The Reality of EV Ownership // Mustang Mach E GT Performance

Hello, what's up everyone? Welcome to today's channel, something a little different, this is not photography. Focus, this is simply more informative. Focus on how to drive an electric card and we're going to start this video with some thoughts and comments on this

mustang

Maki GT. Performance Edition extended range yeah, that's a mouthful behind me and then we're going to finish the video with a little vlog to try out the one thing I haven't really done yet, which is probably the key point of all. EV stuff uh, real quick behind me, this right here is a 2020 3 Mustang Maki GT

performance

extended range edition with all-wheel drive, it's the top model you can get and it's in space white, it's kind of a grayish white color , I think it looks really cool and I want to give you a few things about why I chose this car over the regular Mai why I chose an EV uh why this versus a Tesla some of the good things that have happened so far some of the bad things so far and then we're going to talk about the trip we're about to take and the range anxiety that comes with that, so real quick, let's get in the car and I'll go over the vehicle a little bit for you, hopefully, the opening clip was out of focus.

I just realized my eye tracking wasn't on anyway. This is the Mustang Maki GT Performance Extended Range Edition, so extended range obviously means a longer battery. This has the extended range version. It says it's supposed to have 290 Mi range. I think the

reality

is more like 270 280. We'll talk about that range in a different little part of the video, the GT itself, although what comes with that is. the bigger wheels that I showed in the initial build the bigger Brembo brakes you have the magnar suspension which is tunable and adjustable here on the main screen which I'll show you in just a minute you have these seats right here if you guys see these seats they're like a ricaro style racing seat.

I don't think they're actually ricaro seats, but they are very, very nice, they hold you in the seat, uh, they get the suede and the leather, um, just a lot. of improvements I think the glass roof I'm not sure if it's unique to the

performance

GT but the glass roof is definitely an add on this car is as maximized as possible and it's super nice. I like it. I chose this trim level over the regular Mai because I really like the seats. I like the extra front spoiler that is on the car. The smoky details on the car, especially with the space white color.

I thought it looked really, really, really. Okay, so those reasons why I chose it instead of the regular Maki. I just knew that if I went with the base model I would eventually want to have the GT and what they say, buy right or buy twice, is something like that. What is this, but coming from this, I want to tell you why I chose this car instead of the Tesla option. Now I was looking at the Tesla Model 3 and the Model Y and then I drove this and there are a few things that immediately caught my eye.

On this vehicle, first of all, the fit and finish, let me turn everything around, from this chamois to these buttons and these knobs, these switches, these door locks, everything was so much better, the materials, the steering wheel , I thought it was a lot. prettier, so yes, basic. I thought that was really nice, but then I drove the cars and the Tesla Model and Model 3 have a lot of road noise. I think they are addressing this in the update they are doing on these cars, but I stepped up to the Mustang Maki GT because the seats were more performance oriented and the fit and finish of the vehicle, the road noise was much quieter compared to the Tesla and there were also a couple of other things that convinced me.

I'm showing you this, so a couple of things I liked, if you've ever driven a Tesla, you know there's no off, on, off, button, you just get in the car and that's it. I like having a traditional stop/start button. and you can tell my autofocus doesn't like that button, the glow is funny, but other than that, when you get in a tesla, it doesn't have a shift knob, you have to control everything with the stem right there , I did. I don't enjoy it either. I didn't like the Park Drive thing from top to bottom. I really preferred to have this kind of dial knob right here, the reverse park neutral unit, that's really cool and the last thing is this screen right here behind my steering wheel.

Steering wheel there is no screen on the Tesla, it's just a big wide screen on the Teslas and I really liked having the speedometer. I'll turn it on so you guys can see the speedometer and the charge status and all kinds of stuff right there, guys. I'm hearing all the chimes because I have my Bel seat on um, so I walked in and was like, hey, I really like this. One of the other reasons I chose this over the Tesla um is because the dealer network now I know Tesla is really good at sending service people to your house so I'm not saying it's a bad setup but I like it the idea of ​​being able to drive down the highway back to the dealership where I bought the car, they have technicians that specialize in this vehicle and the F-150 Lightning as well and they could take care of you now.

I had to use their services only once to change these tires on this car because GT performance comes with oh. Wait, the music came with GT performance. with summer tires super sticky summer tires that when they cool down become almost useless and are almost dangerous to drive in the winter so I had to put some All Seasons back on this vehicle and in doing so the dealership was phenomenal they changed my tires but then they took the car back to my house with my summer tires in the back of another car so it wasn't in my car and they left it all for me free of charge and I thought it was amazing and that went into my buying process. decision making also knowing that I could go out and return to the place where I bought my vehicle and take care of it.

