846: Talking EVs: Range Anxiety, Charging, and Tech

Scott and Wes unpack their experiences as electric car owners, sharing the highs and lows of making the switch. From range anxiety to charging infrastructure and cost savings, they talk about everything from the tech perks to the unexpected challenges of driving electric. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! 02:11 Brought to you by Sentry.io. 03:14 What cars and how long have we had them. Hyundai IONIQ 5. Tesla Model Y Long Range. 10:41 Range and dealing with range anxiety. 11:45 The EPA specs. 12:24 Things that affect range. 14:46 Charging. 17:52 Charging levels. 17:56 Level 1 charging. 19:01 Level 2 charging. 19:39 Level 3 charging. 20:10 Charging standards. 21:51 Electric car pricing. 25:56 Regenerative braking. 27:27 General maintenance. 29:04 Pricing and expenses. 31:48 Machine Gun Kelly Effect. 36:46 Would you go completely electric? 38:46 Electric-only tech. 40:57 Buying a new EV. 42:21 Edison Motors website, TikTok. Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Randy: X Instagram YouTube Threads

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Scott Tolinski?

  Welcome to Syntax on this Monday hasty treat. We're going to be talking about electric cars. That's right.

• 0:07Wes Bos?

  Not coding.

• 0:09Scott Tolinski?

  No, not coding. We're going to be talking about electric cars. And it's going to be a fun one. We're just going to be talking about real talk about what it's like to own an electric car. A little bit about things that, you know, real experiences, none of this like, uh, I don't know, bickering and things like that, that people tend to do online. So we're just going to be talking about it. I got an electric car and I don't have an electric car. I had a sports car before, uh, so I got a lot of experience here. I used to even work at a car company. I used to work at Ford. My name is Scott Tolinski. I'm a developer from Denver. With me as always is Wes Boss. What's up, Wes?

• 0:40Wes Bos?

  Hey, yeah, I've, I've hesitated talking about this because I feel like anybody who talks about it is insufferable.

• 0:50Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 0:51Wes Bos?

  Because, uh, like I, I'm not an Elon bro and I'm not an environmentalist. I care a lot about the environment, but if I'm being honest with myself, that was not really a reason why I bought an electric car. I have lots of other initiatives in my life that I care much more about for the environment. So I feel like people on either side of that conversation are, are so obnoxious. Um, you look at the, the comments on any Tik Tok or Instagram reel or whatever. You're like, oh, these people just are either like, they're lying to themselves that it is so perfect. Or they have no idea of, of how awesome it can be. So I hate the term ICE, which is internal combustion engine.

• 1:36Wes Bos?

  Like people call gas cars ICE cars. Like, come on, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

• 1:41Scott Tolinski?

  It's just cult language, right? You want to feel like you're a part of a group. All these little ICE users are, yeah, I know.

• 1:49Wes Bos?

  So I thought it would be a, a interesting conversation as, as we both have driven cars for a little while now. You, you much longer than I, um, but we'll just kind of go into what it actually looks like. And, and if anybody, like the overlap between people who are web developers and people who are interested in electric cars, I think is fairly large. So we'll give you our thoughts.

• 2:11Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah, super cool. And honestly, if your car is running OT updates, hopefully your car's operating system has Sentry, because let's face it, we all know these things aren't bug free. Hopefully they are. Hopefully. I even had too many issues with mine. I'm gonna just be upfront about that.

• 2:26Wes Bos?

  My car thinks that a shovel is a person every time I drive into the garage. So certainly there are issues.

• 2:32Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, certainly there are issues there. Sure. I have seen, actually, it's funny, every time I see like a car's UI, and I'm like checking for FPS when I'm watching and seeing like how responsive it is to touch, because some of them, I mean, honestly, they used to be so bad. I even had a job offer to work on them at one point for GE, or GE, GM. For GE, that'd be, yeah. And I turned that down. So I could have actually been working on these slow interfaces back when they were super duper slow. But if your software has bugs in your car, because that's the world we live in these days, you'll want Sentry at Sentry.io to make sure that your software is collecting these bugs. Sentry.io forward slash syntax FM.

• 3:14Wes Bos?

  All right, cars. So Scott, you've had an electric car for over two years now. So tell us what you got and how you decided on that.

• 3:22Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I have a, an Ioniq 5. I got it in March of 2022. So I've now had it for two and a half years, which I do feel like is a good amount of time to have like feelings and assessment on a electric car, you know, or like what it's like to own one. I had also considered briefly, well, not even considered briefly. I think there were three cars that I was looking at more than any of them, which is the Kia EV6, the Nissan Aria, and the Ioniq 5. I really like the Aria because it has a massive internal cabin, like the cabin's huge inside, but it just like wasn't released when I got mine. Oh, I also considered the Polestar 2, but they delayed it so much that...

• 4:07Wes Bos?

  Yeah, you talked about that for a while.

