December 14, 2022 • 47 mins
In this episode, Eddie and Green Car Reports’ John Voelcker evaluate four industry-leading EVs: the Ford F-150 Lightning, BMW i4 M50, Hyundai Ioniq5, and the Cadillac Lyriq. Then we take the winner out for an electric-powered spin.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. The Germans used to do this. They would charge
like ten thousand dollars for horsepower, you know, to get
the big engine. You'd have to spend sometimes double the
price of the car. And it was just come on, man,
Americans don't do that. Like you check a box on
(00:35):
your Chevy Nova and you get the big engine and
it's fifty bucks. And to me, that seems totally Unamericanand
used to tell me about those days. They predate me.
But I still think that value is a really big
part of the American vehicle equation. John Vulker is the
(01:01):
founding editor of a hybrid and electric car website, Green
Car Reports. He's also a frequent contributor to Car and Draw.
John has agreed to help me sort the wheat from
the chaff when it comes to electric vehicles, and his
thoughts on EVS are as well informed as they come.
(01:22):
On this special season of Car Show, we're putting cars
in four brackets to the test. This week it's EVS.
At the end of our series of highly subjective tests
and debates, we will crown a winner, the greatest award
in the history of this business, the Car Show Car
of the Year. I'm your host Eddie alternate. The four
(01:51):
cars in our EV bracket are as follows the five
hundred and eighty horsepower three hundred miles of range Ford
F one fifty Lightning, starting at fifty four thousand dollars
and escalating steeply from there. Then there's the BMWi four,
specifically in the five hundred and thirty six horsepower sixty
(02:13):
eight thousand dollars and fifty high performance trim with an
EPA range rating of two hundred and twenty seven miles.
Third up the Hyundai Ionic five, starting at forty three
thousand dollars and giving up to three hundred and twenty
horse power or three hundred and three miles of EPA
rated range. Finally, and this one's less expensive than you'd
(02:38):
guess from looking at it, the sixty three thousand dollars
Cadillac Lyric with its three hundred and forty horsepower and
three hundred and twelve miles of range in single motor guys,
and at the end of the episode will take you
for a drive in the winter, So stay tuned. Okay,
(02:59):
let's accelerate quickly. No sound, But first, a definition of
terms that are important for EV owners and even would
be ev owners. Well, probably the first one is kilowat hours.
(03:21):
A kilowatt hour is just a measure of energy, and
you can say a gallon of gasoline has roughly thirty
kilowat hours of energy in it. The car battery in
an electric car, a modern one, not a high end one,
but a modern electric car of VWID four or one
(03:44):
of the ones from Hyundai or Kia, etc. Has sixty
to seventy kilowat hours of energy. And my rule of
thumb has always been that on average, and of course
this depends on how you drive, how fast you drive,
what the temperature is, and so forth. You're looking at
about three miles of range per kilowat hour plus or minus.
(04:08):
So you may see the statistic in the brochure or
online that says, okay, this car has sixty five kilo
one hours of usable energy in its battery. Well, what
does that mean? Basically multiplied by three and you get
to that car having two hundred or more miles of range.
So the next one is EPA range. Like gasoline cars,
(04:35):
the EPA has effectively an efficiency rating for these cars,
and it's the same metrics as a gasoline car. It's
roughly half and half urban and highway now on electric
car because there's so much more efficient. Highway miles takes
(04:58):
a bigger hit on range because you're pushing airside. So
driving around town the range is much higher the EPA
range driving on the highways. If you do nothing but
seventy five miles an hour on the highway for the
whole battery, you won't get that range. The EPA range
is an average, and so you know a conventional internal
(05:20):
combustion car is going to get better highway mileage than
it does in the city. A battery electric will get
better mileage in the city, and it does on the highway. Well,
what I like to point out is that part of
it with a gasoline car is that they're enormously inefficient,
so they waste about three quarters of all that energy
in your gasoline. If you took the energy in a
(05:42):
twelve gallon tank of gasoline, which is about average, and
put it in an electric car, because battery cars are
so much more efficient, you'd have over a thousand miles
of range. You get three hundred in that gas car
because seventy five percent of that energy gets wasted as
heat or noise. Gotcha, And let's talk about charging for
a second. The new sort of buzzword is eight hundred
(06:06):
volt architecture. What does an eight hundred volt architecture mean
and why is it important? In one sentence, it means
that your battery pack can charge at twice the voltage
of the four hundred vold architecture that's been standard pretty
(06:27):
much for all high voltage packs since the first Toyota
Prius plus or minus. So you get reduced charging time
in part because of reduced internal resistance. However, the reason
that not everybody has done this is because it was
a brand new concept five years ago. There isn't the
(06:47):
parts infrastructure out there that automakers can go to and
say I need an electric air conditioner and so on,
and you have to have more powerful charging stations to
take advantage of that. So it's really the kil awot
rate that is the speed at which you can charge
that shoppers buyers should pay attention into. So what's sort
(07:11):
of the state of our charging time? Like how long
should it take to get from twenty percent charge to
eighty or ninety percent charge? Like what are the fastest
charging cars doing on the hottest rigs? Well, we have
the Porsche Taikon, and then a couple of new evis
from Hundai and Kia and Genesis. And note to shoppers,
(07:34):
you will see carmakers quote times for ten to eighty
percent or fifteen to eighty percent. They are under optimal circumstances,
the right temperature, a battery pack that's already warmed up
so it can take energy, and so on. But to
get from ten to eighty percent of a pack, which
may be as much as two hundred more miles, it
(07:57):
could be as little as eighteen minutes as compared to say,
half an hour or forty minutes for one hundred and
fifty kilowat charging, maybe even more depending on Again, Watson
asked Risks, gotcha, Well, let's move into the cars themselves.
Now that's the short version of one hundred eight slide presentation. Well,
(08:20):
we'll do that way. That'll be a detours episode. The
first TV we're going to discuss is the electrified version
of the four f one fifty full size pickup truck.
So let's start with the biggie. The biggest news probably
(08:40):
in the category since the Tesla models, and that is
the Ford F one fifty Lightning. Now, the Ford f
one fifty. The truck is sort of a car company
unto itself. They sell more of these things than any
other vehicle in the US, and so there's room within
(09:01):
the f one fifty universe four things like a raptor
four things like a lightning, because there's no real average
flyn fifty buyer. And so I found it's sort of
fascinating brand management that they decided to go into a
category that's historically, you know, the average American truck buyers
(09:24):
historically a little hostile to evs, and they like towing capability,
and they like big vas and stuff like that. So
I found it really interesting to see Ford make this move.
And what happened was they're getting new sorts of buyers.
They're getting a lot of women buyers. They're really over
indexing on women buyers because a lot of women buyers
(09:46):
claim that they hate gas stations, they feel vulnerable there,
and so they'd rather charge this thing at home. So
really really interesting vehicle. What's your take on the fund
fifty Lightning. I think it's fascinating that Ford decided to
go that way after introducing their first real EV, the
Mustang Makie. They dived right into their crown jewel line.
(10:11):
The F series line makes for a prodigious amount of
money and they make a million ish of them every year.
The fact that they were able to make an F
one fifty that is both a believable F one fifty truck,
and if I heard one thing in the launch over
(10:33):
and over, it was it can't be weird. They've made
a truck that isn't weird. You look at it and
you go, yep, that's an F one fifty. But it
has an electric powertrain, It has range that is real
and reasonable for the way Americans use. They have towing capability,
(10:54):
but most important, it is in many ways a better
F one fifty than anything else in the line. It
has the is it called the power front Mega trunk?
