Electric car.

I got an electric car, specifically a 2024 Hyundai Ioniq 5. It’s not a hybrid — it’s 100% you-gotta-plug-it-in-and-charge-it electric. Stacey and I had been sharing one car (a not-electric Mazda 3) for several years. Which is fine most of the time. Neither of us drive all that much, and most of the time when we do drive somewhere we’re together. But Birmingham, Alabama, doesn’t offer much in the way of mass transit. So on the occasion we do need to drive different places…

I got an electric car, specifically a 2024 Hyundai Ioniq 5. It’s not a hybrid — it’s 100% you-gotta-plug-it-in-and-charge-it electric.

Stacey and I had been sharing one car (a not-electric Mazda 3) for several years. Which is fine most of the time. Neither of us drive all that much, and most of the time when we do drive somewhere we’re together. But Birmingham, Alabama, doesn’t offer much in the way of mass transit. So on the occasion we do need to drive different places at the same time, it’s a hassle.

The Mazda has been paid off for years now, so we decided to finally become a two-car household again, and we wanted that second car to be electric. Stacey put me in charge of doing research and test drives, and I pretty quickly settled on the Ioniq 5. My second favorite was the smaller, less expensive Chevy Bolt EUV. But the big drawback with that one is it doesn’t charge very quickly, so it makes road trips difficult if not impossible. In for a penny, in for a pound, we bought the larger, more expensive (but also nicer and faster charging) Ioniq.

After settling on the Ioniq 5, I decided I wanted a low-mileage 2024 model. Those are generally significantly less expensive than a new one, but are otherwise like new. Turns out a lot of people in the market for an electric vehicle apparently came to the same conclusion, because it’s hard to find a low-mileage 2024 Ioniq 5, and if you do find one it won’t be on the market for long.

We just missed a locally-available Ioniq 5, but then we found one about two hours away from us, just north of Atlanta, Georgia. We spent our New Year’s Eve rushing over to Georgia and filling out a bunch of paperwork. Then we parted ways. Stacey drove home in the Mazda, and I drove home in our new (slightly used) Ioniq 5.

Because of the rushed purchasing process, I didn’t have time to do as much research as I’d intended. I mean, the Ioniq 5 has generally good reviews (it’s one of Motortrend’s favorite EVs), and it has a CCS1 charge port, and it’s fun to drive… but that’s about all I knew about it when we bought it.

After living with the Ioniq for a few months, I’m digging it. I’m glad Stacey and I went electric. The Ioniq 5 is a cool car. But I’ll say that it’s cool in the way I imagine a Macintosh computer was cool in 1985 — it’s super nice and super useful, but it’s also cutting-edge enough that you’re kind of own your own with some stuff.

The obvious area this comes into play is charging. If you have an old-timey gasoline-powered car, fueling stations are basically everywhere. Public chargers for electric cars are most definitely not everywhere. So if you’re going on a road trip, you kind of have to plan the trip around charging stations. Well, not necessarily the whole trip, but you kind of have to plan your stops around charging stations.

Not all charging stations are created equal. There are different ports (you can think of it how computers have different ports — USB-C vs. USB-micro vs. FireWire). Newer cars tend to have an NACS port, and our slightly older Ioniq has a CCS1 port. Some other older vehicles apparently have something called a CHAdeMO port. Aside from basic port compatibility, some chargers are faster than others. No EV charger is going to be as fast as filling up a fuel tank with gasoline, but some are really slow, taking several hours to charge a car. The fastest ones will get you from 10% charged to 80% charged in twenty minutes or so.

That sounds like a long time, but, unlike with a gasoline car, you don’t have to stand there the whole time your car is charging. I find that if I start a charge and stretch my legs a bit and use the restroom, the car is usually charged by the time I get back to it.

I wrote most of this post in the Ioniq, on the way home from Orlando, Florida. (Don’t worry, Stacey was driving. Don’t blog and drive!) It’s a 550-mile trip, give or take. Our methodology for the road trip was to stick to main roads and look for charging stations when we needed to stop for food or a bathroom break. It worked out pretty well.

For example, when we hit Tifton, Georgia, we were getting kind of hungry. So we found a Taco Bell. Then we found a ChargePoint charging station about five minutes from there. So we ate our tacos while the car charged, and it was basically done when we were done eating.

Unlike gasoline pumps, which are almost always at gas stations/convenience stores in the U.S., EV chargers in the U.S. are all over the place. My favorite one from this trip is in Dawson, Georgia. There are two ChargePoint chargers in front of a cute little library. Unfortunately, when we were there it was late in the day and the library was closed. So we walked down the hill and through an Ace Hardware parking lot to a gas station to get snacks and use the restroom.

I am noticing that traditional gas stations are starting to add EV chargers. The Buc-ee’s nearest Birmingham has several EV charging stations. And on the Orlando trip, I used EV chargers at a Circle K and at a Love’s.

Google Maps and Apple Maps both list EV chargers, so it’s pretty easy to find one to suit your needs in most civilized areas. There’s also a phone app called A Better Routeplanner. As the name implies, it plans routes based on where you want to go and what kind of electric car you have. I don’t really like the app, though, because it’s just wrong sometimes (it sent me to an NACS-only charging station once, despite knowing that my car is CCS1), and also because there is more to planning an EV route than just charging stations, especially when multiple humans are involved. (I recently purchased a NACS-to-CCS1 converter, so it’s not really an issue if I end up at an NACS charger anymore. But still.)

That said, I do think A Better Routeplanner is useful for a first draft EV route. Like, it’s good to look at where you’re going and be able to say, OK, there is at least a decent charging option every hundred miles or so.

Electric cars are really awesome for local driving, which is good for me because that’s like 90 percent of what I use a car for. I have a 220-volt charger installed in my garage (the installation wasn’t cheap, mainly because I live in an apartment, and installing a 220-volt power outlet in a commercial building is pricey), and I basically just plug my car in when I get home.

A home charger isn’t nearly as fast as a public charger, but it doesn’t need to be. The home charger can charge the car’s battery from 10% – 80% in about seven hours, so if you plug the car in before you go to bed, it’ll be ready to go in the morning. It’s just another one of those things that you charge overnight, like your phone or your smart watch.

Aside from being more environmentally friendly than an old-time gasoline-powered car (I don’t feel guilty going through the drive-through anymore, because my car isn’t generating any pollution when I’m sitting there waiting on my milkshake!), the Ioniq is just a nice car. It’s got a huge panoramic window in the roof, a cruise control system that basically lets the car drive itself, and plenty of USB ports for charging your phones and whatnot. It’s even got a built-in wireless charge pad for phones that can charge wirelessly. Heck, it’s even got a 110-volt AC plug, so you can use the car kind of like a huge battery pack to power basically anything you can plug into a 110-volt outlet. I actually haven’t even tried the 110 outlet yet — I guess I should do that soon.