• 4:09Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, by the time that it was coming out, I'd actually been like, you know what? Maybe I want more SUV like car, which the Ioniq 5 looks like a hatchback, but it is pretty much the same dimensions as my wife's RAV4. I mean, it's not quite the same, but it is an SUV. It's just the shape of it makes it look like a hatchback. So internally, the cabin size is huge. It has level three charging, so it charges from, man, it charges from like zero to 80% in 20 minutes or something crazy. If you have the right charger, it's super fast charging if you have that charger. That was a big reason why. Also, I do like that it looks like it came straight out of the movie Total Recall or Robocop.

• 4:52Wes Bos?

  It's sick. It's like a satin, a matte satin.

• 4:55Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I have like a silver satin or like a matte paint on it. And the whole thing just honestly, it looks like it's from a 1980 sci fi movie. So I love all of that. The features inside, you know, one thing that I really like about it is that, you know, most cars, they have that center console section that takes up and separates you from the passenger completely.

• 5:18Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 5:18Scott Tolinski?

  My car is complete open footroom. So from my feet to the other, from one door to door, it's like a complete open channel there. And the weird little center console, you can move up and back, but it is just in between the chairs. And it feels like, and normal cars can't do that because of their transmission. But because there's a flat floor in the electric car, man, it just feels so free and open in the cabin.

• 5:44Wes Bos?

  Just wide open. Yeah, there's no hump in the, in the middle. Like, you know, you sit in the back of a car and you get the middle seat, you gotta sit on the hump.

• 5:51Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, there's no hump. Yeah, totally. So for me, you know, those were the ones I was deciding between. I wanted something in that size of the Kia EV6, which is pretty much the Kia version of my car, the Nissan Aria or the Ioniq 5. The VW one was also nice, but I didn't like the range on it. There was a, man, there's a, there's a whole bunch else ones. I wasn't considering a Tesla, Wes. I'm not going to spend too much time dumping on Tesla. I, I just, not a company I really wanted to buy from. So for me, Ioniq 5 was, not only that, I just really loved the way the Ioniq 5 looked, so.

• 6:28Wes Bos?

  Was the one.

• 6:29Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I got it right when it first came out, which is often something you're not supposed to do. I actually, I did that with one of my first cars. Well, not one of my first cars, but I had gotten a Ford Fiesta when they had re-released the Fiesta back in the day. And it's because my, my grandpa had worked at Ford. I got a massive discount on it. It was a cheap little car. I needed a cheap little car and I got one and it was a lemon. They had to replace the engine after like, you know, two weeks of ownership. They're like, you need a new engine. I'm like, what do you mean? This is a brand new car. So, uh, so I, I still broke my own rule of not getting a brand new car, like fresh off the assembly line for the first time, but it's, it's been a great experience and I really do love it.

• 7:12Wes Bos?

  Awesome. So I'm six months, 5,000 kilometers in, which is about 3,000 miles on a Tesla Model Y long range. And I know people hate Tesla. I'm not, I am not the type of person that associates my car with my personality. So I don't really care. To me, it's much more like, I enjoy, I appreciate nice things, but I am not someone who is into cars. So we also considered, when we were looking at it, so we have a van that we have four kids, we have a van and we're like, all right, we need a second car, right? We've had a van, only one car for 12 years, something like that. Like we should probably get a

• 7:56Wes Bos?

  second car because it's starting to get a little bit of a pain. So we started looking into it. I looked at the RAV4 Prime, which is the plug-in version of the RAV4 Hybrid. We also looked at the Kia EV9, which was at the time was only out for a month. And those were good options, but ultimately we wanted a third row for just in case. I mean that we wanted to be able to fit seven people, not all the time. The third row is, is a joke. It's super small, but just every now and then you need to take a friend or you need to be able to, to throw an extra kid in there. You want to take all four kids with you. It's so nice having that option. You don't have to juggle being like, oh, well,

• 8:39Wes Bos?

  I need to take this many people, so let's switch keys and that's annoying to me. So we really the only options in that use case were the Kia EV9 and the Model Y. I know people are gonna say Rivian R1S, Model X, those things are $130,000 in Canada. And in Canada, anything over $100,000 has a luxury tax on it. So like out the door, it was like $150,000, which like shoot me if I ever spend that much money on a car. So this not, I get that those are great options, but there's no chance I was gonna put for any that kind of cash. So I want, we want the Model Y because the EV9 didn't and still does not charge on the Tesla infrastructure.

• 9:25Wes Bos?

  Which in order for us to get to our cottage, we needed to charge some way up there. And there just wasn't the, the infrastructure for it yet. So.

• 9:36Scott Tolinski?

  I want to step in here because I am a Kia EV9 fan, not to say you should have gotten that because I understand your needs.

• 9:41Wes Bos?

  It's sick. I love it.

• 9:43Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, for people out there who might be concerned that it's very new and stuff. It's actually built on the same skateboard platform as the EV6 and the Ioniq 5 and the Genesis. So the way that Kia and Hyundai did this is they have the same skateboard platform for all of their cars. Which means, you know, you can share parts between them and.

• 10:02Wes Bos?

  You get the drive motors, the battery, all the tech.

• 10:06Scott Tolinski?

  So you don't have to worry about it being like a brand new tech or something like that. I just want to throw that next. I am an EV9 fan. I like the way they look. Yeah.

• 10:12Wes Bos?