I forget they have some brand name for this. CHI
thought the front. Actually I avoid using the F word,
but as you wish, but this, you know, open the
(11:17):
hood and there's this gigantic space that's lockable so you
can put tools in it that you can't leave in
the bed. And it has all independent suspension, so it
rides far better than any other F one fifty And
people don't look at you weird because it's not a
weird truck. And there are ancillaries to being a large
(11:38):
battery pack on wheels, like you can power your house again,
a lot of asterisks there. But Ford, I think was
really surprised how much people took to this notion of oh,
if I have an EV, I actually have backup energy
as a swap out for my Honda generator. And I
(11:59):
know some of you in Michigan have told me fairly
frequently that the power goes off there. I have the
same problem up the mountain and the Catskills. And so
that's a material benefit of an EV that doesn't come
from a gasoline vehicle. So they have not only made
an F one fifty that is electric believable and desirable,
(12:23):
they have gotten a bucket load of people buying them,
and the new buyers some of their existing buyers. But fleets,
because the lifetime cost per mile of an electric vehicle
is so much lower than gasoline and especially diesel, that
a lot of fleets are looking hard and saying, you
(12:45):
know what, No, for the truck that goes from San
Francisco to New Orleans can't do electric right now. But
all of our local fleets think a utility truck or something.
All of those they know how long they drive. The
F one fifty electric is perfect there, and Ford has
been swamped with demand. Oh yeah, we're going forty five
(13:10):
miles in a day. There's so much excess capacity in
that battery, you know, and that energy cost versus gas
in that scenario or a lot a lot lower. But
it must be said that if you want to buy
the big battery pack in this F one fifty, it's
really expensive. It's like another ten grand. We had one
(13:30):
here to test and it was ninety four thousand dollars.
And if I'm going to spend ninety about the price
of a King Ranch, right, yeah, but the King Ranch
doesn't have that play school interior. You know. That's like
you know, off gassing, and it's the interior on these
on these vehicles is like not a ninety four thousand
dollars interior. And you know, I think four interiors are
(13:52):
a real week point. And I would be pissed if
I spent ninety four grand on an F one fifty
and I had that you know, like lego style interior
that they got going there. I'm curious to see overtime
the knicks of truck buyers who by it for the
cool points, the advanced technology, you know, first electric truck
(14:13):
in their subdivision, that kind of thing, and how many
expect luxury commends rate with the price point in a
gasoline car. Tesla was able to do it. Ford arguably
may be able to translate that into the truck world too.
We'll see, Yeah, there's a lot of will see and
(14:34):
we'll see what the second buyer set is for that
if they continue to really go gangbusters or if there's
just a lot of excitement about it. But you know,
the interesting thing about evs is when you drive a
lot of them back to back, you sort of get
the feeling that the ones you're driving are essentially obsolete
because the next generation of the vehicle that you're driving
(14:56):
is going to have more range, it's going to charge
more quickly, so you're still on the sort of sharp
part of the curve with a lot of EV tech,
I would agree with that. You know, the analogy is
where between a conventional automobile and a phone. I think
how often we replace our phones. But it is my
hope that some of that advance comes if and when
(15:20):
the car industry stabilizes after the shortages resolve, and we've
been saying this for three years now, that some of
that advance will be used to bring the price down
so that in fact, instead of sort of a I
don't know, fifty thousand dollars average or something for an EV,
it might be thirty five. And certainly GM has aspirations
(15:42):
toward that. We'll see when and how it happens. Before
we get to the GM product, I want to talk
about another vehicle that I found super great, super interesting,
and another sort of under the radar EV if you will.
That would be the BMWi four electric sedan, available in
(16:06):
two single motor rear wheel drive trims that E Drive
thirty five and the E Drive forty, and one dual
motor all wheel drive trim, my favorite I four, the
M fifty. That's when we come back. The BMW I
(16:31):
four exists within the body of the BMW four series
Grand coupe, so it looks just like a sort of
normal four door coupe whatever that means that BMW makes.
But this thing is proof that all the great engineers
of BMW have been transferred to their electric vehicles because
(16:53):
this thing is it rides better than an M three,
it's quicker than an M three in the M forty trim,
and it gets decent range. In this car I think
is so well executed and so great it makes me
like BMW's again. What's what's your take on the I four? Historically,
BMW's interesting because their first EV was this massively complicated,
(17:16):
highly engineered, extremely efficient car that Americans never really wanted
to buy, which is a small hatchback the three, based
on the bet the batteries were going to stay expensive forever.
That turned out to be absolutely not true. BMW in
twenty sixteen totally corrected and said right, no more specialized
(17:37):
cars were just going to make it as a power train.
It may have a battery, but otherwise it's totally, completely,
absolutely just like your gasoline car. Other makers from other
places don't do that so much necessarily. I like the
I four For whatever reason, I found it much more
(18:00):
convincing as an EV in its higher end two motor trim,
the fifty, rather than the forty. Maybe it's because I've
driven so many evs. The forty didn't feel significantly better
than a bunch of sort of midrange evs to me,
But the fifty was clearly the BMW you mentioned single
(18:25):
motor versus dual motor. If you want to make an
EV all wheel drive, you just put a motor on
an axle, right, So these ifs are rear wheel drive,
rear motored vehicles in their kind of entry level forms,
the thirty five and the forty, and then you make
it all wheel drive by putting another motor on the
(18:45):
front axle. Absolutely convenient. And it actually one piece of
trivia which I'll keep to one sentence, is there's an
EV coming out that has a front wheel drive version,
a rear oil drive version, and an all wheel drive version.
You can put the motor on either both ends, and
there are reasons for doing each of those things. Evs
(19:08):
are interesting because people are rearranging the shape of the
car and taking advantage of the smaller power train with
a battery under the cabin. Or some of them are
BMW is not BMW has the exact same proportions as
the gasoline car, but I like the I four the
(19:31):
The German approach to evs has been interesting because they
were really late to the game, so were the Americans,
but there were some some expeditions on the American side,
with the exception of Tesla, but that's its own show,
if not its own series. Oh yeah, absolutely, But no,
it's a great driver. It does what a BMW should
(19:53):
do and has the benefit of being really quiet, silky smooth,
just all the things that you want a luxury car
to do. Low noise, very very quick acceleration. You know,
luxury and performance are sort of intertwined now in the
public mind, I think the buying mind and the ipord
(20:15):
does that really really well? Agreed. Yeah, you know, you
also raised a good point about the package itself, Like
you don't have big engine up front with a transmission
attached to it, the battery, the energy storage is really
in the floor and situated between the axles, so you
(20:35):
have this really nice low center of gravity height that's
great physically for the car. It helps it handle really
really well. So the sort of packaging scenario, the envelope
of the car, even though it might be the same,
is really really different underneath, and that allows certain manufacturers
(20:57):
to really play with it because if all your energy
storage is in the flour and you have these two
motors on the axles, you can change the interior dimensions
of the vehicle. You can play with the space and
the proportion of the thing. And the next vehicle I
want to talk about, I think, does that really really well.
(21:18):
I'm talking about the Hyundai Ionic five. And there are
three ways to get it. Single motor rear drive format,
two motor all wheel drive trim, or with the long
range single motor setup good for more than three hundred
miles on a full charge. Now, if you look at
it in pictures, it looks like it's the size of
(21:40):
a VW Golf. And I think vehicles that are really
really well proportioned look smaller in photos than they do
in real life. And conversely, vehicles with bad proportions, bad
stylistic proportions look bigger in photos than they do in
real life. So this Hyundai Ionic five, this thing has
(22:01):
a wheelbase that's larger than the Palisade three row suv.
It looks like a small compact, but it's really really
interestingly packaged, and it's styled in a really really cool way.
It sort of looks like if you know, the launch
a Delta integrally hatchback from your it looks like a
Minecraft version of that. It's sort of like a it
(22:24):
was sort of the future we were promised in the eighties,
you know, very very cool sort of eight bits styling,
really really tremendous road presence. When you see this thing
in the road, like what the hell is at and
it's big inside, and it's quick, and it's got that
eight hundred volt charging architecture that we talked about earlier.
This thing, to me is just such a home run
(22:46):
all the way around, even if the interior, in keeping
with the eighties theme, looks like one of those cubical firms.
