We have a 2016 Kia Soul EV. It uses a 27kWh battery pack, quite small compared to other electric vehicles which commonly have 50+ kilowatt hours of capacity. We've used the Kia primarily as a city car on local roads with only the occasional highway trip. As a city car it has been fantastic, small and easy to park yet large enough to handle our typical trips like groceries and taking kids to school.
When new the car would get 80+ miles in city driving on a full charge. Its battery slowly degraded each year until a few months ago when it began dropping quite rapidly. OBD diagnostics can read the state of each individual cell in the battery pack, enough of the cells had failed for it to be replaced under warranty.
This post is not about the battery replacement process, though we are quite happy with Kia and the warranty support.
This post is about how useful we find an electric vehicle even with fairly limited range, and how little difference it made when its range suddenly increased. The first time we charged the car with its new battery pack its range estimate read 101 miles. Honestly I didn't even know it could display three digits.
We charge the car using solar production in excess of what the house is using. Where before we would charge the vehicle every day, we're now charging it mostly on weekends. It has triple the battery capacity but 5x above the reserve level we like to keep. It can go all week on our usual errands.
It seems somewhat strange to me but our use of the vehicle has not really changed with all this extra range. The new energy ecosystem was already compelling for us:
- Solar panels on the roof produce substantial extra energy during the day.
- Not having to pay for gasoline or oil changes further improves the economics.
- Most trips are short. On any given day we drive just a few miles.
When we talk about the fossil energy system we point out how damaging its emissions have been, and how the cost of that damage is completely externalized from production. All of that is true. Another aspect of the fossil energy system is how ruthlessly it pulls profits back up the supply chain, resulting in enormous profits at the top and almost nothing to the rest of the ecosystem. Gas stations make their profit from snacks, carwashes and oil changes, the gasoline sale merely brings people in while the supplier takes all of the profit. Methane pricing encourages spikes to ruinous prices for electricity distribution operators.
Distributed energy production and distributed ownership of energy production also results in more of the benefits being distributed. Our little electric car is part of a larger whole where one can capture and use the energy from the Sun without some entity in the middle siphoning off the benefits of doing so.
Update: a few weeks after publishing this, both of us parents had conflicting appointments and I had to drive the EV further than its previous battery could have managed. It was glorious. More range is certainly better. Still, our use of the car is mostly just short trips around town.