  Yeah, it's, it's pretty good. I, I had met a guy at the Chargers one day and he let me take a look. And I was like, this is sick. Like it's a proper three row, not like a, oh, you can squeeze a third row in there if you want. But there's no room for like putting a backpack in it or anything like that.

• 10:31Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. And the Ioniq 9 will be the, based off of the Kia EV9 as well. So there will be an Ioniq 9 that looks pretty sick.

• 10:40Wes Bos?

  That's awesome. All right. So let's talk about how far you can go and then we'll get in into the charging because you talk to anybody and myself as well is just like the range anxiety is something that absolutely everybody has, meaning that I would like that, but I go places where I need to be able to to gas up in two minutes and keep going on the on the road. Right. So I go to our cottage many times a year and our cottage is about a four, four and a half hour, sometimes five hour drive depending on traffic. And that ends up being just over 400 kilometers, which is 320 or I don't know how many, hold on, let me, let me do the math. I want to

• 11:22Wes Bos?

  make sure I'm not leaving our American friends out here. 250 miles away, right? Like that's a, in my opinion, that's a pretty big drive, especially I talked to all these Europeans on on Instagram and they're like, ah, I could drive across the entire continent with that. But in Canada, in the States, some of our drives are fairly long. So the EPA, which is like, what the Environmental Protection Agency, they basically spec out how far these cars can go. So our car is specked out for 525 kilometers, 325 miles, which is is a bit of a joke. Really, it's not going to go that far on on a battery if you have it charged up to 100%. Really, what

• 12:06Wes Bos?

  happens is when we go to the cottage, the night before I'll charge it up to 100% and you can really get in ideal situations, maybe 425 kilometers, which is 260 miles. So that's, that's really what you're going to get out of, out of that. If you, if you get that specific one, the things that affect range is wildly different, right? Like when you have lots of people, lots of stuff in the car, it's quite a bit less. How you drive. So I'm, I'm a pretty aggressive driver, I would say. So I don't get as far on it. And the winter tires, driving in in slush and stuff like that, that will bring it down quite a bit as well. But

• 12:45Wes Bos?

  None of that has been an issue. None of that has been even remotely an inconvenience, which I spent very many, many years. I've been looking at electric cars for many, many years, thinking like, oh, am I be able to do this and X, Y, and Z? And like, never, never been an issue. Not at all. Not even close to being like, oh, this is kind of scary, right? And it's just like, I can't believe how actually, so it's so much better than I would have thought.

• 13:16Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. For me, the range anxiety was, you know, I mean, being in Colorado, it's hard to drive. I mean, you could drive to Utah, right? Like that. But like, if I'm going to go to Michigan to visit my family, I'm going to fly to Michigan because that is like a two day drive. We got dogs, we got kids, like, that's not going to happen. So we don't do any super long car trips. For me, the most important thing was that I could go to any of the ski resorts, whether that is, you know, even Vail is like an hour, 42 hours on a, you know, on a trip. Or if I want to go to, most of the time, it's like an hour and a half, hour 15 into the mountains, which is mostly like really uphill driving. I need to be able to get to the mountains and back and either charge while

• 14:00Scott Tolinski?

  I'm there or just drive back. So for me, like, I'm able to go to go skiing for a day, come back and still have 30%, 40% left on my battery, which is actually another great thing. We talk, we talk a lot about like a range anxiety.

• 14:16Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 14:17Scott Tolinski?

  If your car is using the one pedal driving motor, you're going downhill or whatever, it's recharging the battery. And if I'm going into the mountains and I'm coming back, I've had, I've had a trip, honestly, Wes, this was crazy. I had a trip where like on the way up, it took 50% of my battery and I still managed to get home with 40% battery because the way back was like pretty much downhill charging the whole way.

• 14:39Wes Bos?

  The regenerative?

• 14:40Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. So the range for me has always been very good. But again, I'm not doing any cross country trips with the car. But again, it charges really fast. When, when we take it into mountain trips for the weekend or for the week and we want to spend some time like away from the house. Like I said, my car with the level three charging, I'll just take it, bring my computer 15, 20 minutes, whatever, charge it up and be good to go.

• 15:02Wes Bos?

  Yeah, it's, it's amazing. So I have needed to charge at a supercharger, I think.

• 15:11Wes Bos?

  Three times so far. So I can make it four and a half, five hours to the cottage on without a charge at all. And you show up with, I think I show up with 15% battery. It's kind of, kind of a little dicey though, because if it does, if you end up needing to, to go a different way, there's a detour, then you're, it's, it's much harder to charge a car that's out in the middle of, out of the middle of nowhere than just getting a jerry can, right? Like there's, I know there's tow trucks and whatever, but not where my cottage is. So what I'll do is the, the three times I've actually needed to charge is you stop and you literally, I'm not lying, we charge for six minutes every single time because it's, it's

• 15:55Wes Bos?

  so much different than thinking about, oh, you got to fill up the gas to a hundred percent.

• 15:59Scott Tolinski?

  Totally, yeah.

• 16:00Wes Bos?