You know, I don't think the interior is quite that bad,
but you drive a lot more high end cars than
I do. Let's got that like, you know, that grayish
fabric and it just sort of looks like you're you're
(23:06):
working for IBM. Well, there is there is this trope that, oh,
you're driving electric car, it has no emission, so you
have to use all sustainable materials, and a lot of
a lot of vehicles, regardless of electric or gasoline, do
actually use sustainable materials? Gotcha? Now you hear a lot
of EV skeptics say, well, yeah, the cars themselves are
(23:31):
zero emissions, but the round trip on the energy is
pretty dirty because in this country, two thirds of our
electricity is produced from coal or natural gas. So if
you're driving the EV, you're driving a coal or natural
gas powered car two thirds of the time. We call
(23:52):
this the coal tailpipe argument. It is categorically false. And
here's why. In the US, with the latest data from
the Department of Energy, coal is only twenty percent of
our generation mix, and it is being replaced by a
mix of renewables or far far, far more efficient and
(24:13):
lower carbon natural gas generation. Even on the dirtiest grid
in North America. An electric car has the carbon footprint
of a forty mile per gallon passenger car, and you
will notice that we sell very few of those these days. Yeah,
that's true, but that's not exactly apples to apples, because
the well to wheel on an EV includes the mining energy,
(24:39):
which is significant and done properly. Those wells to wheels
comparisons include not only the energy, but also the manufacturing
burden of the car. So an EV definitely has more
what they call embedded carbon to build it, but that
is fairly quickly offset depending on the vehicle, how big
(25:02):
its battery is and so forth. It's from fifteen to
forty thousand miles where you cross, and because it's using
so much less energy per mile, everything after that is great,
and so we're drying the dirtiness down. Yeah, exactly. So
no question that battery electric cars have more carbon embedded.
(25:25):
But as the grids that they are charging decarbonize, an
electric car gets cleaner per miyath. And you can't say
that about gasoline. Grids all over the world are moving
to more renewables. They're swapping out coal for natural gas,
and so electric cars over their lifetime get continually cleaner.
(25:46):
But what I will say is I think Hyundai has
hit a good balance between completely duplicating a conventional interior
set of controls and going off on the far end,
as Tesla has done with the Model three and Model
Y and some of the other startups have where in fact,
(26:06):
to do very simple, basic quick things you have to
go into menus and screens and sort of expand or
drop down or find an option, which I think is
not only annoying and adiotic, but dangerous. I think Hunday
hit the right balance in terms of it's got knobs
(26:26):
for the thing you expect knobs for. My grumble about
the Rivian is that you can't adjust the air events
without going which I just ridiculous, idiotic. So you can
adjust the air events on the hunday and so on.
But it has a lot of the features that you
will use less or you will need to find in
(26:49):
a decent menu structure to my way of things. Yeah,
it does have great user interface and Hyundai Kia Genesis products.
If you want to get to the map, there's a
button for the map. If you want to get to
the radio, there's a button for the radio. There's a
volume knob, there's a seek button. And one of the
coolest adaptations from a convention no internal combustion car to
(27:11):
the Ionic five are the so called shift panels on
the steering wheel. Now in Antic five they don't control
any gear set, but what they do is increase the
amount increase or decrease the amount of regenerative braking. And
there's a term maybe we want to define. Let's sidebar
for a second, what exactly is regenerative braking? John In
(27:36):
a conventional gasoline car, when you lift off the accelerator
these days, to improve fuel economy, you pretty much glide,
but there is drag and so over time you slow
down with the engine on you're still burning gasoline. You're
still essentially wasting energy even as you slow down, and
then when you hit the brakes, more wasted energy because
(27:57):
generated by heat. In an electric car, the bulk of
the braking in day to day driving is done by
instantaneously turning an electric motor into a generator that puts
energy back into the battery. And there are various ways
to tune the generation. And if you said what we
(28:18):
call regenerative breaking at a higher level, the car slows
faster and puts more energy back into the battery. The
average is about thirty percent of the energy you use
to move the car comes back in through regenerative braking.
People have different preferences on how their EV drives. Some
(28:42):
want it to drive just like a conventional automatic car,
lift off and it just rolls. Others and often more
experienced EV drivers like a higher degree of regeneration up
to what we call one pedal driving, which means you
mostly don't even touch the brake pedal. It's one of
those things that you've got to do it to understand it, yeah,
(29:04):
and it takes a little skill, but once you master it,
I think you don't want to go back to moving
your foot between the accelerator and a brake pedal. And
also I think it's a boon too aggressive driving, because
it slows you down sort of automatically, very quickly for
a turn before you turn. And I find that I
(29:26):
use the highest regenerative setting on those paddles almost exclusively.
I don't want to be sailing around and coasting around.
I want to, like if I want to accelerate and
I want to stop, and never the twain shall meet,
as do why I consider one pedal driving to be
a benefit once you learn it. And one of the
(29:46):
great ironies I think about this Ionic five is is
probably the funkiest looking, but it's sort of the most
conventional driving, and you know, it really is satisfying and
it's terrific. When we come back another entry from Detroit.
(30:14):
I want to move on now to the last vehicle
in our set, and that is the Cadillac Lyric. The
Lyric is Cadillac's first all electric vehicle, but certainly not
its last. On the heels of the Lyric, Caddy just
announced its flagship, a customizable three hundred thousand dollars EV
(30:35):
called the Celestic. The thing that I love about the
lyric is it looks like a Barcelona chair turned into
a car. It is so amazingly beautiful when you see
them on the road, maybe not in a photo, but
when you see it from the chair height of another car.
You see these things on the road, they're just endlessly
(30:56):
fascinating and I think they're going to look good for
a very very long time. You know, they are pretty
utre in terms of their styling, but they also seem
pretty timeless too, and I think an ev like that
that is very highly styled, timelessly styled, but also isn't
going to set any land speed records. It's not super fast.
(31:19):
It's just quiet, luxurious, beautiful, great to be in, and
really kind of affordable. I mean, that's that's like the
Cadillac sweet spot. That's what that brand should be. And
I think the lyric is a great execution, a great
representation of what a modern Cadillac could and should be.
(31:40):
What's your take on the lyric? The lyric is interesting.
I'm going to defer my decision on the styling for
a couple of decades, and here's why I'm now pretty
much convinced that the Tesla models is going to be
one of the defining designs like the Citron Das or
(32:01):
you know, the those handfuls. Even though it's totally boring,
I would say classic. Okay, you couldn't say boring because
it set the mold. People thought it was a Jaguar
before people knew what a Tesla was. Everybody said, essentially, God,
(32:22):
that's beautiful, that's a Jaguar. And the models I'll I'm
gonna let you finish. But the model, as to me,
I always looked like one of those cars that they
would have in like a Chevron ad. There was like
an amalgamation of different cars that you couldn't You couldn't.
It didn't have like a recognizable grill, but you could see, oh,
maybe they're trying to make it look like a Benz
or a Jag or something. It was just like a
(32:44):
mishmash of a bunch of styling ques that yeah, it
said a little bit lower, but like, come on, man,
like go for it a little bit. Well. I think
I understand why it trended toward the Classic because Tesla
did the traditional way of launching new technology at the
top of the market, and they made a car that
(33:07):
was desirable and also had electric power or put more
cynically desirable despite being electric. But desirable is the most
important things, quick and desirable, right. Tesla built them on less,
Nissan built the Leaf. Which one do you want to own? Yeah?
(33:28):
But the Lyric I want to wait and see. I've
heard really mixed reviews on its styling. Many people, I
think yourself stunned by it, and others really disliked the
back end, the front. No one seemed to have a
trouble with the back end, that sort of slightly curved hatch.
(33:50):
Remember the first Art and Science Cadillacs two thousand and
three four. I thought that was a stunning design at
the time. It was it was blocky, it was aggressive,
it was the new direction for Cadillac. I saw one
recently and I thought, God, that looks old and dated, right,
And so I want to see if that happens with
(34:10):
the Lyric, And I think great styling needs to lead
the market a little bit. The former BMW designer very
controversial Chris Bengal. He said, our cars are going to
be on the road for thirty forty years. They need
to look good in thirty and forty years, and they
can't be too trendy. And I think that the lyric
just absolutely hits that long term style. I think it's
(34:32):
going to age very very well. And I think, you know,
it drives like an SUV should. It's quiet, it's easy,
it doesn't snap your neck bank, but you know, come on,
it's comfortable and soothing. It doesn't necessarily have all those
ev advantages. But GM has really good regent. I didn't
(34:53):
have to think twice about how the lyric would behave
getting into it fresh. Here's my question, though, You and
I and this continent are not who matters as to
whether or not that car is a success. Cadillac has
sold more vehicles in China for five years now. The
(35:14):
gap is growing and the Celestic there are three hundred
thousand dollars super low production luxury car. That's the halo
for over there. It doesn't matter whether Americans want it
or not. Yeah, agreed, the duomotor lyric is coming. And yes,
there is that connection between performance and luxury that we've
(35:38):
come to expect that the you know, the European cars
have taught us to expect, like the Bmdwes and Mercedes mgs.
