To EV or not EV
Careful what you wish for.
Finally, you’ve joined the band — you and your life partner bought an EV in an effort to inch closer to the right side of history. This will be vehemently argued given what it takes to make the battery your new electric vehicle run, not to mention how the electricity coursing through said battery is produced. Article after article announce you’ve robbed Peter to pay Paul. Your social media friends will question your intelligence. Still, the two of you are on the bandwagon, and after a few hours listening to the dealer fail to explain what 94 MPGe means, you take possession of a brand new blood red Toyota plug-in hybrid.
Note to readers and any wanna-be plug-in owners — on a full charge, this vehicle is only EV for forty miles, after which a gas engine kicks in.
“What?!?” you say.
“That doesn’t count,” your friends are sure to say. And yet you think this the perfect marriage as your partner and owner of this red beauty mostly drive short distances around the town in which you live.
And if that’s not bad enough, you’ve agreed to lease—yes lease not own— caving to the magnetic pull of new technology every three years. Your parents wonder where they went wrong,
“Never lease,” you hear your father lament from the beyond.
“But the technology is changing so fast,” your feeble retort.
“No buts.”
Still, it’s too late and you make the next call to WBUR for the purpose of donating your 2004 Volvo V70. Yes, the one you bought a dozen years ago for ten grand when you walked into the dealer and asked, “What’s the cheapest car you have on the lot?” On that day, the salesman couldn’t write-up the ticket fast enough for fear you’d come to your senses and walk out before taking possession. But you didn’t, walk out, the allure of owning a white station wagon with a cassette tape deck too great.
Owning electric’s not for the faint of heart. You know this from the time you rented a Tesla for a day and needed your Gen Z son to show you how to turn it on. Said another way, you’ve come to see driving an EV as essentially driving around in an iPhone with wheels. You learned this again when getting into this particular Toyota for the first time, pushing the GO! button not once, but twice, and then curious why nothing happens when you put your foot ion the accelerator.
“You turned the car on and off again,” your salesman says, at which point you wonder if you push and hold the Go! button, might he be ejected. Not to worry, because this dealer’s on an end-of-year mission to bamboozle each person into thinking these cars the answer the world’s problems (a.k.a. unloading them on the cheap to make room for the next year’s models).
“Let’s do it again,” he says while helping you set-up the real reason you’re buying this vehicle — CarPlay.
“You need to repeat the process in order to commit it to muscle memory.” This the funniest thing anyone’s said to you all day, because committing anything to memory at this point in your life is impossible.
There’s a lot to learn, and fewer and fewer hours left to learn it all in. Your partner holds up the owners manual and says, “bedtime reading.” You laugh and cry at the same time, and think of the power of this thing, and then rue the time it will take to unleash it. Time better spent walking the dog and reading the paper. You both the last people on your block to have not one but two newspapers delivered to your doorstep — a throwback gesture preventing you both from keeping up with the times. As for the manual, you and your wife realize there’s not hope for either of you, so you make the joint decision not to worry too much about what special features will be left undiscovered until the kids return home for the holidays. You promise to make a list, if you can remember to put one of these little note pads in the glove box.
“Are you home?” your wife calls to ask.
“Yes.”
“I’m at the parking lot up the street trying to charge this thing,” she says. As if driving’s not a challenge enough, charging at a public EV station’s its own chapter in the book of keeping up with the eJones. You live in a hundred year old Victorian who’s locks still use keys. Remember keys, because they don’t come with your new EV. A fob does, a word you look up in the dictionary and learn doesn’t exist. Tell that to your salesman, who says the second fob will come in December.
“What!?!” You think but don’t say.
“Chip shortage,” his answer to the face you’re making.
Very little of this makes sense, but you’re OK with it all, because you’re driving on electricity now, zooming around in a vehicle that sounds like it belongs in a Blade Runner remake.
“This the future”, you say to yourself until the gas motor kicks in. And since you leased your new ride, you’re at peace with a ‘limited time only’ future. Three years to be exact, about the amount of time this battery will last before it starts to lose charge capacity in the exact same way your iPhone battery did. Not gradually, but with the immediacy of a heart attack. You remember when your phone died and you got used to walking around from AC outlet to AC outlet, and are glad you won’t have to repeat this with a half ton automotive machine. Your lease will prevent you from driving around the neighborhood saying, “Excuse me, you don’t know me but can I use your charger? I live just a couple streets away, but you can trust me.”
In the end, your friendly sales person explains the reason you will sleep at night despite spending more money on this choice than on the last three cars you’ve owned combined. “If the airbags deploy, you will hear a voice ask if you’re OK,” he says. “Don’t worry, it’s not God talking to you from the after life, but rather our ‘Toyota Connect’ switchboard. And if you don’t answer them, they will send for emergency responders.”
“Phew!” You’d read about the couple who drove off a bridge in Wyoming to be saved by this service, lifted out of a canyon by helicopter. You live in Brookline, but still.
Oh, one last thing. You don’t have to lock your new ride. Just walk away and it will lock itself, that is as long as you have the fob on you. And it will unlock all four doors when you reach for the handle, as if it has a mind of its own, which it will at the end of your lease when AI’s installed in every make and model, and the next car you sign up for will drive itself. Given how your mental and physical capacities are rapidly failing, you and your life partner sleep like babies knowing you’re in the right EV.