  It's simply just like, how much, how many minutes do I need to just top up? Can I grab 10, 15% to get to my next destination? And thinking about it in terms of that has been, is a bit of a mind shift, right? You always think about like, oh, how much does it charge go to zero to a hundred percent? And, and how, how many times have I ever charged from zero to a hundred percent? Never. It's always just, you plug it in, you get 10, 15, 20% as much as you need. Or you, a lot of people will go for lunch or whatever and, and charge it up. But the amount of times I've actually stopped, it's, it's been done charging before I've gotten back from going to the bathroom with my kids.

• 16:42Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 16:43Wes Bos?

  Part of that is because the charges are a kilometer away in the parking lot, though.

• 16:48Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. And, and if you, if you need the fast charging, there are cars like mine. Mine, here's the official stats. It goes from 10 to 80% in 18 minutes. It can add 62 miles in five minutes. So if you need 62 miles in five minutes, pretty fast. So there are cars that, that charge very fast if you need fast charging for whatever the reasons. But like Wes, I, I mostly You know, I mostly just charge my car at home. Or if I am going to charge my car away from home, what I do is it's do it when you're going out to eat or something.

• 17:21Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 17:22Scott Tolinski?

  You know, you walk to the restaurant or you you park near or something like that. And it maybe it's just lucky where I'm at in Colorado that we have a lot of EV chargers around. It makes it pretty easy to do that.

• 17:33Wes Bos?

  Mm hmm. The the 1080 thing is kind of interesting because that's how people judge it. Because when your battery is super low, it charges super fast. And then as you get up to 80%, it's much slower to go from 80 to 100%. So that like 1080 is kind of the metric that a lot of people are using. So we'll talk about the charging levels. There's three levels, right? One, two, three. Level one is you simply plug it into a 120 volt outlet. I know the everyone in Europe is laughing us right now because we have such wimpy electricity. But that is extremely slow. I think I did the math on it. If you were at zero battery and needed to go to 100, that would take five days to to fully charge. However,

• 18:17Scott Tolinski?

  For me, I would, I don't remember taking five days because I did the the level one charger for about a year before I ended up getting my home level two charger. And I don't, maybe it's just because I don't drive that much that it maybe never got that low.

• 18:32Wes Bos?

  You know, I never got that low as well. I would just run it down 15%. And then it would overnight, it would go to, it would recoup that that 15%. But if you do the math, it is, it certainly does take that much because there is only 15 amps allowed to come out of those those circuits. And at our cottage, we have a, an old woodworking shop that has a 240 20 amp plug. So I got like a special adapter for it and it charged much faster. But what most people do is they're not charging on those plugs. That takes absolutely forever unless you're just leaving it for a full day. Most people go and get a level two, which is generally a 60 amp breaker.

• 19:15Wes Bos?

  They can go up to 100 amp breakers and they will then deliver something like 40. Mine mine delivers forty eight amps of two hundred and forty volts and it it charges like as I've never been in a problem where I've like, oh, I'm waiting for this thing to charge because I don't I can't even tell you how fast it charges, right? I just plug it in and a couple hours later, the thing is full, which is pretty sweet. And then there's the third level, which is level three, and that is it goes DC straight to the batteries. So rather than converting AC to DC, which is what your car has a charger in it, you just go DC straight. And that's what supercharging is or or fast charging is. And you'll see them often on the side of the highway.

• 20:00Wes Bos?

  Those things will will get you really, really fast. Like, like I said, I can spend five minutes there and get fifteen, twenty percent and I can be on my way.

• 20:10Scott Tolinski?

  Word.

• 20:10Wes Bos?

  Charging standards, you can use any charger out there mostly. So the the Tesla charger is called NACS, North American Charging Standard. And then most of the ones right now that you're gonna see at like a mall or whatever, they have a something called the J seventeen seventy two. And those things are pretty compatible. You can buy a little adapter and they will convert themselves. And it's it's not really a big deal. Most new cars are coming out with the Tesla standard, which is the NACS. But I wouldn't sweat about that because it's simply just a little adapter you you have to keep in the trunk and you can you can charge on on any of them.

• 20:52Wes Bos?

  I've I've charged at six or seven around town just to test it to see if it works. But I've never actually needed to.

• 21:00Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, you know what, I got like two free years of charging with Electrify America. So I only like go to Electr- I'll go out of my way to go to Electrify America.

• 21:08Wes Bos?

  Oh, man, yeah.

• 21:08Scott Tolinski?

  Chargers, just to take advantage of that.

• 21:11Wes Bos?

  That's good because I should say one thing is the Tesla chargers are not cheap at all. If you are comparing the kilowatt hour of a Tesla charger versus gas, it's essentially the same. The cost savings here, and we'll get into pricing, is really if you are able to charge at a lower rate at home. Or a lot of people even have a super low overnight rate, which is almost free to to charge this thing. But if you are thinking, oh, I'm gonna charge at a a supercharger absolutely every single time, which is a lot of people in apartment buildings or street parking, whatever. The benefit of the pricing goes out the window very quickly because those chargers are really expensive.

