(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . My New PHEV. A Colorado State Open Thread, 10/2/2023 [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-10-02 The Colorado State Open Thread is for people of, by and interested in our square(ish) state. Not all topics must be about Colorado, but they usually are. Most of the stories are ones of people or places in Colorado, but sometimes they’re of things. Elk Fest was held in Estes Park this last weekend, so a lot of elk came to celebrate. This one was crossing Lake Estes to go try and get some females away from some other males. The big event in my life this week was that I was finally (after four+ months) able to receive a car to replace the two cars that I had when my wife passed away. They were a 2019 Subaru Forester and a 2011 VW Touareg. Neither was ideal from my point of view. The Forester was my wife’s car and it was a base model with cloth(ish) seats and few options. It was OK, but it was what she wanted, and I wish it had seats that would have been easier to keep clean with the animals and the mileage per gallon, when she drove it, was in the upper 20’s. Even for it being 3 years old, it had only about 11K miles traveled. The Touareg, which we purchased from a dear friend of hers, was a top of the line 6 cylinder car the friend had purchased as her forever car for her retirement. Before she found out she had lung cancer from a lifetime of smoking. She made us a great deal and the car had less than 20K miles under its tires when she sold it to us for the balance of the loan — a terrific deal since she had been paying down the loan so she wouldn’t have debt in retirement. The Touareg had lots of bells and whistles and it had some that even my new Hyundai doesn’t have, like heated side mirrors and a built-in altimeter, which has been fun and helpful here in Colorado, though GPS on a phone now can provide an equivalent. What I didn’t like about the Touareg was that it requires premium fuel (which the manufacturer said, so I never used regular) and it only managed about 20 or 21 mpg. It was also getting a bit old and some of the electronics weren’t working the way they were supposed to anymore. At 12 years old, it still hadn’t quite topped 80,000 miles. So, I decided to do the environmentally responsible thing and get an electric vehicle of some sort. I weighed the options between a fully electric car, a hybrid gas-electric, or a plug-in electric hybrid-gasoline car. I quickly eliminated the fully electric car, since I know that I would go nuts trying to watch the power gauge go down as I take trips from Estes Park to other areas of Colorado. Denver shouldn’t be too big of a problem, as it would be about 200 miles round trip and some of the better all-electric vehicles claim 300+ mile ranges, but if I did a lot of running around in Denver, going to Parker (to visit a friend), or Littleton or other locations on the far side of Denver, I was worried that I might run low coming back up the hills to Estes. Some electric cars have fast charges to get the balance of the miles I might need, but my eyes would still be glued to the gauge on many trips. Also, I am still not ready to trust the low clearance of even electric SUV’s during snowstorms in the mountains. I also have plans of long trips, especially to areas that aren’t high on anyone’s electrical charging station plans, so I want to have maximum fuel options. From 2006 to about 2017 I had a hybrid Ford Escape and I loved that car. I put about 176,000 miles on it before I was talked into giving it to my wife’s son-in-law, who had it for about a year before somehow the engine seized up. That SUV got between 27 and 31 or so MPG (slightly less as it got older), but it was better than all the other small SUV’s around and better than the larger hybrids. The current Ford Escape hybrids, however, get poor marks from Consumer Reports, and I tend to trust CR pretty religiously. Other hybrids didn’t impress me that much, either, either for gas mileage or in various reviews. So I started looking at plug-in hybrids. I figure that I can use battery power (the car can get 30+ miles on pure battery, supposedly) around Estes Park and plug it in every night. When I want to go on trips to Denver, Loveland, Fort Collins and the like, I can use battery power and then eventually use it as a hybrid when the battery gets low. It turns out there are two batteries — one for pure electric and one for hybrid, and I’m going to have to just let the car figure out what it wants to use. The car doesn’t seem to run on pure electric power the way I envisioned, but I don’t know that I’m reading all the various gauges correctly. I did enjoy seeing the mpg equivalent indicate I was getting over 110mpg at one point on Loveland’s level streets, but driving up the Big Thompson canyon and around Estes, it suggests it’s getting in the 50’s to 60’s. I still haven’t even cracked open the owner’s manual. Once the decision was made for a PHEV (acronym for Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle), I started looking at the various manufacturers. One of the top-reviewed companies was Hyundai — Kia. The same plant makes both lines in South Korea. I’ve never had one of them, but I was trusting the professional reviewers to get these things right. Consumer Reports does their reviewing anonymously, so they don’t get swayed by manufacturers offering incentives for good reviews. Car and Driver and Road and Track were a couple other online review sites I checked. All seemed to like the Hyundai. I went out to look at the cars, and unfortunately, the Hyundai dealership not only didn’t have the PHEV on their lot, but they didn’t have hybrids or even a Santa Fe for me to test drive when I went by. I stopped by a Subaru dealership because we were generally very happy with our past Subies, but Subaru for some reason is resistant to having a hybrid and doesn’t have a PHEV or fully electric car yet. They do now have a hybrid vehicle, but it was a sedan, not a SUV, and I like the room of an SUV. If they had a PHEV Outback or Forester, my search would have probably been over at that point. I went to Lexus, and, in addition to the higher cost, they had one of my main issues with the VW — it required premium fuel. The particular car they had on the lot was missing a sensor that is now common on the current vehicles for cross traffic warnings across the front of the car (it had one for traffic crossing in back of the car), but I felt that was a deal-breaker on that car, so I told them I would wait until they could get one with the full sensors in the color I wanted. I basically stopped hearing from them. I also went to look at the Toyota Rav4 PHEV. Again, none on the lot, and it would be 9-12 months to get one delivered from Japan. I didn’t want to wait that long. The Hyundai dealership said that they should be able to get one in a month or less, so I put a deposit down upon one, sight unseen and without a test drive. They even sent me a text with the printout from the car showing essentially what is on the window sticker, so I really thought it was coming soon. Apparently nearly every one that Hyundai is making is Black, White, or Silver/Gray. The color I wanted, so it would stand out in a parking lot and be easier to find, was called “Lagoon Blue”. The salesman said it’s so dark it’s nearly black. I figured it might be a midnight blue, from what was in the catalog, and I was fine with that. I was told that it was in a lot on the west coast and it would be shipped to another dealer in Colorado, and it would then be brought to the dealer in Loveland. This was in May. One of my friends in Estes Park got a white one after six months of waiting so he let me do a test drive and that helped ease my frustration. This story has gone on long enough, so I won’t go through all their failed delivery schedules, broken promises, and such, but the car was finally manufactured in South Korea, shipped across the Pacific, trained to Colorado (Pueblo) and then driven to Loveland where most of the accessories I wanted were put on it (one is still back-ordered) and I was able to pick it up. Four months after their initial estimate. I will be giving it a good road test next week, as I travel to eastern Kansas (Lawrence) and back. I’ll report on my mpg and any other interesting findings along the way. I will put up an Open Thread diary next week, but I’ll be on the road so I won’t be able to answer questions until late or Tuesday. Until then, please talk amongst yourselves, share what’s going on in your lives, and I’ll be very interested to hear about it all. The floor is yours... [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/10/2/2196942/-My-New-PHEV-A-Colorado-State-Open-Thread-10-2-2023 Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/