And I believe the Cadillac has done certain cars that
we're going to talk about also in this series. That
beat the Germans at their own game, but here like
this one is unapologetically American and I sort of love
(35:59):
it for that. And now John and I will rank
all four cars to pick our top choice. I would
put the lyric last on our list of best EV's
(36:22):
most interesting evs of the year, because, Yeah, at the
end of the day, it's an SCUV that gets pretty
good range, it's pretty comfortable. There's kind of a lot
of those The styling sets it apart, but not as
interesting to me as the Flin fifty or the BMW
or the Ionic. So that's my fourth pick. I don't
(36:42):
know if you agree or not. I would actually put
the BMW in fourth because, given how far BMW took
the I three some of the interesting facets of that,
the I four feels to me like an over correction.
They got scared. It drives beautifully. It is a predictable BMW.
(37:09):
Where's the specialness of being an EV? Besides accelerated responds, quietness,
and weight distribution. The significance to me of the BMWi
four is that they were able to impart the BMW
values and traits onto an EV and actually exceed some
(37:29):
of those of their gas powered cars. And to me,
that's what's significant about it is that BMW offers it's
buyers the choice. You can get this with the gas motor,
you can get it with an EV. And I think
ultimately that's where we're going to be, Like, you know,
the electric motors might replace like the V six version,
and I kind of like that world where we've got
(37:51):
a bunch of different takes on sort of the same
overall envelope, the same styling statement, the same aggressive sports
dan kind of vibe. And so I'm going Lyric four
BMW I four in the third spot, even though I
really I'd swamp the Lyrica into three. Okay, but let's
(38:14):
talk about runner up in this bracket. For me, it's
the flyn fifty. I can make a convincing case for
either the Ionic or the F one fifty. I think
the Ionic is more significant globally, and I think it's
technology is more advanced. And it shows how deadly serious
(38:40):
Hyundai Kia are about electric cars, about setting themselves up
for the long run in evs and aggressively ramping up
their production. They may well be the first global car
company to introduce a three row, battery electric three hundred
(39:00):
mile suv, which thus far only Tesla has done. And
you know, we'll see where GM comes in on that.
The F one fifty, to me, because I'm an American,
is equally significant just because it was so unexpected and
(39:20):
quite frankly, I think it's so good at doing the
truck things that buyers of that segment and that vehicle expect.
I don't think anyone expected the F one fifty to
be quite as well thought through as I found it
(39:40):
to be. And I agree with all that, and I
think it is such a huge gamble and so well played,
so well executed, and a significant, significant entry because they
are going right for the heart of the market with
a technology that people still haven't embraced. And let's be honest,
(40:02):
even though you know EV sales have doubled during the pandemic,
there's still only six percent of the market. So for
four to push its chips in this way and make
this huge bet really really impressive and significant. But look
at the demand. They expected to sell forty thousand of
them a year, and they cut it off at two
(40:24):
hundred thousand orders before a single one had been built.
And sold. Yeah, I hear that. I don't know if
that's the tsunami of initial demand and if that's going
to continue, we'll see about that. The thing that keeps
it in the number two spot for me is just
the The price is so ridiculous, man, Like to get
(40:44):
the Germans used to do this. They would charge like
ten thousand dollars for horsepower, you know, to get the
big engine. You'd have to spend sometimes double the price
of the car. And it was just come on, man,
Americans don't do that. Like you check a box on
your Chevy Nova and you get the big engine and
it's fifty bucks. And to be that seems totally Unamerican.
(41:06):
Train man used to tell me about those they predate me.
But I still think that value is a really big
part of the American vehicle equation. And the people who
do value better than anybody else right now because they're
vertically integrated, because they have such an eye toward the
future is Hondai Kia Genesis. And look for the price
(41:28):
of the average car. The transaction price for the average
car now is forty eight grand, and it's inflated because
of part shortages and supply chain issues. But for around
that price. For fifty grand, you can get this incredibly stylish,
well realized, state of the art charging infrastructure, great to drive,
(41:48):
great to be, an really really huge interesting package. You
can get really a concept car for the road, if
I'm going to say it, in the Ionic five for
fifty grand, and to me, that's just like bring it on.
I take your price argument. On the other hand, you
can get a perfectly serve sabol F one fifty Lightning
(42:12):
for that same sixty grand. It won't be the top trim,
and yeah, they just jacked the base price, so I
think that has some headway yet, but I do take
your price argument. I think in the end I go
for the Ionic for two reasons, one sort of industry
analysis and one purely selfish. The industry analysis is that
(42:35):
that's a globally important car. They are selling them in
all the major markets. They're selling them here, they're selling
them in Europe, they're selling them in Asia, and it
has been well reviewed accepted all of those places, So
(42:56):
that makes it more significant than the F one fifty
versus say the Maki, which is in fact being sold
in other markets. The other, frankly, is that I and
we would prefer to drive an Eye five N one fifty.
Now that may or may not be at all relevant
to the people, is totally I mean, um yeah, I
(43:18):
would be happy to own an Ionic five. I'm really
don't see any need to drive an F one fifty Lightning.
It's overkill, man, it is. I mean, for the three
days a year that you're gonna buy a huge TV
for the Super Bowl or take some wood around, I mean,
(43:39):
you don't need an you don't need a pickup truck.
They're gargantulan. And that's one of the kind of hilarious
things about the FUND fifty to me is how performatively
oversized it is, like, oh, yeah, it's a big old truck,
but it's really good for the environment. So can you
have your cake and eat it too? Maybe, so we
(44:05):
go lyric BMW F one fifty Ionic five makes it
to the next round. Here we are in the Ionic
five to give you a sense of what it's like
to drive. Really doesn't have a ton of grip, but
it hustles. It really moves like olivs. You know. The
(44:29):
acceleration is just instantaneous, but the brakes are decent, even
if they're a little. They're not maybe aggressive enough. You
have to be intentional about your breaking in this vehicle.
One of the great and really intuitive things about this
(44:49):
Ionic five is you can adjust the level of regenerative
breaking via little paddles mounted to the steering wheel. You know,
in a normal internal combustion vehicle, those might be paddle
shifters that control the transmission. Here it adjusts how much
the car automatically slows down based on regenerative rather than
(45:14):
friction breaking in the system. And that is one of
the great advantages of evs to drive with one pedal,
and it's great for lazy people. You can just lift
off the throttle and come to a complete stop. You
don't have to go through the anguish and agony of
moving your right foot from the gas pedal to the
(45:35):
brake pedal. It doesn't for you. Okay, let's accelerate quickly,
no sound. I went started with a range of one
hundred and eighty five miles, ending with a range of
one hundred and sixty one miles, But I did not
(45:57):
go twenty four miles. I only went about fifteen, so
a high degree of inaccuracy from the projection in the computer.
But I was also driving like a complete maniac and
sapping as much juice as humanly possible. But I was
also using full regenerative breaking and here I am at
(46:21):
a complete stop using the intelligent pedal setting on the
region Next time on Car Show, The Best SUVs of
the Year with Ezra Dyer. Car Show is written and
hosted by me Eddie Alterman. It's produced by Emily Rosstek
(46:43):
and Jacob Smith. Our editor is Karen Shakerjee. Original music
and mastering by Ben Tolliday. Our executive producer is Mia Loebell.
Our show art was designed by Sean Karney and airbrushed
by Greg la Fever. Our patron saints as always are
with Tom Allad and Justine Lane. Car Show is a
(47:05):
production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and
others from Pushkin Industries, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin
Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and
uninterrupted listening for just four ninety nine a month. Look
for Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcasts subscriptions. To find more
(47:26):
Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to podcasts.
