Kia EV6 Road Trip – San Francisco to Yosemite – Is it Practical?

We rented this electric Kia from TURO to see how practical it is to take an electric vehicle on a 500 mile road trip. The results may be surprising – charging at Yosemite was waaaay easier than finding a working charger in San Francisco.

I’ve been really intrigued by the hyundai ioniq 5 and the kia ev6 um but here in 2022 supply chain problems we can’t even test drive or even see none of the dealers have them you got to pay for them before you give can you know even drive it so when we traveled to visit our daughter in san francisco we were able to find one on onturo the kia version of it and uh

We gave it a good test drive we wanted to see if we could go from san francisco to yosemite national park we made it and we learned a lot along the way i think this is the reality and that is this is all broken up but at least it sort of works this one just was the dc fast charger and that is a door nail and this is a kind of not quite ready for prime timeness

Um we just start topping the kia up because this is one of the things that you know we didn’t want to get out on the road and be way low and then find that charger doesn’t work where we’re going so that’s an issue but the car has been created i’m sorry it was nine dollars and it got us from 200 miles to 245 miles now that 45 miles cost us nine dollars so the

Equivalent should have been about a gallon and a quarter or about even at four dollars a gallon that’s less than six dollars so that was not a great deal well maybe we’re in san francisco and yeah electricity is i have no no basis for comparison i do really like this it says i pedal feature you can see you can adjust the level of of regenerative braking by with

The paddle shifters here and with this i pedal max it’s truly one so we’re going down a really steep hill and i just let off on the gas and no matter how steep the hill even here in san francisco which has the steepest hills ever it comes to a stop without touching the brake that’s pretty cool but we have the cruise control on and the lane keeper or whatever so

I’ve got my hand closed but it’s totally slowing down now hope this car is going to go in front of us let’s see what happens it’s adjusting its speed yes sir cool wow 110 degrees and very cool in here huh very cool well we’re plugged into this charger and ripping and unfortunately i got two of them and they’re both giving me an error on the payment authorizing

Payment and payment error well that sucks in one mile take exit 230 on the right to beckwith road soaring the next one that we were going to go to was also out of order so we’re going to try the third one now we’re down to 100 miles we’re at another charging station but it’s uh again it’s 104 degrees out um the you can’t read the credit card reader because the

Display doesn’t work i’m trying to sign up for evie go which is the app but it’s not let’s see if it’s not signing up what a pain in the ass well it says it’s verified now you can’t again super sunny but you can’t read anything on this let’s see if it verifies it if it wants me to pull it out how was it easy okay it was fine it only took us like 20 minutes the

Thing is use the app that’s what we learned that our friend told us that use the app they’re very friendly here all right pretty sure it’s charging now it says it it’s it’s only a 50 kilowatt charger because all the other ones were broken so it says it’s gonna take 52 minutes to get to 90 percent thankfully we’re like at a mall so we’re gonna go into the mall

But oh my god what a pain in the ass this guy with the bolt his machine i don’t know if you can see it shows all the information about the charging our machine doesn’t show jack all right we’re all charged up what were the stats okay the final session cost was 16.95 energy dispensed 46.009 kilowatts thank you for visiting brenna thank you brenna so i love the

Automatic bright dimmer see that watch and it’ll brighten up again as soon as we get past there all by itself that’s a cool feature right am yep love it i guess i don’t understand the key situation it knows i’m here when i walk up to it but it doesn’t unlock the door so let me see sometimes it knows it there and the back door there so it’s beeping i don’t know

What that means and then the mirrors go out but then this door handle would suck it’s still locked if i go around the back the trunk just randomly opens sometimes if i just stand around it i don’t know there but the door doesn’t open unless you unlock it which i it’s got to be a setting but i didn’t see it so that’s how we get in this is a fantastic feature

This place for your phone and it’s a wireless charger um you just put your phone on it and it’ll start charging which is great the downside is that it’s a very low amperage charger so it’s almost one of those things where it takes if you’re using your phone for something directions or something it’ll almost take as much power as it will generate so it hardly gets

Charged up so we’re just outside of yosemite i got all set got got the apps downloaded for the chargers got to the chargers take a look what we got someone chop the cords off all right so we found ones with cords now in a gas station you don’t have to stand out in the rain and do this not so much here hopefully the app now that i’ve downloaded from electrify

