I never got around to writing the follow up post to my previous post, which would have been to say that I concluded in February that I should sell the Model Y before the bottom totally dropped out of the market, so I did, and replaced it with a 2023 Hyundai Ioniq 5. I still need to write my overall review and impressions so far, but the short, short version is that the driver aids aren't quite as good as FSD but they're good enough for what I want, the car charges faster on a compatible charger, I like having Android Auto, and generally it feels more like a regular car - it has buttons and switches, a normal display in front of the driver, etc. There are some things I don't like, but I have a bit of a rant about one of the major things, so I'm writing that part now, and I'll get to the general review later, I guess.
One of the things that Tesla had well-sorted, which made the lack of Android Auto/Carplay support tolerable, was integrating charge stops into trip routing. It did the hard work of figuring out where you needed to stop, told you how long til that stop and what SOC you'd arrive at, and how long you needed to charge to make it to your destination or the next charge stop. It even adapted and added charge stops if the burn rate was higher than expected for some reason, or warned you to reduce speed to conserve power so you'd make it, and later in my ownership it would even route around busy chargers where it could. It still had some blind spots, but it worked well the vast majority of the time.
I didn't realize how spoiled I was by this, beyond knowing that Tesla's charging network was better developed and thus trip routing was somewhat easier than CCS-based options, until I started using Hyundai's equivalent, which... to say that it's inferior is being quite kind.
My first trip in the car, I used Android Auto/Google Maps for navigation. While AFAIK it's available in some cars, in this car it has no integration with the EV parts of the car, so it can't see burn rate, state of charge, etc. and thus does nothing with charge stops unless you manually add them. It also doesn't precondition the battery or tell you projected SOC for your destination, though the car's estimated range remaining is pretty accurate. This, coupled with the fact that this car has a higher coefficient of drag than the Model Y and is thus way more affected by headwinds at highway speeds, meant that I found myself pretty suddenly going from it being tight but I have enough indicated range to make it, to a point where I didn't have enough charge to make it to my destination anymore and scrambling to find a charger. I switched to the in-car navigation and was looking for chargers nearby. Default sort is by name rather than by distance, and then there's no way to filter other than by name or address, most notably: no option to show me only DC fast chargers. And while it lists the charge rate, for reasons only clear to some engineer at Hyundai, it lists Level 2 (AC) chargers not by their actual rate, but as "<60 kW", which is how I ended up spending 40 minutes at a 6 kW charger to get enough charge to get to the charger it should have sent me to in the first place. I will note that due to being sort of flustered, it didn't occur to me to talk to Google via Android Auto to tell it to find me the closest DC Fast Charger, so I don't know if that would have worked better.
Ok, lesson learned, use the car's Nav so that it adds charging stops more intelligently next time. Except... after doing this a few times, I can confidently say that it doesn't do much of anything more intelligently in this area.
- Pre-charge battery conditioning, which gets the battery to the temperature necessary to take advantage of the fastest charge rates, is disabled by default, and seems like I have to re-enable it almost every trip, so I had a couple of slower than expected charges before I figured this out. And of course, this only works if you're navigating to a charger via the car's Nav system, so it knows to trigger the preconditioning.
- While there is a place in the route guidance that shows charge stops, charge duration, and projected arrival SOC, it's not exactly easy to find and it's not displayed anywhere. This also means that when you arrive at the charger/while charging, there is no guidance for how long to charge, so mostly you just assume you're charging to 80% and hope for the best.
- Trip routing appears to have a very narrow cone of what it considers to be along your route, and it seems like based on my most recent experience, it refuses to alter your route to get to an available fast charger that is close but not directly on your route, even if the route solution it arrives at involves multiple hours at a Level 2 charger instead. In other words, it's not taking charge time into account when determining the "shortest" route.
This past weekend, I took a day trip that was about 350 miles round trip. As I usually do, I pulled it up ahead of time in ABRP to get an idea of what the trip would look like in terms of range and charge stops - sometimes it makes more sense to stop and charge before you get there even if the first leg doesn't actually require a charge stop, so that you have sufficient charge to get back to your return trip charge stop. Looked fine to do the first leg with no charge, and then charge on the return trip. Except unfortunately, parts of the trip had significant wind, so arrival SOC was a bit lower than projected (30% instead of 38 or so). Get in the car and set the destination for the return trip, and it adds chargers, we set off. I look at the route, just because I'm curious how close I'm going to be cutting it or if it found a different charger, only to see that it has me charging for multiple hours at my first charge stop. I realized that it has concluded I don't have the range to make it to the charger I was supposed to use, and sent me to a local slow charger. Repeated attempts to get the Nav system to figure this out don't net different results, especially given what I previously mentioned about the filter and sorting of available chargers, so I ended up pulling out my phone, looking up close DC fast chargers in the Plugshare app, and then manually telling the car to navigate to the one that was 22 miles away so that it hopefully does the preconditioning. Fortunately this worked, and other than the stress and annoyance of having to pull over to fight with the UI and override it to do something sensible, there wasn't any additional drama, but this would have been a mess if I hadn't caught it and I used my remaining range to arrive at a charger that wouldn't actually help.
I said at the beginning of this post that this felt much more like a normal car - i.e. people could mostly get in it and drive with little or no learning curve. The fact that handling charge stops on a trip works this poorly really means that isn't the case. If I lent this car to a friend or family member who doesn't normally drive an electric car, and didn't give them any guidance about this, it would have resulted in a really terrible experience unless they resorted to external means to do what the car should have figured out for them. Hyundai pushes updates to the system periodically, but I strongly suspect on a car going on 3 years old, I shouldn't be holding my breath for a massive feature update to address this issue and am better off figuring it out myself. Might be time to start using ABRP via Android Auto, since that's at least the most electric car focused nav option I have available, even if I have to give it some data manually.
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