I had a rental car for three days last week. I like to try new things, so when Avis offered me the option of an electric vehicle, I took it. I didn’t think it could be all that different from a regular car and there seems to be a trend toward more favorable parking spaces for the electric vehicles, so I wanted to give it a shot.
The first time I remember seeing an electric car was in maybe 1983, when one of the teachers would run an orange extension cord to an ugly hatchback the color of dusty coffee. It was the kind of tableau that you couldn’t make fun of because mockery would have been lily-gilding on this little diorama of self-righteous sadness.
Electric cars seemed to go away for a long time after that. Eventually along came the Prius, which a friend of mine who owned an early model described as “powered mostly by smugness.” I disliked the Prius, but it was because the Prius and I are shapes that clash more than they coordinate, not because of the electrical part. I don’t especially care about cars; that goes doubly so for the parts that make the car go, rather than the parts a normal human would customarily interact with, like the seats and the control interface and the exterior. A long-waisted person in a Prius, speaking personally, experiences the sensation of riding in a luge, or perhaps an enclosed recumbent bicycle.
The Ionic 5 that I rented, driving-wise, delighted me. The driver-assist features, like automatically staying in your lane or slowing down when the driver in front of you does, felt for the first time in my experience like the car was actually trying to help me, rather than pointedly clearing its throat and nudging me back to paying attention. The pickup is shockingly good. Most compellingly, as a person who does not hear well, the reduction in noise from a normal engine is astonishing. I could hear the radio. I could hear the other people in the car talking. I hadn’t previously realized how much noise a car engine makes.
Not that the car is without problems. I hate everything about the way you interface with the car: the oversized TV screen, the completely unacceptable gear shift, the climate controls, the inability to turn on the seat heater without a second Russian officer to turn her missile key at the same time. The biggest problem was foreshadowed as I drove it off the Avis lot, jocularly wondering aloud about whether or not I was required to bring it back full.
Then I tried to charge it.
I guess I had sort of assumed that charging an electric car was simply a matter of pulling up to one of those convenient parking spaces and jacking in for a few minutes. It is not. At least, it is not that simple in the Florida panhandle when you are doing it for the first time. You learn, for example, that there are two kinds of chargers. One of them charges the car very slowly. Like “15 minutes to go from 8% battery to 29% battery” slowly. The other kind charges very, very slowly. That one took 17 minutes to go from 6% to 8% before I got around to reading the pump (or whatever) that indicated the other one was faster. So I got a little less than a third of a tank (so to speak) in 30-plus minutes, but for $9.
I don’t know how to feel about this specific part of the future. Trying to figure out what that improves on, and in which direction, is the kind of story problem that makes me glad I’ve always been too pretty for math.