The ’26 Ioniq 5 EV goes back today.
Yesterday, I spent another half-hour of my life waiting to get a partial charge at a commercial “fast” charger. I spent a total of about an hour (two roughly 30 minute sessions) waiting to get some charge back into the EV during the week I had it to test drive.
If I owned this EV – which ostensibly accepts charge more quickly than some other-brand EVs – I’d be spending about four hours each month, probably, waiting for it to recover some charge. An EV takes much longer to recover a full charge – even at a “fast” charger. If you want a full charge, the wait will be much longer than half an hour, which is the time it took to recover enough charge to drive the Hyundai another 50-70 miles or so.
This is not usually explained to people by the people trying to sell people on EVs.
Another thing is that even if an EV is capable of being recharged faster, the rate at which it actually recharges is also dependent on the fast charger. These fast chargers are not all the same.
Tesla “superchargers” – the word is bracketed in air-fingers quote marks to point out the interesting way combustion engine terminology is used to make EVs and EV paraphernalia sound exciting, as when supercharged – are capable of faster-charging than some of the other not-as-fast chargers. What about those others?
Think about that. Have you ever encountered a gas pump that takes much longer to fill your tank? Very occasionally you may have to deal with one. Ninety-nine percent of the time, when you pull up to any gas pump, it will pump gas into your car’s tank very fast. It typically – it routinely- takes less than five minutes at pretty much any gas pump you pull up to, anywhere in the country.
It is not like that with EV fast chargers because they are not all Tesla-style superchargers. In fact, most are not – in most parts of the country. At least they are not in my part of the country. In my area – SW VA – the only convenient fast chargers are EV Go fast chargers, which are hilariously named in that you generally do not go very far until after you wait, unless you are willing to wait comparatively forever. Having to wait about half an hour to get charged up enough to go another 50-70 miles being a long time to wait when I could have put 15 gallons of gas – a full tank andenough to drive it about 300 miles – into my old truck in less than five minutes.
Of course, I could have waited at home.
Note that the wait still applies – and it’s also much longer; it takes (best case) about six hours or so to fully recharge an EV at home using the fastest-possible type of charging you can do at home, which is using a 240V Level II charger. That requires an electrical panel that can support an additional 240V circuit, which also requires a 40-50 amp breaker. If you have that, great – but it still means the wait. Some will argue that the wait is irrelevant because after all you are home and so presumably do not need to drive anywhere. But what if something comes up and you do? Regardless, even if you are sleeping, it’s inarguable you’re still waiting. I have used JB Weld epoxy to fix various things; it takes several hours for the JB Weld to set and overnight for it to set up enough to return the fixed thing back to service. The fact that I am home and able to do other things – including sleep – does not change the fact that I have to wait for the JB Weld to set.
It is the same with charging an EV at home. Being able to do other things while you wait is great. But let’s be honest about the wait.
I do not think EVs will ever become more than a specialty/niche segment of the market on account of the wait. Even if that “breakthrough” in battery technology we have been hearing about for tghe past decade ever happens that makes it feasible to fully recharge a battery in “only” ten minutes. That’s still twice as long as it takes to fully fill most gas tanks. How is doubling the wait time an improvement? Imagine the continuous parking lot at gas stations if it took every has-engined car ten minutes to fill up. Ten minutes scaled up is not a small thing.
Ay home? Unless every home gets upgraded to commercial high-voltage capacity, ten minute recharges arent going to happen there, either. Never mind where the electricity is going to come from and who’s going to pay for it.
So long as there is an alternative to the wait, most people aren;t going to willingly wait. Even when gas is expensive, it still saves time – which unlike money cannot be recovered. Most people are probably not going to willingly sign up for all the waiting (and the attendant planning) that comes along for the ride with an EV, no matter how quickly it can get to 60 nor how quiet it is. Most people have things they’d rather be doing than waiting. It’s why fast food is still popular, even though it has gotten as or even more expensive than home-cooking a meal.
Because it’s fast, you see.
. . .
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EVs are a solution seeking a problem. Nothing is more efficient than the act of converting gasoline into energy; conversely batteries are an inefficient way of storing energy. Like the B-model F-35, it has to drag around extra weight.
I do not have the time or desire to sit somewhere waiting for a soulless glorified golf cart to recover a partial charge. I live in the South and don’t want to be sweating for 30 minutes or longer waiting for a partial charge.
That doesn’t even cover how these things nearly weigh twice as much as a vehicle their size (a Tesla 3 weigns nearly as much as a van), go half as far (most cars and trucks can go 500 miles or more on a full tank) and can catch on fire in a devastating way that twkes thosands of gallons of water to extinguish.
They’re also plugged into the Matrix, allowing your movements (what little there are) to be tracked and can be shut down via an over the air “update.” If waiting for a stupid Windows computer to “update” is a royal pain in the posterior, why would you want to do it in a car?