Pushkin. The Germans used to do this. They would charge
like ten thousand dollars for horsepower, you know, to get
the big engine. You'd have to spend sometimes double the
price of the car. And it was just come on, man,
Americans don't do that. Like you check a box on
(00:35):
your Chevy Nova and you get the big engine and
it's fifty bucks. And to me, that seems totally Unamericanand
used to tell me about those days. They predate me.
But I still think that value is a really big
part of the American vehicle equation. John Vulker is the
(01:01):
founding editor of a hybrid and electric car website, Green
Car Reports. He's also a frequent contributor to Car and Draw.
John has agreed to help me sort the wheat from
the chaff when it comes to electric vehicles, and his
thoughts on EVS are as well informed as they come.
(01:22):
On this special season of Car Show, we're putting cars
in four brackets to the test. This week it's EVS.
At the end of our series of highly subjective tests
and debates, we will crown a winner, the greatest award
in the history of this business, the Car Show Car
of the Year. I'm your host Eddie alternate. The four
(01:51):
cars in our EV bracket are as follows the five
hundred and eighty horsepower three hundred miles of range Ford
F one fifty Lightning, starting at fifty four thousand dollars
and escalating steeply from there. Then there's the BMWi four,
specifically in the five hundred and thirty six horsepower sixty
(02:13):
eight thousand dollars and fifty high performance trim with an
EPA range rating of two hundred and twenty seven miles.
Third up the Hyundai Ionic five, starting at forty three
thousand dollars and giving up to three hundred and twenty
horse power or three hundred and three miles of EPA
rated range. Finally, and this one's less expensive than you'd
(02:38):
guess from looking at it, the sixty three thousand dollars
Cadillac Lyric with its three hundred and forty horsepower and
three hundred and twelve miles of range in single motor guys,
and at the end of the episode will take you
for a drive in the winter, So stay tuned. Okay,
(02:59):
let's accelerate quickly. No sound, But first, a definition of
terms that are important for EV owners and even would
be ev owners. Well, probably the first one is kilowat hours.
(03:21):
A kilowatt hour is just a measure of energy, and
you can say a gallon of gasoline has roughly thirty
kilowat hours of energy in it. The car battery in
an electric car, a modern one, not a high end one,
but a modern electric car of VWID four or one
(03:44):
of the ones from Hyundai or Kia, etc. Has sixty
to seventy kilowat hours of energy. And my rule of
thumb has always been that on average, and of course
this depends on how you drive, how fast you drive,
what the temperature is, and so forth. You're looking at
about three miles of range per kilowat hour plus or minus.
(04:08):
So you may see the statistic in the brochure or
online that says, okay, this car has sixty five kilo
one hours of usable energy in its battery. Well, what
does that mean? Basically multiplied by three and you get
to that car having two hundred or more miles of range.
So the next one is EPA range. Like gasoline cars,
(04:35):
the EPA has effectively an efficiency rating for these cars,
and it's the same metrics as a gasoline car. It's
roughly half and half urban and highway now on electric
car because there's so much more efficient. Highway miles takes
(04:58):
a bigger hit on range because you're pushing airside. So
driving around town the range is much higher the EPA
range driving on the highways. If you do nothing but
seventy five miles an hour on the highway for the
whole battery, you won't get that range. The EPA range
is an average, and so you know a conventional internal
(05:20):
combustion car is going to get better highway mileage than
it does in the city. A battery electric will get
better mileage in the city, and it does on the highway. Well,
what I like to point out is that part of
it with a gasoline car is that they're enormously inefficient,
so they waste about three quarters of all that energy
in your gasoline. If you took the energy in a
(05:42):
twelve gallon tank of gasoline, which is about average, and
put it in an electric car, because battery cars are
so much more efficient, you'd have over a thousand miles
of range. You get three hundred in that gas car
because seventy five percent of that energy gets wasted as
heat or noise. Gotcha, And let's talk about charging for
a second. The new sort of buzzword is eight hundred
(06:06):
volt architecture. What does an eight hundred volt architecture mean
and why is it important? In one sentence, it means
that your battery pack can charge at twice the voltage
of the four hundred vold architecture that's been standard pretty
(06:27):
much for all high voltage packs since the first Toyota
Prius plus or minus. So you get reduced charging time
in part because of reduced internal resistance. However, the reason
that not everybody has done this is because it was
a brand new concept five years ago. There isn't the
(06:47):
parts infrastructure out there that automakers can go to and
say I need an electric air conditioner and so on,
and you have to have more powerful charging stations to
take advantage of that. So it's really the kil awot
rate that is the speed at which you can charge
that shoppers buyers should pay attention into. So what's sort
(07:11):
of the state of our charging time? Like how long
should it take to get from twenty percent charge to
eighty or ninety percent charge? Like what are the fastest
charging cars doing on the hottest rigs? Well, we have
the Porsche Taikon, and then a couple of new evis
from Hundai and Kia and Genesis. And note to shoppers,
(07:34):
you will see carmakers quote times for ten to eighty
percent or fifteen to eighty percent. They are under optimal circumstances,
the right temperature, a battery pack that's already warmed up
so it can take energy, and so on. But to
get from ten to eighty percent of a pack, which
may be as much as two hundred more miles, it
(07:57):
could be as little as eighteen minutes as compared to say,
half an hour or forty minutes for one hundred and
fifty kilowat charging, maybe even more depending on Again, Watson
asked Risks, gotcha, Well, let's move into the cars themselves.
Now that's the short version of one hundred eight slide presentation. Well,
(08:20):
we'll do that way. That'll be a detours episode. The
first TV we're going to discuss is the electrified version
of the four f one fifty full size pickup truck.
So let's start with the biggie. The biggest news probably
(08:40):
in the category since the Tesla models, and that is
the Ford F one fifty Lightning. Now, the Ford f
one fifty. The truck is sort of a car company
unto itself. They sell more of these things than any
other vehicle in the US, and so there's room within
(09:01):
the f one fifty universe four things like a raptor
four things like a lightning, because there's no real average
flyn fifty buyer. And so I found it's sort of
fascinating brand management that they decided to go into a
category that's historically, you know, the average American truck buyers
(09:24):
historically a little hostile to evs, and they like towing capability,
and they like big vas and stuff like that. So
I found it really interesting to see Ford make this move.
And what happened was they're getting new sorts of buyers.
They're getting a lot of women buyers. They're really over
indexing on women buyers because a lot of women buyers
(09:46):
claim that they hate gas stations, they feel vulnerable there,
and so they'd rather charge this thing at home. So
really really interesting vehicle. What's your take on the fund
fifty Lightning. I think it's fascinating that Ford decided to
go that way after introducing their first real EV, the
Mustang Makie. They dived right into their crown jewel line.
(10:11):
The F series line makes for a prodigious amount of
money and they make a million ish of them every year.
The fact that they were able to make an F
one fifty that is both a believable F one fifty truck,
and if I heard one thing in the launch over
(10:33):
and over, it was it can't be weird. They've made
a truck that isn't weird. You look at it and
you go, yep, that's an F one fifty. But it
has an electric powertrain, It has range that is real
and reasonable for the way Americans use. They have towing capability,
(10:54):
but most important, it is in many ways a better
F one fifty than anything else in the line. It
has the is it called the power front Mega trunk?
I forget they have some brand name for this. CHI
thought the front. Actually I avoid using the F word,
but as you wish, but this, you know, open the
(11:17):
hood and there's this gigantic space that's lockable so you
can put tools in it that you can't leave in
the bed. And it has all independent suspension, so it
rides far better than any other F one fifty And
people don't look at you weird because it's not a
weird truck. And there are ancillaries to being a large
(11:38):
battery pack on wheels, like you can power your house again,
a lot of asterisks there. But Ford, I think was
really surprised how much people took to this notion of oh,
if I have an EV, I actually have backup energy
as a swap out for my Honda generator. And I
(11:59):
know some of you in Michigan have told me fairly
frequently that the power goes off there. I have the
same problem up the mountain and the Catskills. And so
that's a material benefit of an EV that doesn't come
from a gasoline vehicle. So they have not only made
an F one fifty that is electric believable and desirable,
(12:23):
they have gotten a bucket load of people buying them,
and the new buyers some of their existing buyers. But fleets,
because the lifetime cost per mile of an electric vehicle
is so much lower than gasoline and especially diesel, that
a lot of fleets are looking hard and saying, you
(12:45):
know what, No, for the truck that goes from San
Francisco to New Orleans can't do electric right now. But
all of our local fleets think a utility truck or something.