• 21:51Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. So let's talk, and while we're on that, I mean, let's talk pricing. You did some, some actual cost analysis here, like real world versus gas. I do want to say like, like you had mentioned, if you are, you know, you know, don't own your own home where you can install this, that, that gets harder. I think that gets much tougher. And I don't know if that's a decision I would make personally. Yeah. Just, yeah, just because you'd be what you'd be charging all the time, especially if you're driving a lot, you'd be charging elsewhere. Or if they have them at your work, maybe that'd be nice.

• 22:25Wes Bos?

  That's the thing. A flip side is a lot of people say, hmm, my work has chargers.

• 22:30Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 22:31Wes Bos?

  So your electricity bill would be zero. If you plug in at work and they pay for it, that's, that's wicked. You, you pay nothing. But I have, so I've driven 5,000 kilometers, which is 3,100 miles in about six months now. And I have spent $190 on electricity. So people are like, can you tell it in your bill? No, not at all. If you take the supercharging out of that, it's probably close to like $130 that I've, I've spent on my home electricity.

• 23:08Wes Bos?

  And we get fairly cheap rates here in Ontario because we have a massive waterfall that is constantly dumping, right? So in Ontario, all of our power comes from nuclear or from the waterfall. So it's relatively cheap compared to other countries and other places. So we can kind of take advantage of that. So I pay, I think 11, 12 cents a kilowatt hour. I've seen people pay four or five times that. And then you can also, if you want, you can get on time based billing, where you can get it down to two cents a kilowatt hour. And you, you can time the car to charge overnight. So you can essentially fill your car up for.

• 23:51Wes Bos?

  I don't know. I can fill my car up at 11 cents for $8.50. But if you're, you could probably get that down to a buck 50, two bucks if you're doing overnight. We don't do the overnight though, because I'm home all day. We have the heaters on. We have the air condition on. I have lights on, so it doesn't make sense for us.

• 24:09Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, we have, I think a lot of the, the home chargers even have like settings in the nap for them that allow you to set it up.

• 24:15Wes Bos?

  You can time them. But let me, let me show you my real world. If you are 100% charging at home, which is me driving to the cottage, takes four and a half hours, 400 kilometers. I can charge the whole car for about $8.50 and our van's gas to the cottage costs us $75. Gas is a little bit cheaper now, probably a little bit less. So it's almost 10 times cheaper to, if you're charging at home and just doing that. And that's not a fair comparison because the van is much bigger. It's, it's not as efficient, right? But I, I did compare it against a RAV4 hybrid. And that would be about $40 with the gas. So it's still would have been four times cheaper than a, a hybrid,

• 25:00Wes Bos?

  which is, is, is pretty nuts.

• 25:03Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. And I mean, I, there's also like all these additional maintenance costs that I don't know if people consider. I mean, my wife has a hybrid. She has the RAV4 hybrid. We've had it for a while. I mean, you do, I, not a maintenance cost, but like going out of your way to a gas station is a non nothing, you know, thing. She has to stop at a gas station. People act like that takes no time out of your day whatsoever. Where like for me, I literally just plug it in and that actually takes no time out of my day.

• 25:31Wes Bos?

  Yeah, it's always full, which is wild. People think, oh, I can fill my car in, in five minutes. That's why I hear a lot of people say, but like, I never have to go to the gas station. It's not really a pain in my ass to go to the, the gas station, but.

• 25:43Scott Tolinski?

  You gotta go out of your way sometimes.

• 25:44Wes Bos?

  Yeah, yeah, you do.

• 25:46Scott Tolinski?

  I, I just got done shopping at Costco. Now I gotta go wait in the Costco gas line because that's where the, the gas is the cheapest, right?

• 25:52Wes Bos?

  That makes no sense to me.

• 25:54Scott Tolinski?

  It's cheaper. It makes sense to me. But another, you know, another big cost-saving measure is brakes, right? You don't think about that because with the one pedal driving, it is it's magnets or what is it? Resistance, using resistance to slow down the car? I was trying to explain this to my son the other day and I was like, I actually don't know how this works.

• 26:12Wes Bos?

  Yeah, well, the way that a motor works is that when you put electricity to a motor, it will spin. However, if you manually spin a motor with your hand, it's generating electricity. That's how generators work, right? I have a propane generator that spins a motor fast enough that generates electricity. And then that goes into into the house. So you can either make a motor go by putting power to it, or if you're flying down a hill, you're not putting any power into it, but that motor works as a generator and is able to put the power back into the battery, which is pretty cool. Like, I can go,

• 26:55Wes Bos?

  I can go down like a one-minute hill we have here in Hamilton and my it goes up 1%. Like, it's not nothing.

• 27:03Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I know. And I always use the one pedal driving. For people who don't know, the one pedal driving, when you take your foot off the gas, it starts to slow down the car like pretty rapidly, almost as if you were braking. So I pretty much only use the one pedal to brake until you need to actually brake or you have to brake hard or something like that. So your brakes don't get the amount of use that they would get because the motor is slowing it down. Also, you know, people don't think about this. They electric cars don't have like belts. They, you know, your your engine has all these belts, timing belt, whatever belt. You have to replace these belts. Granted, not that frequently, but you don't have to do that. You don't have to worry about belts wearing out. Two, oil. The cars don't have oil. There's no engine to put oil in. You never have to go into an oil change.