America will get us up to the 250. all right i’m going to give it a shot well now that’s more like it i didn’t have to uh do anything but plug it in and i did it all by itself it’s given 100 it’s ramping up 150 250 560 165 it says we got 15 minutes left until it gets to 80 percent um we were down at like 35 percent 36 let’s see how far we go here we’re at 100

That’s fun so it’s charging us 43 cents a kilowatt and it’s gonna put in let’s see it’s 77. so roughly 40 kilowatts so 40 times 40. well we’ll see well that was a much more pleasant experience it only well 15 minutes i think we charged it all the way up to 90 once it got up to 80 it slowed down quite a bit um so we’re going to stop at 90 charge see what

Happens i guess just turn it off i don’t know there was that 18 bucks for about 150 miles worth of range i don’t know if that’s good or bad i don’t really care it was 19 minutes 45 kilowatts delivered so we’re going to stop yes so curvy road no should i show your hands sure you can put your back in there come on you could do it curvy road hands let’s see

How fast see your hands a little nerve this screen is easily blocked by the steering wheel but look where my hand is and look where the speedometer is and this is the view that i have you can’t see it because it’s it’s back there same with the range on here so the only two really important things on the screen are blocked when you have your hands at ten and

Two isn’t that awful alice that’s why i gotta have them at nine and three sorry yeah we made it it’s a bit smoky because it’s on fire wow there’s el capitan well i love it when it works i didn’t i just plugged it in i didn’t even have to do anything else it just knew it’s plugging in we’re just topping up so that we can hopefully get as far as we can from

Disseminate to san francisco going to 100 it’s interesting today i’m getting on the same charger only 128 kilowatts um i if i had to guess it’s because the battery isn’t at the right temperature to accept the 250 either that or just because it’s so close to the 80 percent it’s already sort of ramping down before it even ramps up i got about 220 miles to to

Go you can see i’ve got 220 miles worth of range i want to run it up to 100 it’s not my car so i’ll do that all right we’ve got 195 miles to san francisco and it says we got 284 miles worth of charge see if we can make it all the way without having to recharge till we get to the city we can do it so it’s almost just easier to steer yourself provide some sort

Of input maybe that’s just on mountainous curvy roads such as this oh it’s everything i was pretty excited about the self-driving on the kia hyundai put your hands somewhere i put them on the wheel but honestly the steering part sucks because it not only makes you put your hand on the wheel but you’ve got to wiggle it back and forth every 10 seconds or it’ll beep

At you the dynamic cruise control was fantastic i like that but the steering nah it just isn’t worth it frustrating again now they’re both used sort of that one’s not working this one’s full but nobody’s here here i am at the net the next charging station after looking for about an hour and they’re both full someone’s just camped out there that one for the last

Hour it’s full it’s ready but they’re not there i don’t know if it’s worth waiting or trying to find the next one mother i’m telling you i guess if you lived in the city and you had to charge in public infrastructure don’t do it yet it’s not worth it this was about an hour and a half to find a charger and paying for parking underground and i finally got one

To work so thank god for that but it’s just it’s ridiculous terrible terrible infrastructure also it sucks driving around in san francisco uh our road trip was fine i’ll tell you the car is fantastic i love it it’s really fun drive especially on mountain roads i can’t stop thinking about it and i drive a really nice car day to day and this was just better more

Fun but the infrastructure is just now ready there’s no way absolutely no way they can especially california convert to all electric fleet because they don’t have the infrastructure even when we were there it was so hot there wasn’t enough electricity to run the air the air conditioners and they were having rolling blackouts add all of the transportation fleet

As electric and you can’t do it there’s not enough electricity generated there’s definitely not enough ev chargers around i gotta say my conclusion is if you live in the city and you don’t have a garage with its own charger don’t do it you can’t rely on the public charging infrastructure in 2022 maybe eight years from now but if you have to rely on public

Infrastructure i would it’s a hard pass right now other than that though the car was great take what you will bye you

Transcribed from video
Kia EV6 Road Trip – San Francisco to Yosemite – Is it Practical? By Matthew Brenengen