Santa Ynez road trip
We planned a fun weekend road trip from our home in Los Angeles to Santa Ynez with some friends of ours. We’d be taking a sunset cruise in Santa Barbara, doing some wine tastings, and eating lots of tasty meals.
My current car is a 10 year old large sedan. It’s a nice comfortable car. It’s gas milage (18 city/28 highway), but not particularly good by modern standards. The technology in the car was advanced for its time, but now falls behind all the fancy features in new cars.
A few months ago I had to have some service done on my car, and went to my local Hertz to rent a car. I got a Kia EV6. I only drove it around LA, but I was impressed with the overall experience. I thought it would be interesting to rent a Polestar 2 for the road trip and see how that might be different.
Our friends recently bought a RAV4 Prime (hybrid SUV) so this made a good opportunity to compare the two.
Car Rental
Weekend rates from Hertz were pretty good and I saw they were have a buy two days get one free deal which would work great for this weekend trip. I signed up for the rental with the deal online and then called over to the local shop to make sure I could get the Polestar for the trip. I was all set.
Route Planning
It was about 150 miles each way. The car came with a 78% charge, which it claimed should have gotten me 210 miles. That seemed fine, but since we had some plans Friday night, I didn’t want to arrive with car with a lower charge. I saw there was Electrify America (EA) charging with 150kW and 350kW charging in Solvang after about 130 miles so that seemed great.
Unfortunately traffic is always a problem and Google maps told me this would take almost 3 hours. Charging the car from 20% to 80% should take about half an hour, so I added that to the schedule. We wanted to arrive by 2pm, so we planned to leave at 10:30am.
Northbound Travels
The trip north was primarily freeways even at 10:30am traffic is a hassle. The car has adaptive cruise control and lance centering, so I turned those on and off we want. I found from my experience with the EV6 that this really does make traveling in traffic much less of a hassle and results in a calmer journey. The Polestar did that well. It wants some input on the steering wheel at regular intervals to make sure you’re paying attention. If you haven’t done that recently it has a gentle bell to remind you and a gentle pull on the steering wheel makes it happy.
The Polestar 2 has Android Automotive. Since I have a Pixel phone that was all intuitive to me. Google maps works really well for me, and I plugged in the Solvang EA station for our trip. The car showed the time we’d reach the destination and the state of charge when we’d arrive.
The only odd thing is that I expected to connect the phone by Android Auto, so I could use it to control the car system. For some reason that wouldn’t connect. It gave me an error about an unsupported device. I used bluetooth to connect for my music/podcasts and phone calls and did the nav on car. Worked fine.
Solvang Charging
We arrived in Solvang with about 27% charge, which was a bit more than the route planning had predicted.
Charging in Solvang was completely easy. It’s a small location near the national park service ranger station with 4 350kW ports, 3 150KW ports, and 1 50KW Chademo. There was no one there when we drove up. I knew the maximum charge rate for my car was 150KW so I took one of those stations, plugged in and the station immediately connected to the car. I touched my phone to the reader for Google Pay and it started charging. It quickly ramped up to 140KW so we were off and running.
My SO took the opportunity to walk to the market and pick up some snacks. I sat countably in the car with the air running. I spent 30 minutes charging up to 80%. The rate was $0.48k and the bill came to $21. I disconnected the cable and we were on our way to meet our friends at the house.
The Weekend
The weekend itself was great. We ate and drank and hung out and it was really nice to get away from our day to day in LA. The Polestar 2 is a relatively small car and the back seat really wouldn’t have been particularly comfortable. We ended up in our friends RAV4 for all the trips around Santa Ynez.
I live in the south side of LA and our friends are in the north eastern valley. So their travel distance to Santa Ynez was shorter, but they did the travel for the weekend, so in the end our milage was about the same. Obviously the driving conditions are a bit different, but not dramatically so.
The Return
Alas our weekend was over and it was time to head home. Again it was an easy trip back with a stop in Ventura for some food, and to visit the channel islands national park center, and a stop at a fruit stand to bring a few things home. The Polestar worked exactly as I expected. Again I returned with 25% charge when we predicted 20%.
We stop at home and unload the car. I needed to return the car to Hertz with the same 78% charge, so I needed another charge. There’s another EA station close to my house, so I headed off to refill the batteries at about 6pm.
Trouble in Paradise
The EA station had 6 150KW stations. #1 and #3 were in use. #5 & #6 were being taken up by an A-Hole in an Audi e-tron that chose to park diagonally cross both stations. The spots in front of #2 and #4 were open.
I pulled into spot #4 and connected up. This time the charge says “Connecting to car” and then “Re-connecting to car”. After waiting a bit I tried unplugging and plugging in again, but it still had the same problem.
The charging plug for the Polestar 2 is on the driver side rear of the car. The cables for the chargers are relatively short, so I need to reverse in. I pull the car out and back into #2, then get out to connect the cable when I see the charger has red letters saying that it is offline. Well that won’t work.