• 27:49Scott Tolinski?

  Oil changes are a pain in the ass. Let's face it. I don't know if they are in Canada, but here they are. They're always like.

• 27:54Wes Bos?

  I hate it. It's so annoying. You gotta, yeah. They're pretty quick, but even then I have to think, oh, I gotta, I'm gonna take the car and go through the jiffy lube, or if you go to like a mechanic, get a book and appointment or whatever.

• 28:06Wes Bos?

  Not to say that the Tesla doesn't have maintenance, but it or electric cars don't have maintenance, but they are significantly less, like the brakes. Is a huge one for me. It's so much that you don't use your brakes on electric car that there's, I'm part of all these groups on Facebook all the time. People are like, my brakes are rusting over. It's like, well, you have to use them sometimes.

• 28:26Scott Tolinski?

  To use them sometimes.

• 28:27Wes Bos?

  There's, there's even a, if you go into the service mode of a Tesla, you can turn on this brake burnishing mode, which it will, you go really fast and then it will put the brakes on really quickly. And you do that six or seven times because people are not using them at all. Like,

• 28:44Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 28:44Wes Bos?

  If I drive like four hours, I probably tap the brake five, six times, which is, is nuts. It is a little bit motion sickness when you first get into it because as soon as you take your foot off the pedal, it immediately starts braking. So you have to like relearn how to, how to drive the thing.

• 29:04Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 29:04Wes Bos?

  One thing that is way more expensive is, first of all, the cars are way more expensive.

• 29:08Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 29:10Wes Bos?

  That's why I was laughing with my sister the other day. She's like, I was like, it's so much cheaper without paying for gas. She's like, yeah, but you also bought a really expensive car.

• 29:18Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 29:19Wes Bos?

  First of all, the Model Y is not like a fancy car anymore. I know people think it's like a, a super expensive fancy car. It's, I call it a Corolla. Literally everybody on my street has one. There's, it's like the next Honda Civic because people do the math and the numbers work out. It's a little bit more upfront, but if you, if you actually do the math on things that we're talking about, gas, brakes, maintenance, oil changes, things like that, it actually does work out. Like, believe me, I, I'm, I'm the guy that picks garbage from the side of the road. I do the math on this type of stuff, right?

• 29:53Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, your, your garbage picking stuff.

• 29:55Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 29:58Wes Bos?

  But the insurance is friggin ridiculous on these things and so much that like, a lot of people get sticker shock. So. My, our Model Y is a hundred dollars a month more than our van is. It was the same as, we used to have a BMW X5. It's the same amount and the BMW X5 is a very large, high-end SUV. And Tesla is not a high-end SUV, right? It's a nice car, but it's not high-end by, by any means, which is, is pretty nuts. And it's because insurance companies don't want to touch these things once they get in a wreck because there's a big battery in them and they're kind of scared to, to repair it. So they just write them off all the time. You see it all the time.

• 30:41Wes Bos?

  And there's this like underground of people who actually fix them now, which is kind of cool. I've been watching on YouTube quite a bit. Rich rebuilds is probably the biggest one out there, but there's this huge, like the, the next generation of mechanics are not, get your fingers oily and whatnot. We certainly will still need those. I don't think that every car needs to be electric because there's lots of use cases where you need all of that power and range or whatever. But a lot of the next generations of mechanics are nerds who know this stuff really, really well. And part of this like Facebook group that is full of like Tesla service, like third-party Tesla service guys, and it's wild the stuff they'll do.

• 31:24Wes Bos?

  They'll be like, this one battery cell is corroded. And they're just like, they peel it open. They have all these scan tools that they can use to figure out which battery it is. They take the cell out, they replace it, they balance it and like, it's pretty cool what they can do.

• 31:40Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Yeah, you do wonder too, like as the, the battery tech evolves and the tech changes in general, like what that will come. You know, one thing I never understood about maybe people hating on electric cars is like the people who are. Fast car enthusiasts.

• 31:57Wes Bos?

  Yes.

• 31:57Scott Tolinski?

  Because I had, I had a, a sports car before. Yeah. It's like a turbocharged, you know, nearly 300 horsepower car and it's not nothing. It was a lightweight car. So it's very fast. Right?

• 32:09Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 32:10Scott Tolinski?

  But the Ioniq 5 with 350 horsepower and instantaneous torque is by far the fastest, most fun to drive car I've ever owned for numerous reasons. I push the pedal and my daughter calls it cheetah mode and you throw your head back like a spaceship. It shoots off so fast.

• 32:29Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 32:29Scott Tolinski?

  So there are, and there, and there's so much weight low to the ground that you can corner really well in them. So to me, I never understood, like, I don't need my car to go vroom, vroom for me to enjoy it personally, because I, it's fast as hell.

• 32:42Wes Bos?

