Nope, no Apple CarPlay makes it easy for me to write off GM in its entirety for the next few years. Maybe if other manufacturers follow suit I’ll reconsider but until then, well, you gotta find SOME way to weed out companies while researching your next car
Ford needs to make an electric Ranger, simple, small and cheap
No official announcement from Ford yet but rumors continue to swirl that in 2025 there will be either a Ranger Lightning or Maverick Lightning. Internal codename for it is Project T3, if you Google “Ford Project T3” there is an awful lot of stuff out there, I’m sure at least half of which is already out of date or wrong.
Filled it in, good luck with your project.
In order of importance to me -
Philly area so it’s not quite frigid tundra here, but we did finally have our first frost of the season a couple weeks ago.
My Ariya with its small battery and heat pump has had very little range loss, I’d say around 10%, so from 215 down to around 190. The heat pump is absolutely the main reason why I felt fine getting this car with the small battery.
Meanwhile my MME with its big battery and resistance heater is taking a significant hit, it’s a solid 25% from 312 down to 235.
Can you still easily find the Bolt?
Nah they’re just about done… after failing to buy a new one this past summer I switched to Nissan and Ford. Lots of used ones in my area though including some low mileage ones, gotta watch the battery on those though, GM was in a rough spot with those 3 years ago
our ice car is ten times more comfortable than our ev
Counterpoint: I replaced my ICE Mercury Milan (Ford Fusion rebadge) with a Nissan Ariya EV that is so much more comfortable, it should have been marketed as an Infiniti
Great post and I really enjoyed reading your comparison of every model out there you test drove. You’re fortunate to live in an area (MA) with so many well-informed dealer sales reps, it was a little bit harder down my way (PA) although I found some eventually.
You were also a lot more open minded and comprehensive in your search than I was… there were several cars that you test drove that I had just ruled out arbitrarily in my online research due to various “dealbreakers”. In the end I wound up only test driving the Nissan Ariya and Ford MME and while I got the Ariya first, when one of our remaining ICE cars started developing fresh problems a few weeks later I didn’t hesitate trading that one in for an MME.
If you were still in SD do you think you would have been looking for something smaller than a crossover? M3/Bolt/Leaf?
Any guesses here on what the anode material is going to be? I read the entire article and all it says is no cobalt. So far so good but I’d like to know more… carbon nanotubes perhaps?
I’m in with my 0.0002% for '23
There’s already a very small industry for this that’s dedicated to specific, old battery packs, particularly the Nissan Leaf and also the Chevy Volt. But it’s all independent shops, no national chain or manufacturer support.
The ultimate fate of this industry relies on how “easy” these batteries are to work on. Besides Nissan and Chevy, Ford and VW packs are also designed to be serviceable. So far, so good.
However, Tesla is moving in the opposite direction and their new Model Y battery is designed to NOT be serviceable. All empty space between cells in the pack is filled with a dense, pressurized polyurethane foam that makes the pack rigid and turns it into a load bearing chassis component. While cutting manufacturing costs, it also renders the pack almost completely non-serviceable. It can still be removed and replaced with a new pack but that’s it.