Luckily at this point the Audi leaves. I pull out and back into #6 and begin my charge. This time it all works as expected. I sit back in the drivers seat. I wanted to be a good citizen so I called EA to report the two broken chargers. #2 is going to be replaced. Other people had reported #4, but she added my report to the list. Hopefully that improves the situation for other folks.
While I waiting the 30 minutes to bring the car back up to 80% some one slips into #5 and starts charging. A guy pulls into #4 and tries to charge. He stayed in that spot so I wondered if it worked for him. Another woman pulls into a parking space nearby with her blinkers on. She was waiting for a spot to open.
The guy in #5 finishes before me. The woman slides in. She has a discussion with the guy who wasn’t actually charging. He has a discussion with the woman and drives off. It turns out he wasn’t charging and he was going to another EA station about 10 miles away. I was already at 75% at that point and would have been done in about 5 minutes, so it’s a shame I didn’t catch him before he left.
The charge itself was 30 minutes and $23.
The Charging Experience
I can say I’ve now witnessed the California charging issues for non-Tesla owners. It was a busy time. There were only 6 chargers and 2 of them were down. That’s not a good report for EA.
For me it was only a minor inconvenience to move the car a couple times and a few minutes waiting on #4, but the woman had a longer wait (15 minutes?) and the man decided it was faster to go to a bigger station. (4 350KW, 15 150KW)
These chargers are in a below ground parking garage. While you could have gone upstairs to the shops it’s a bit of a hike. I wouldn’t be sure there was time during a 30 minute charging session.
Across the parking lot were 20 Tesla 250KW super charger ports. Those were completely full as well. As far as I could tell they were all working. Cars were coming and going. If you assume a 30 minute charging session, you probably didn’t have to wait more than a couple minutes to get one.
Comparing the Results
$135 for the rental. $44 for the charging for $179.
Our friends with the hybrid RAV4 spent 10 minutes filling up a gas tank with 9 gallons and spent $40 on gas at Costco. Our costs were about the same, but I had to spend an hour or hour and a half at charging stations.
From what I’ve read his 9 gallons of gas emitted about 190 lbs of CO2. Grid power seems to be about 1 lb/KW so I probably emitted 90 lbs. That’s an improvement.
The Polestar 2 is a nice car. It handles well (2023 FWD) when we drove some twisty fun roads, and is comfortable in the highway traffic. In the end, it was too small for me, so I wouldn’t buy it, but I’m a giant. The Kia EV6 would have been a better choice for this trip.
Hypotheticals
I could have gotten a lower charging rate if I signed up for EA’s pass+ membership for $7 a month. If I had done that before the first charge and cancelled it after my second that would have saved me a few bucks. Probably not worth it for 2 charges, but 3 or more would have made it worthwhile.
My gasoline car takes premium gas and would have needed about 12 gallons. Refilling that at Costco would have cost me $61 and generated 250 lbs CO2. If I instead use the IRS reimbursement rate of $0.655 per mile to cover all the wear and tear, that would have cost me $197. The rental was cheaper.
My house has solar and my rates based on the purchase price of the panels work out to about $0.07/KW. If I owned an EV I still would have had to charge in Solvang, but I could have done the second charge at home. That would have been $3.36 instead of $23 and would have emitted nearly zero CO2. (I don’t know the amount of CO2 to make and install the panels, but that’s split over 25 years and covers more than just the car)
I saw an article recently comparing a Kia Niro ICE vs EV and a mini Cooper ICE vs EV over 3 years from the initial purchase. Unfortunately I can’t find the original article. My take away was that the EV was about 20% more expensive over the 3 years if you didn’t include the tax rebates. The rebates make it much closer to even.
Lots of money is being put into improving the charging infrastructure. These charging stations are capital intensive and require lots of power which means they’ll take some time to get deployed. Battery technology is progressing quickly and some of the improvements like solid state batteries seem like they’ll provide some big improvements and lower charge times.
Conclusion
If I were a renter and couldn’t have easy access to an over night charger, I’d want to think twice about buying an electric car at this point because of the time and hassle of regularly doing commercial charging.
Next year many car brands will start having access to Tesla superchargers. That’s great for owners of those cars, but will lead to more competition for Teslas wanting to use the superchargers.
I like the new tech in new cars whether they are gasoline or EV. I really like the ride of the EV and the power is amazing.
The tax incentives were the right amount to balance out the new technology. The changes to the incentive requiring that EVs be built in the US will lead to more US investment, which is great, but until that happens it makes them more expensive. Making the car owner pay more to support the environment seems like a bad policy.
I’ve been waiting for the high prices, supply chain problems, first versions of cars, and scarcity to work itself out. That seems to be happening. The really high prices seem to be leveling out and some brands may even have a glut.
All the manufacturers are making EVs and we’re starting to see a variety of choices and price points. The competition will also bring the price down.
For me, I think it is about time to buy one. I’m not in a hurry, so it could be later this year or some time next year, but I think there’s one in my near future.