  I, I have a very good theory on this and I call it the machine gun Kelly effect. And it's because, hear me out. This, this, I've been, I've talked to my wife about it the other day and she's like, you're so stupid, but this makes so much sense to me, is that people who buy electric cars immediately become car people and almost always those are not car people previously and they all of a sudden are, they want to talk about it. They want to tell everybody about it. And quite honestly, car people love to modify their cars and they love to do the research and they love to talk about it. And then here

• 33:21Wes Bos?

  comes me who went on the Tesla website and I picked from three colors and two interiors. I picked from those things and everybody goes to car meets and says, you got the blue, I got the gray. Oh, there's also a black and there's a white. That's it. You know, like, and there's not a whole lot you can do to modify it. And then there's this like crazy aftermarket of like Amazon aftermarket parts you can add to it and all kinds of crazy stuff. So my, my thing here is that I feel the same way about people who like machine

• 33:59Wes Bos?

  gun Kelly. Why? Because you shouldn't be able to just find music that you like and say, I like this because I love music. I love punk. I love hardcore and I spend lots of time. Curating my library and finding really hard to find stuff and talking to people about, "This sounds really cool." And then you see these nerds put the radio on and say, "Machine Gun Kelly is sick." And, and then they go to a, they go get a T-shirt from Hot Topic and think that they're super into music. And that's how it should be. I feel the same way about Taylor Swift as well.

• 34:42Wes Bos?

  It's totally fine to like popular music and it's totally fine to do that. You don't have to be nuts about music to enjoy something, but it bugs us music people when we see that type of thing because the guy is a poser and he's just putting on like a bunch of earrings and trying to look cool. And you know, you know what I'm trying to say here is that

• 35:05Scott Tolinski?

  I know what you're trying to say.

• 35:06Wes Bos?

  Car people.

• 35:06Scott Tolinski?

  No, I get what you're trying to say. For me, I, the only, the only thing I'm concerned about with this metaphor is that, do people actually listen to Machine Gun Kelly? If you are out there and you're a listener, yeah, let me know. I do, I did not know he was an artist of note. I, I thought he had like, I thought he was kind of like a, he showed up for a minute and is

• 35:25Wes Bos?

  He's, he's huge in the al- alternative rock scene. It's the same thing when I was, when I was growing up, people would listen to Simple Plan and it's just like,

• 35:35Scott Tolinski?

  He's like a poser rap guy.

• 35:37Wes Bos?

  No, he's, he's like, he's like in the like, like punk rock, um, like Blink 182 adjacent. Blink is really cool. Don't get

• 35:46Scott Tolinski?

  He must have pivoted.

• 35:47Wes Bos?

  Yeah, that's the thing. That's the thing is that he was super into rap, but then when rap's not cool anymore, what's, oh, alternative is back in, you know? And, and now everyone's into that. And I know this is the stupidest thing ever, but it bugs people who spend their life identifying with that. And, and I guarantee it's the same thing for, for car people is like, I spent so long. I love to jack my truck up. I spent, I, I go on the forums, I talk to everybody. I, I put all these aftermarket parts into it. And then you see some guy ripping down the highway with a rap on his Tesla thinking he's hot shit.

• 36:27Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 36:27Wes Bos?

  It bugs you.

• 36:29Scott Tolinski?

  I get what you're saying. As a former snobby music person, I have since changed my tune. I was a music student. So, you know, I grew up going to concerts. So, believe it or not, I definitely was a snobby music person for a long time.

• 36:42Wes Bos?

  People just like what they like.

• 36:44Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 36:46Wes Bos?

  All right. So let's wrap it up here. The question is, so now we have a van that's gas and a car that's electric. I often think to myself, would you go 100% electric? And my answer to that is, I absolutely would if they come out with something that is as good as the van. And the Model X is not a van. You can't fold the seats in. People who think that the Model X is a van equivalent have not done van stuff, you know? Show me when you put eight sheets of plywood into a Model X and we'll talk, you know? But the van is so good. Put a washer dryer in there the other day. I can tow with it, no problem.

• 37:28Wes Bos?

  All the seats come out really cool. The kids can abuse it. Frickin' TV flips down from it. Give me a Tesla van or give me a Kia EV9 with sliding doors that you can still take the seats out. There's still room underneath. You give up that room underneath because there's a battery there. Give me all that stuff. 100% I would be there. I would be there in a second.

• 37:52Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. I honestly, I, you know, I would do. I have, I would have no problem getting full EV. Because again, we just don't drive cross-country like that. My wife has the, what did I say? The RAV4 Hybrid for a while ago. And I think it's like a 2020, maybe, maybe even 2018. I don't even remember when. Either way, it's still new enough that we're not even considering buying a new car. I'm the type of guy who buys a car and keeps it for, you know, 10, 10 plus years.

• 38:24Wes Bos?

  Yeah, same with me.

• 38:25Scott Tolinski?

  Paid off and, you know, I have to buy, I have to buy a new car. In fact, my last car was so old it didn't even have a backup camera. It didn't have like any features. Like the fanciest feature it had was like the blind spot detection. So, yeah, I rarely buy a new car. But when we do, inevitably do, we'll definitely go another EV. They're just great.

• 38:46Wes Bos?

  Yeah, pretty good. We didn't, we didn't specifically talk about the tech in these cars because I don't think that's an electric only thing. You know, like all the, all the, well, like what tech is, is EV only?

• 38:58Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, well, does your, I guess your minivan might have this, but like a normal outlet? My car has a normal outlet.