All of those they know how long they drive. The
F one fifty electric is perfect there, and Ford has
been swamped with demand. Oh yeah, we're going forty five
(13:10):
miles in a day. There's so much excess capacity in
that battery, you know, and that energy cost versus gas
in that scenario or a lot a lot lower. But
it must be said that if you want to buy
the big battery pack in this F one fifty, it's
really expensive. It's like another ten grand. We had one
(13:30):
here to test and it was ninety four thousand dollars.
And if I'm going to spend ninety about the price
of a King Ranch, right, yeah, but the King Ranch
doesn't have that play school interior. You know. That's like
you know, off gassing, and it's the interior on these
on these vehicles is like not a ninety four thousand
dollars interior. And you know, I think four interiors are
(13:52):
a real week point. And I would be pissed if
I spent ninety four grand on an F one fifty
and I had that you know, like lego style interior
that they got going there. I'm curious to see overtime
the knicks of truck buyers who by it for the
cool points, the advanced technology, you know, first electric truck
(14:13):
in their subdivision, that kind of thing, and how many
expect luxury commends rate with the price point in a
gasoline car. Tesla was able to do it. Ford arguably
may be able to translate that into the truck world too.
We'll see, Yeah, there's a lot of will see and
(14:34):
we'll see what the second buyer set is for that
if they continue to really go gangbusters or if there's
just a lot of excitement about it. But you know,
the interesting thing about evs is when you drive a
lot of them back to back, you sort of get
the feeling that the ones you're driving are essentially obsolete
because the next generation of the vehicle that you're driving
(14:56):
is going to have more range, it's going to charge
more quickly, so you're still on the sort of sharp
part of the curve with a lot of EV tech,
I would agree with that. You know, the analogy is
where between a conventional automobile and a phone. I think
how often we replace our phones. But it is my
hope that some of that advance comes if and when
(15:20):
the car industry stabilizes after the shortages resolve, and we've
been saying this for three years now, that some of
that advance will be used to bring the price down
so that in fact, instead of sort of a I
don't know, fifty thousand dollars average or something for an EV,
it might be thirty five. And certainly GM has aspirations
(15:42):
toward that. We'll see when and how it happens. Before
we get to the GM product, I want to talk
about another vehicle that I found super great, super interesting,
and another sort of under the radar EV if you will.
That would be the BMWi four electric sedan, available in
(16:06):
two single motor rear wheel drive trims that E Drive
thirty five and the E Drive forty, and one dual
motor all wheel drive trim, my favorite I four, the
M fifty. That's when we come back. The BMW I
(16:31):
four exists within the body of the BMW four series
Grand coupe, so it looks just like a sort of
normal four door coupe whatever that means that BMW makes.
But this thing is proof that all the great engineers
of BMW have been transferred to their electric vehicles because
(16:53):
this thing is it rides better than an M three,
it's quicker than an M three in the M forty trim,
and it gets decent range. In this car I think
is so well executed and so great it makes me
like BMW's again. What's what's your take on the I four? Historically,
BMW's interesting because their first EV was this massively complicated,
(17:16):
highly engineered, extremely efficient car that Americans never really wanted
to buy, which is a small hatchback the three, based
on the bet the batteries were going to stay expensive forever.
That turned out to be absolutely not true. BMW in
twenty sixteen totally corrected and said right, no more specialized
(17:37):
cars were just going to make it as a power train.
It may have a battery, but otherwise it's totally, completely,
absolutely just like your gasoline car. Other makers from other
places don't do that so much necessarily. I like the
I four For whatever reason, I found it much more
(18:00):
convincing as an EV in its higher end two motor trim,
the fifty, rather than the forty. Maybe it's because I've
driven so many evs. The forty didn't feel significantly better
than a bunch of sort of midrange evs to me,
But the fifty was clearly the BMW you mentioned single
(18:25):
motor versus dual motor. If you want to make an
EV all wheel drive, you just put a motor on
an axle, right, So these ifs are rear wheel drive,
rear motored vehicles in their kind of entry level forms,
the thirty five and the forty, and then you make
it all wheel drive by putting another motor on the
(18:45):
front axle. Absolutely convenient. And it actually one piece of
trivia which I'll keep to one sentence, is there's an
EV coming out that has a front wheel drive version,
a rear oil drive version, and an all wheel drive version.
You can put the motor on either both ends, and
there are reasons for doing each of those things. Evs
(19:08):
are interesting because people are rearranging the shape of the
car and taking advantage of the smaller power train with
a battery under the cabin. Or some of them are
BMW is not BMW has the exact same proportions as
the gasoline car, but I like the I four the
(19:31):
The German approach to evs has been interesting because they
were really late to the game, so were the Americans,
but there were some some expeditions on the American side,
with the exception of Tesla, but that's its own show,
if not its own series. Oh yeah, absolutely, But no,
it's a great driver. It does what a BMW should
(19:53):
do and has the benefit of being really quiet, silky smooth,
just all the things that you want a luxury car
to do. Low noise, very very quick acceleration. You know,
luxury and performance are sort of intertwined now in the
public mind, I think the buying mind and the ipord
(20:15):
does that really really well? Agreed. Yeah, you know, you
also raised a good point about the package itself, Like
you don't have big engine up front with a transmission
attached to it, the battery, the energy storage is really
in the floor and situated between the axles, so you
(20:35):
have this really nice low center of gravity height that's
great physically for the car. It helps it handle really
really well. So the sort of packaging scenario, the envelope
of the car, even though it might be the same,
is really really different underneath, and that allows certain manufacturers
(20:57):
to really play with it because if all your energy
storage is in the flour and you have these two
motors on the axles, you can change the interior dimensions
of the vehicle. You can play with the space and
the proportion of the thing. And the next vehicle I
want to talk about, I think, does that really really well.
(21:18):
I'm talking about the Hyundai Ionic five. And there are
three ways to get it. Single motor rear drive format,
two motor all wheel drive trim, or with the long
range single motor setup good for more than three hundred
miles on a full charge. Now, if you look at
it in pictures, it looks like it's the size of
(21:40):
a VW Golf. And I think vehicles that are really
really well proportioned look smaller in photos than they do
in real life. And conversely, vehicles with bad proportions, bad
stylistic proportions look bigger in photos than they do in
real life. So this Hyundai Ionic five, this thing has
(22:01):
a wheelbase that's larger than the Palisade three row suv.
It looks like a small compact, but it's really really
interestingly packaged, and it's styled in a really really cool way.
It sort of looks like if you know, the launch
a Delta integrally hatchback from your it looks like a
Minecraft version of that. It's sort of like a it
(22:24):
was sort of the future we were promised in the eighties,
you know, very very cool sort of eight bits styling,
really really tremendous road presence. When you see this thing
in the road, like what the hell is at and
it's big inside, and it's quick, and it's got that
eight hundred volt charging architecture that we talked about earlier.
This thing, to me is just such a home run
(22:46):
all the way around, even if the interior, in keeping
with the eighties theme, looks like one of those cubical firms.