EVs also eat tires for breakfast. They also have zero resale value because once batteries go through enough charge/discharge cycles, they degrade chemically and can’t hold as much of a charge.
And your range is degraded by very hot or cold temperatures.
So what if the stupid things can beat a Hellcat in a drag race? You’ll have to sit at a charger on your duff waiting to recover charge so you can get home. These vehicles as Eric shows are useless for rural areas.
The point of these things and their forced adoption is part of the plan, along with deindustrialization, restrictive land use regs (except for water and power-chugging data centers), to corrall the “eaters” into 15 minute open air prisons, leavng the rural areas to the plutocrats while we live in the pod, eat ze bugs and hopefully die since we’re the carbon these evil SOBs want to eliminate.
It’s thoroughly satanic.
AI killed EVs. The electricity is needed elsewhere because the C-suites finally being able to fire the white collar workforce comes first.
It is the American way.
Ironically, it is the white collar workforce who bought the EVs.
EV Epitaph?
2025 global sales of electric vehicles (EVs)
reached 25% of new global light-duty car sales.
Driven by a 20% year-over-year surge,
annual global EV volumes topped 20.7 million
units for the first time.
Pure internal combustion engine (ICE-only)
light cars and trucks dropped by
3 to 5 percentage points
in global market share
from 2024 to 2025.
Globally, plug-in electric vehicles—
combining Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs)
and Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEVs)
—accounted for 25%
of all new light-duty car and truck sales.
Excluding the United States,
28% to 29%
Top Countries by EV Sales Share (2025):
Norway 97%
Denmark: 69% – 71%
Singapore: 47% – 63%
Sweden: 61% – 63%
Iceland: 57% – 62%
Finland: 56%
Netherlands: 56%
China: 53% – 54%
Belgium: 43%
Richard,
All the countries you cite have all-but-outlawed gas-engined cars. This is not market driven. It is government driven. When the government stops pushing EVs, what happens? What happened here? EV market share collapsed. Why? Because while EVs have some pros, the cons outweigh the pros for most people.
His name isn’t Richard. It’s Jim — Jim Farley. And has he got a deal for you!
Look on the bright side when the parking garage full of EVs collapses due to weight or burns to the ground from a damaged battery you get to buy a new one.
A win for the economy or maybe not (broken window fallacy)!
‘Ten minutes scaled up is not a small thing’ — eric
Even setting that issue aside, there is still the weight [as opposed to wait] bloat.
Vehicles already were packing on hundreds of pounds due to saaaaaafety mandates, despite weight saving technologies such as aluminum engine blocks and even aluminum body panels for the F-150. Cars are not ‘GLP-1 friendly’ — science offers no help for these unfortunate obese creatures.
EeeVees gratuitously pack on another thousand pounds of baaaattery, exacerbating the bloat. The late Paul Fussell claimed that old-school rich folks, who didn’t care about the vagaries of automotive fashion, purchased their rides based on lowest cost per pound. Almost inevitably, they would up in an Electra 225 land yacht, or one of its peers.
The point remains that an extra thousand pounds of material has both an up-front cost and an ongoing maintenance cost for brake pads, tires and even the electrical power needed to propel the great gross honker around. This is technological regression: more weight, more cost for zero benefit other than quick 0-60 times.
In real life, technological regression doesn’t occur except under deleterious interventions, such as Govco. Wait, let me amend that claim: the NYT just published a story on how higher hood lines, such as the 47-inch hood height on a Silverado, probably are killing several hundred pedestrians a year. The market did that: punter/poseurs need the ego boost of drivin’ a big-ass truck. Yet outlawing this silly styling fad for safety’s sake doesn’t even occur to purblind regulators.
Go figure!
Well, I gotta keep rockin’ while I still can
Got a two-pack habit and a motel tan
When my boots hit the boards I’m a brand new man
With muh back to the riser, I make mah stand
— Steve Earle, Guitar Town (1986)
erratum para 3: ‘would up’ –> ‘wound up’
Jim, I drive an almost 30 year old small car in the summer and looking out the windows all you see is the door handles of the trucks around you. If it wasn’t for my antenna ball finding my car in a parking lot would be a lot harder.
Hot rodders of the 1950s ‘chopped tops’ because the ponderous old sedans of the late Thirties to mid Fifties looked too top-heavy to them. This chopped-top Buick with a six-inch slit windshield prowls the streets of my little burg, scaring children and puppies:
https://ibb.co/W4mKrPpK
Little did ancient hot-rodders suspect that insecure Americlowns of the 2020s would want to ‘sit tall,’ since they are in fact impotent to command anything else besides their giant truck in an impersonal algorithmic world.
Maybe you could get a six-inch roof lift …
Jim: “Maybe you could get a six-inch roof lift …”
Jim, back in the 60’s John Wayne had that done to one his cars, a wagon if I remember correctly. Being tall and having money means you can make the car fit you better.