• 39:03Wes Bos?

  Does not, but my mini, my minivan 10 years ago has an outlet and the Tesla does not have a, a regular 120 volt outlet. Drives me crazy. Literally the thing is a battery on wheels and you can't plug like a radio into, into the back of it. You have to get, I do have like a inverter and the USB ports put out like power delivery. So they're pretty good, but kind of bugs me.

• 39:30Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I plug my Mac, I plug my MacBook Pro into the power adapter. That's great. I love the climate control stuff, so I can have my car set the climate controls.

• 39:40Wes Bos?

  Oh, yeah, that's a huge one.

• 39:42Scott Tolinski?

  It's a huge one, morning or in the summer.

• 39:43Wes Bos?

  You can keep the air conditioning on when you're at the mall and you can just run the air conditioning for two hours and keep the car icy cold. And then, or you can, you can heat it up.

• 39:54Scott Tolinski?

  It's really the best in the winter. For me, because our garage is detached. So even in that short walk from the house to the garage, you're like, oh, it's cold. Let's get in, you get in the garage and you get in the car and the car's all nice and warm. That to me is huge. Yeah.

• 40:08Wes Bos?

  I'm, I was specifically talking about the like, the self-driving tech.

• 40:12Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, yeah, the lane keep stuff.

• 40:14Wes Bos?

  Lane keeping, uh, whatever. The self-driving stuff is pretty cool, but that, all that stuff can, is added to most cars.

• 40:23Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Yeah. There's nothing really groundbreaking unless you're using some crazy LiDAR systems or, yeah.

• 40:28Wes Bos?

  Yeah. Well, that's, that's my beef with the Tesla is it doesn't have any sensors. It's all cameras. So like the, there's like the backup, the blind spot. It's not as good as our 10 year old thing. And the thing drives itself. It's not as good as our 10 year old van, which, which has sensors in it. So I kind of wish it did have sensors.

• 40:49Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. I don't know what their deal with, uh, not using like LiDAR is. I think a lot of really interesting cars do, or at least newer ones.

• 40:56Wes Bos?

  Yeah, I agree.

• 40:56Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Um, if, if I got a new EV, Wes, and I, if I ever had the money to spend on it, um, Like a hundred thousand dollar car.

• 41:04Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 41:05Scott Tolinski?

  Which, believe me, like you said, it's not in my future. Uh, this is the one I would get. I would get the Lotus Electra. It is not in Lotus's typical wheelhouse of being these lightweight British cars. It's this massive SUV, uh, but it is a, uh, hyper car. It drives very, very fast. It has nine hundred and five horsepower and it's a three seat, it's a three row SUV with nine hundred horsepower. And it's crazy. So this is my dream car.

• 41:31Wes Bos?

  So many cool car companies just popping up, like are starting to see them driving around. Although Canada just put a big, like a hundred percent, um, tariff on imported ones, imported vehicles from China. Cause like BYD is a huge, like we're almost at a spot now where you can get like a fifteen thousand dollar little electric car. But not anymore, at least not in Canada, because they are gonna tax the crap out of that.

• 42:00Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, like Lotus, like, just like Volvo was purchased by, uh, I'd say Greeley, one of the Chinese auto manufacturers.

• 42:05Wes Bos?

  Oh, really?

• 42:06Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 42:07Wes Bos?

  Yeah. This Lotus looks sick.

• 42:09Scott Tolinski?

  It's crazy. It's my favorite. A lot of people hate it, which is the one thing I hate about the Lotus fan groups because they're all like, it's not a two seater, tiny little, I'm like, I, nobody's buying them. So that's why they're making this, yeah.

• 42:21Wes Bos?

  Oh, also, one other thing is I'll, I'll tell you, go on TikTok and look up Edison Motors. It's a electric truck company from Canada, Vancouver, that is big in the logging industry. And the way that it works is that you don't plug it in. It has a caterpillar generator onboard.

• 42:42Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, a generator, yeah.

• 42:43Wes Bos?

  It has a generator and the generator runs and fills the batteries. And then the batteries drive the thing. And he says, it's, it's not about saving the environment. It's about the efficiency of this and the, the torque that you can get out of electric motors. And it's really interesting. And then the Ram, the Dodge Ram, which is the good old boys' truck. They just came out with the Ram Rev. Really cool. It's kind of the same idea where it still has an engine in it, but it's all electric battery, drivetrain, all that good stuff. But then it has a, like a three cylinder engine in it that will charge the batteries for you.

• 43:23Scott Tolinski?

  Sick. Well, this was a very, just like the weight of these electric cars, this was a chunky episode.

• 43:32Wes Bos?

  Very, very. Yeah, that was a bit long. Maybe we could have got a tasty out of it. But hopefully you enjoyed a thing or two. I think the people that are interested in the stuff don't necessarily care. They'll listen to it. And we'd love to hear your thoughts on us. Tweet us at syntax FM. I'm at Wes Boss and Scott is at S Tolinski.

• 43:52Scott Tolinski?

  Thank you. All right. We'll catch you later.

• 43:54Wes Bos?

  Peace.

• 43:55Scott Tolinski?

  Peace.