You know, I don't think the interior is quite that bad,
but you drive a lot more high end cars than
I do. Let's got that like, you know, that grayish
fabric and it just sort of looks like you're you're
(23:06):
working for IBM. Well, there is there is this trope that, oh,
you're driving electric car, it has no emission, so you
have to use all sustainable materials, and a lot of
a lot of vehicles, regardless of electric or gasoline, do
actually use sustainable materials? Gotcha? Now you hear a lot
of EV skeptics say, well, yeah, the cars themselves are
(23:31):
zero emissions, but the round trip on the energy is
pretty dirty because in this country, two thirds of our
electricity is produced from coal or natural gas. So if
you're driving the EV, you're driving a coal or natural
gas powered car two thirds of the time. We call
(23:52):
this the coal tailpipe argument. It is categorically false. And
here's why. In the US, with the latest data from
the Department of Energy, coal is only twenty percent of
our generation mix, and it is being replaced by a
mix of renewables or far far, far more efficient and
(24:13):
lower carbon natural gas generation. Even on the dirtiest grid
in North America. An electric car has the carbon footprint
of a forty mile per gallon passenger car, and you
will notice that we sell very few of those these days. Yeah,
that's true, but that's not exactly apples to apples, because
the well to wheel on an EV includes the mining energy,
(24:39):
which is significant and done properly. Those wells to wheels
comparisons include not only the energy, but also the manufacturing
burden of the car. So an EV definitely has more
what they call embedded carbon to build it, but that
is fairly quickly offset depending on the vehicle, how big
(25:02):
its battery is and so forth. It's from fifteen to
forty thousand miles where you cross, and because it's using
so much less energy per mile, everything after that is great,
and so we're drying the dirtiness down. Yeah, exactly. So
no question that battery electric cars have more carbon embedded.
(25:25):
But as the grids that they are charging decarbonize, an
electric car gets cleaner per miyath. And you can't say
that about gasoline. Grids all over the world are moving
to more renewables. They're swapping out coal for natural gas,
and so electric cars over their lifetime get continually cleaner.
(25:46):
But what I will say is I think Hyundai has
hit a good balance between completely duplicating a conventional interior
set of controls and going off on the far end,
as Tesla has done with the Model three and Model
Y and some of the other startups have where in fact,
(26:06):
to do very simple, basic quick things you have to
go into menus and screens and sort of expand or
drop down or find an option, which I think is
not only annoying and adiotic, but dangerous. I think Hunday
hit the right balance in terms of it's got knobs
(26:26):
for the thing you expect knobs for. My grumble about
the Rivian is that you can't adjust the air events
without going which I just ridiculous, idiotic. So you can
adjust the air events on the hunday and so on.
But it has a lot of the features that you
will use less or you will need to find in
(26:49):
a decent menu structure to my way of things. Yeah,
it does have great user interface and Hyundai Kia Genesis products.
If you want to get to the map, there's a
button for the map. If you want to get to
the radio, there's a button for the radio. There's a
volume knob, there's a seek button. And one of the
coolest adaptations from a convention no internal combustion car to
(27:11):
the Ionic five are the so called shift panels on
the steering wheel. Now in Antic five they don't control
any gear set, but what they do is increase the
amount increase or decrease the amount of regenerative braking. And
there's a term maybe we want to define. Let's sidebar
for a second, what exactly is regenerative braking? John In
(27:36):
a conventional gasoline car, when you lift off the accelerator
these days, to improve fuel economy, you pretty much glide,
but there is drag and so over time you slow
down with the engine on you're still burning gasoline. You're
still essentially wasting energy even as you slow down, and
then when you hit the brakes, more wasted energy because
(27:57):
generated by heat. In an electric car, the bulk of
the braking in day to day driving is done by
instantaneously turning an electric motor into a generator that puts
energy back into the battery. And there are various ways
to tune the generation. And if you said what we
(28:18):
call regenerative breaking at a higher level, the car slows
faster and puts more energy back into the battery. The
average is about thirty percent of the energy you use
to move the car comes back in through regenerative braking.
People have different preferences on how their EV drives. Some
(28:42):
want it to drive just like a conventional automatic car,
lift off and it just rolls. Others and often more
experienced EV drivers like a higher degree of regeneration up
to what we call one pedal driving, which means you
mostly don't even touch the brake pedal. It's one of
those things that you've got to do it to understand it, yeah,
(29:04):
and it takes a little skill, but once you master it,
I think you don't want to go back to moving
your foot between the accelerator and a brake pedal. And
also I think it's a boon too aggressive driving, because
it slows you down sort of automatically, very quickly for
a turn before you turn. And I find that I
(29:26):
use the highest regenerative setting on those paddles almost exclusively.
I don't want to be sailing around and coasting around.
I want to, like if I want to accelerate and
I want to stop, and never the twain shall meet,
as do why I consider one pedal driving to be
a benefit once you learn it. And one of the
(29:46):
great ironies I think about this Ionic five is is
probably the funkiest looking, but it's sort of the most
conventional driving, and you know, it really is satisfying and
it's terrific. When we come back another entry from Detroit.
(30:14):
I want to move on now to the last vehicle
in our set, and that is the Cadillac Lyric. The
Lyric is Cadillac's first all electric vehicle, but certainly not
its last. On the heels of the Lyric, Caddy just
announced its flagship, a customizable three hundred thousand dollars EV
(30:35):
called the Celestic. The thing that I love about the
lyric is it looks like a Barcelona chair turned into
a car. It is so amazingly beautiful when you see
them on the road, maybe not in a photo, but
when you see it from the chair height of another car.
You see these things on the road, they're just endlessly
(30:56):
fascinating and I think they're going to look good for
a very very long time. You know, they are pretty
utre in terms of their styling, but they also seem
pretty timeless too, and I think an ev like that
that is very highly styled, timelessly styled, but also isn't
going to set any land speed records. It's not super fast.
(31:19):
It's just quiet, luxurious, beautiful, great to be in, and
really kind of affordable. I mean, that's that's like the
Cadillac sweet spot. That's what that brand should be. And
I think the lyric is a great execution, a great
representation of what a modern Cadillac could and should be.
(31:40):
What's your take on the lyric? The lyric is interesting.
I'm going to defer my decision on the styling for
a couple of decades, and here's why I'm now pretty
much convinced that the Tesla models is going to be
one of the defining designs like the Citron Das or
(32:01):
you know, the those handfuls. Even though it's totally boring,
I would say classic. Okay, you couldn't say boring because
it set the mold. People thought it was a Jaguar
before people knew what a Tesla was. Everybody said, essentially, God,
(32:22):
that's beautiful, that's a Jaguar. And the models I'll I'm
gonna let you finish. But the model, as to me,
I always looked like one of those cars that they
would have in like a Chevron ad. There was like
an amalgamation of different cars that you couldn't You couldn't.
It didn't have like a recognizable grill, but you could see, oh,
maybe they're trying to make it look like a Benz
or a Jag or something. It was just like a
(32:44):
mishmash of a bunch of styling ques that yeah, it
said a little bit lower, but like, come on, man,
like go for it a little bit. Well. I think
I understand why it trended toward the Classic because Tesla
did the traditional way of launching new technology at the
top of the market, and they made a car that
(33:07):
was desirable and also had electric power or put more
cynically desirable despite being electric. But desirable is the most
important things, quick and desirable, right. Tesla built them on less,
Nissan built the Leaf. Which one do you want to own? Yeah?
(33:28):
But the Lyric I want to wait and see. I've
heard really mixed reviews on its styling. Many people, I
think yourself stunned by it, and others really disliked the
back end, the front. No one seemed to have a
trouble with the back end, that sort of slightly curved hatch.
(33:50):
Remember the first Art and Science Cadillacs two thousand and
three four. I thought that was a stunning design at
the time. It was it was blocky, it was aggressive,
it was the new direction for Cadillac. I saw one
recently and I thought, God, that looks old and dated, right,
And so I want to see if that happens with
(34:10):
the Lyric, And I think great styling needs to lead
the market a little bit. The former BMW designer very
controversial Chris Bengal. He said, our cars are going to
be on the road for thirty forty years. They need
to look good in thirty and forty years, and they
can't be too trendy. And I think that the lyric
just absolutely hits that long term style. I think it's
(34:32):
going to age very very well. And I think, you know,
it drives like an SUV should. It's quiet, it's easy,
it doesn't snap your neck bank, but you know, come on,
it's comfortable and soothing. It doesn't necessarily have all those
ev advantages. But GM has really good regent. I didn't
(34:53):
have to think twice about how the lyric would behave
getting into it fresh. Here's my question, though, You and
I and this continent are not who matters as to
whether or not that car is a success. Cadillac has
sold more vehicles in China for five years now. The
(35:14):
gap is growing and the Celestic there are three hundred
thousand dollars super low production luxury car. That's the halo
for over there. It doesn't matter whether Americans want it
or not. Yeah, agreed, the duomotor lyric is coming. And yes,
there is that connection between performance and luxury that we've
(35:38):
come to expect that the you know, the European cars
have taught us to expect, like the Bmdwes and Mercedes mgs.
