The regular Ioniq 5 can be much lower and there are lease incentives right now. Does she have a place to charge at home?
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She does not. She is going to drive the car maybe 20 miles a week. 
She plans to start by using the regular outlet in her garage and see how it goes. If it’s an issue, then she will have a charger installed. I think it will work for her. It wouldn’t work my DH who drives his EV 130+ miles/day.
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Hmm… How much does that cost on a person’s electricity bill I wonder?
DH has considered a hybrid but all we would have to offer is the usual outlets in our carport. He does mostly local driving, rarely more than 20 miles from home. And there are charging hubs at many shopping and similar facilities nearby (do you pay when you charge up??)
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If she has access to a regular plug and only drives 20 miles a week then she will be totally fine. I wasn’t sure if she was in an apartment or something where there might be questionable access.
It absolutely costs on your electricity bill, but dramatically less than a gas bill. It costs us about $80/month in electricity which would probably be equivalent to at least $200 in gas. We currently use our garage to charge and have yet to invest in a super charger (I prefer the European term hyper charger). A regular outlet gets us about 20% charge overnight which is about 30-50 miles. If we go on a trip or are lax about plugging it in we go to the mall and use the hyper charger that can charge to 100% in about 30 minutes. (There’s various payment schemes associate with this as well.) I can also slow charge at my office that I rarely go to.
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Yikes! I guess it would take almost 2 days to achieve a full charge then??
That would be challenging since you would always have to think well ahead vs hitting the gas station
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Yes, I do think that it requires planning. But we would rarely use 20% in a day, does that make sense? So if you use 10% during the day and charge over night you are pretty much at homeostasis. When we went to the Cape we stopped in Plymouth to hyper charge for about 15 minutes on the way there and the way back and were fine. When we just went to Maine I took it to charge and wandered Homegoods (poor me) for 45 minutes while it charged.
We are toying with getting the hyper charger installed which would be somewhere around an $800 investment but then we could charge to 100% at home in under an hour.
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That all makes sense, yes!
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Honestly, we installed a Tesla charger in our garage and I haven’t noticed a significant change in our electric bill. Obviously we are using more electricity but it’s not noticeable (unlike the summer when we are running 3 AC units and the bill is stupid expensive).
That would probably be okay. I think on a regular outlet DH’s car charges 6 miles/hour (I will double check on that). So it would be easy enough to add 50-60 miles overnight.
Yep. Locally we have them at hotels (which you can use even if you aren’t staying there), Walmart, shopping areas. Whether you pay or not depends on the charger.
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She owns a house so no issues there. I think she would be okay even if she drove 20 miles a day.
Interesting that you have noticed a big increase in your electic bill. I guess it can vary depending on where you live.
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The $800 to install ours was totally worth it.
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I think that we are leaning in this direction and I was just being cheap!
We have solar panels so we went from getting credit every month to owing like $40/50 over the winter so I absolutely cannot complain but we’re now slowing burning down our credit so maybe we’ll just have to get a few more panels!
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We have talked about solar panels. I really need to do some research on them.
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It wasn’t long ago that it would be unlikely you get any return on investment with solar panels…but there has been significant improvements in the technology over the past several years which makes having them worth it for an increasing number of people. But you definitely do need to determine if it makes sense depending on your home location, orientation, how long you plan to live there, etc. I think we’ll continue to see solar panels improve in efficiency in the coming years…so even if it isn’t worth it today, it might be in, say, 5 years.
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We looked at Tesla solar panels but they were costly so not a great return on investment. We need to explore other options.
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We have two plug-in hybrids, a Chevy Volt and a Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid. Each gets around 30-40 miles of pure electric driving per charge, then has a backup gas engine if that goes to 0. We’ve taken the minivan on road trips from our home in North Carolina to Montana (two trips back and forth) along with a trip to south Texas, and of course Orlando. Since it’s a smaller battery pack, we just plug it into a basic 120V outlet in the garage and it charges overnight. But we also get a little over 400 miles on a full tank of gas, as well.
We barely burn any gas outside of road trips (40 miles is usually plenty unless we’re running all around town). Our power company’s energy report breaks down EV charging and it averages about $25/month for the two cars (we have a single cable that we just swap between cars).
Of course the Volt is now discontinued and I think it’s nearly impossible to find Pacifica hybrids over the last couple of years. But I’d highly recommend either…
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My biggest concern is: what about when you need roof repairs.
Now you have to pay someone to come remove your solar panels, store them safely from damage, fix the roof, and then pay someone to come put them back on.
No thanks
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Very true! I think if you are going to have solar panels installed, you probably want to make sure your roof is fairly new. If you get 25 years out of solar panel, you probably want a roof that also has 25 years on it!
I don’t personally have solar panels, nor want them. Probably wouldn’t work well for us.
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This is our top choice for new car right now. I have the regular gas model from 2018. Have you been happy with it? I think a hybrid will feel weird for us but will absolutely be more convenient!
I rented one on a work trip a few months ago. It pretty much drove like any other car. Of course, the vehicle was never used in electric mode, so I don’t know how that would have worked.
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I will say that ours were installed immediately after we put on a new roof, so yes this is absolutely a consideration and one that we waited about 3 years to have happen. That being said, when we put on our addition we did have a few panels removed and stored for a few months and it wasn’t exorbitant.
They have absolutely been a great investment for us but definitely understand it’s not for everyone. We face south and live in Massachusetts with a number of favorable incentives. We will probably add more panels and someday (hopefully!) get a battery backup.
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