things is that it makes it easier for them to turn something like remote starting to a subscription service (as it was on my Kia).
TLDR, I’d rather just have regular door handles.
I learned today that if you have a power outage while your EV (Chevy Equinox) plugged in, it sounds a very loud beeping alarm. I’m glad I was home, or that would have been an annoying 90 minutes for my neighbors.
You said it. Once when I was in my Bolt with a friend I showed him what bottom-end torque is like on an EV. When the light went green I bipped the pedal to get it moving then floored it until I was considerably above the speed limit. In half a mile the GOM* dropped two miles.
Speed also makes a difference. On the instrument panel is a green ring around the central portion. If you hit the throttle hard it turns yellow to nag you. Even if you accelerate gently at 65mph it starts turning yellow and by 70 is fully yellow.
*Guess-O-Meter, what the range estimator has been dubbed in the Bolt owner’s board I peruse.