And I believe the Cadillac has done certain cars that
we're going to talk about also in this series. That
beat the Germans at their own game, but here like
this one is unapologetically American and I sort of love
(35:59):
it for that. And now John and I will rank
all four cars to pick our top choice. I would
put the lyric last on our list of best EV's
(36:22):
most interesting evs of the year, because, Yeah, at the
end of the day, it's an SCUV that gets pretty
good range, it's pretty comfortable. There's kind of a lot
of those The styling sets it apart, but not as
interesting to me as the Flin fifty or the BMW
or the Ionic. So that's my fourth pick. I don't
(36:42):
know if you agree or not. I would actually put
the BMW in fourth because, given how far BMW took
the I three some of the interesting facets of that,
the I four feels to me like an over correction.
They got scared. It drives beautifully. It is a predictable BMW.
(37:09):
Where's the specialness of being an EV? Besides accelerated responds, quietness,
and weight distribution. The significance to me of the BMWi
four is that they were able to impart the BMW
values and traits onto an EV and actually exceed some
(37:29):
of those of their gas powered cars. And to me,
that's what's significant about it is that BMW offers it's
buyers the choice. You can get this with the gas motor,
you can get it with an EV. And I think
ultimately that's where we're going to be, Like, you know,
the electric motors might replace like the V six version,
and I kind of like that world where we've got
(37:51):
a bunch of different takes on sort of the same
overall envelope, the same styling statement, the same aggressive sports
dan kind of vibe. And so I'm going Lyric four
BMW I four in the third spot, even though I
really I'd swamp the Lyrica into three. Okay, but let's
(38:14):
talk about runner up in this bracket. For me, it's
the flyn fifty. I can make a convincing case for
either the Ionic or the F one fifty. I think
the Ionic is more significant globally, and I think it's
technology is more advanced. And it shows how deadly serious
(38:40):
Hyundai Kia are about electric cars, about setting themselves up
for the long run in evs and aggressively ramping up
their production. They may well be the first global car
company to introduce a three row, battery electric three hundred
(39:00):
mile suv, which thus far only Tesla has done. And
you know, we'll see where GM comes in on that.
The F one fifty, to me, because I'm an American,
is equally significant just because it was so unexpected and
(39:20):
quite frankly, I think it's so good at doing the
truck things that buyers of that segment and that vehicle expect.
I don't think anyone expected the F one fifty to
be quite as well thought through as I found it
(39:40):
to be. And I agree with all that, and I
think it is such a huge gamble and so well played,
so well executed, and a significant, significant entry because they
are going right for the heart of the market with
a technology that people still haven't embraced. And let's be honest,
(40:02):
even though you know EV sales have doubled during the pandemic,
there's still only six percent of the market. So for
four to push its chips in this way and make
this huge bet really really impressive and significant. But look
at the demand. They expected to sell forty thousand of
them a year, and they cut it off at two
(40:24):
hundred thousand orders before a single one had been built.
And sold. Yeah, I hear that. I don't know if
that's the tsunami of initial demand and if that's going
to continue, we'll see about that. The thing that keeps
it in the number two spot for me is just
the The price is so ridiculous, man, Like to get
(40:44):
the Germans used to do this. They would charge like
ten thousand dollars for horsepower, you know, to get the
big engine. You'd have to spend sometimes double the price
of the car. And it was just come on, man,
Americans don't do that. Like you check a box on
your Chevy Nova and you get the big engine and
it's fifty bucks. And to be that seems totally Unamerican.
(41:06):
Train man used to tell me about those they predate me.
But I still think that value is a really big
part of the American vehicle equation. And the people who
do value better than anybody else right now because they're
vertically integrated, because they have such an eye toward the
future is Hondai Kia Genesis. And look for the price
(41:28):
of the average car. The transaction price for the average
car now is forty eight grand, and it's inflated because
of part shortages and supply chain issues. But for around
that price. For fifty grand, you can get this incredibly stylish,
well realized, state of the art charging infrastructure, great to drive,
(41:48):
great to be, an really really huge interesting package. You
can get really a concept car for the road, if
I'm going to say it, in the Ionic five for
fifty grand, and to me, that's just like bring it on.
I take your price argument. On the other hand, you
can get a perfectly serve sabol F one fifty Lightning
(42:12):
for that same sixty grand. It won't be the top trim,
and yeah, they just jacked the base price, so I
think that has some headway yet, but I do take
your price argument. I think in the end I go
for the Ionic for two reasons, one sort of industry
analysis and one purely selfish. The industry analysis is that
(42:35):
that's a globally important car. They are selling them in
all the major markets. They're selling them here, they're selling
them in Europe, they're selling them in Asia, and it
has been well reviewed accepted all of those places, So
(42:56):
that makes it more significant than the F one fifty
versus say the Maki, which is in fact being sold
in other markets. The other, frankly, is that I and
we would prefer to drive an Eye five N one fifty.
Now that may or may not be at all relevant
to the people, is totally I mean, um yeah, I
(43:18):
would be happy to own an Ionic five. I'm really
don't see any need to drive an F one fifty Lightning.
It's overkill, man, it is. I mean, for the three
days a year that you're gonna buy a huge TV
for the Super Bowl or take some wood around, I mean,
(43:39):
you don't need an you don't need a pickup truck.
They're gargantulan. And that's one of the kind of hilarious
things about the FUND fifty to me is how performatively
oversized it is, like, oh, yeah, it's a big old truck,
but it's really good for the environment. So can you
have your cake and eat it too? Maybe, so we
(44:05):
go lyric BMW F one fifty Ionic five makes it
to the next round. Here we are in the Ionic
five to give you a sense of what it's like
to drive. Really doesn't have a ton of grip, but
it hustles. It really moves like olivs. You know. The
(44:29):
acceleration is just instantaneous, but the brakes are decent, even
if they're a little. They're not maybe aggressive enough. You
have to be intentional about your breaking in this vehicle.
One of the great and really intuitive things about this
(44:49):
Ionic five is you can adjust the level of regenerative
breaking via little paddles mounted to the steering wheel. You know,
in a normal internal combustion vehicle, those might be paddle
shifters that control the transmission. Here it adjusts how much
the car automatically slows down based on regenerative rather than
(45:14):
friction breaking in the system. And that is one of
the great advantages of evs to drive with one pedal,
and it's great for lazy people. You can just lift
off the throttle and come to a complete stop. You
don't have to go through the anguish and agony of
moving your right foot from the gas pedal to the
(45:35):
brake pedal. It doesn't for you. Okay, let's accelerate quickly,
no sound. I went started with a range of one
hundred and eighty five miles, ending with a range of
one hundred and sixty one miles, But I did not
(45:57):
go twenty four miles. I only went about fifteen, so
a high degree of inaccuracy from the projection in the computer.
But I was also driving like a complete maniac and
sapping as much juice as humanly possible. But I was
also using full regenerative breaking and here I am at
(46:21):
a complete stop using the intelligent pedal setting on the
region Next time on Car Show, The Best SUVs of
the Year with Ezra Dyer. Car Show is written and
hosted by me Eddie Alterman. It's produced by Emily Rosstek
(46:43):
and Jacob Smith. Our editor is Karen Shakerjee. Original music
and mastering by Ben Tolliday. Our executive producer is Mia Loebell.
Our show art was designed by Sean Karney and airbrushed
by Greg la Fever. Our patron saints as always are
with Tom Allad and Justine Lane. Car Show is a
(47:05):
production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and
others from Pushkin Industries, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin
Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and
uninterrupted listening for just four ninety nine a month. Look
for Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcasts subscriptions. To find more
(47:26):
Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to podcasts.
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.