What else did I talk about about fit and finish? Cabin noise. Oh, the dealership, the knobs and. the screens, the latest is carplay rivan and tesla, both do not have apple carplay and let me turn this around. You can see here that I obviously have carplay so I can go to my Spotify or Apple Maps, which is really cool. The nice thing about Apple Maps is that it integrates and talks to the car, so it knows my charging status and when I do the mapping system, it will talk to the car and say "hey, here's a charger and this is when Can you fill in and that kind of stuff?

So when I weighed all that stuff together I thought it was really cool, uh, and that's why I chose it over a Tesla, so it's not all sunshine and rainbows about it. Tesla because there are two important things that are kind of GL I wrote a list that are obvious tradeoffs when you decide to choose a Mustang Maki or basically any other car over a Tesla because Tesla is the standard in many ways and the most obvious is the. charging network, that's what we're going to test later in this video because I have a level two charger in my house and I haven't had to use the public charging network even once, which is absolutely phenomenal.

Needless to say, if you are someone who has access to a house, condo or apartment, the garage that can install a level two charger in your house, do it because it absolutely makes range anxiety go away unless you are going for a trip long we'll do later and that's the point of this video, but the Tesla charging network is phenomenal, if you don't know, there are two types of charging standards right now: Tesla and then there's everyone else, so it's like thinking about Apple and then Android, right where Apple had a Lightning port and Android had USB or micro USB for charging in the beginning, that's the problem. is that Tesla, their charging network is controlled by them, everyone has the same experience when you open the app, it just works, you plug it in, you know they're working, the reliability is there for a non-Tesla vehicle, it's kind of gaming. a bunch of different companies in strange places, you know, will your car be able to plug in and start running without having to log into another app? a credit card, take all kinds of things, that's why there's an app called plug share that people use, it's kind of a crowdsource of charging information and it tells you if you know the latest news about that charger, if you're running and what your charge rate is and that kind of stuff, but that contributes to range anxiety, that's very big.

The reason some people don't adopt EVS is because it's just an unknown, like people want to pull off a freeway exit ramp and go to a gas station and know that they will be taken care of and not taken care of. I'm sure the charging network is something that people are not very comfortable with and it is a problem, but it is a short-term problem because now they have announced that Tesla and the other vehicle manufacturers will share their networks and therefore So, Ford. has announced that they will send me a free adapter for my car to use the Tesla charging network and I know that Tesla can also get adapters to connect to the other network so it will be temporary.

The problem is also that if Ford is trying to fix this, I have a Ford app. I forget what it's called Ford, something that maybe Ford plugs in and there's a credit card on fire, so when I plug in the station it's supposed to just talk to my car and start charging and charge my card right away without having to do any kind of signal in that kind of garbage, we'll see if that really works CU, let's try it, uh, here at the end of the video. And that's the bad side of Tesla versus a non-Tesla type of setup.

Well, let's talk about the good and the bad so far about this vehicle because now that I have told you what your compensation is, let my decision begin. The creation process was let's talk about the good and the bad. What do I like so far about driving EVs in general? Well, first of all, you won't understand this until you drive it for a long period of time. It is the power, it is specifically this. One, I don't know if all EVS have this power, but this car has an incredible amount of horsepower and torque and it's available anywhere, anytime you want, all the time, so you press the accelerator and Boom, it's all-wheel drive. it just breaks down, you're doing a 30 or 40 turn, you press the accelerator, you just go back and go, it's addictive and once you do that you don't want to go back to a gas car because gas cars have to rev the engine and the transmission they have to downshift, none of that here and that's huge.

The second thing I really like is the heat, so you know, traditional gasoline cars have to warm up and then they start producing heat and obviously newer cars have gotten better than older cars, but this one works with an electric heater, then you just get in and like the seats get warm instantly, the steering wheel is hot, the car is hot and that's awesome, I'll talk about the heat in a second, although that's also a detractor. electric vehicles, so I'll tell you that in a second also, the third thing is driving with one pedal, it's very strange to get used to if you don't know what this is, essentially when you take the accelerator off the accelerator. it starts braking for you, it starts decelerating for you, and then it puts a lot of that energy back into the charging system and regenerates energy for you at first.

It's weird because you're used to letting off the gas and coasting and then hitting the brake, you can literally drive this vehicle and never hit the brake if you time out when you use the regenerative braking, so that's really cool and once you You get used to it again, it's something you don't want to go back to. I can mention this already, charging at home, so behind me here in my garage I have an amazing charging point level two charger, you just plug it in at night. I have my car set on a schedule to charge when rates drop at night.

I just plug it in. It stops at 90%. I'll tell you why in a moment and then I'll be ready every morning. I get up and have enough reach. I never have to do anything crazy and the last thing I have. Here's the weight and the all-wheel drive system, so this car weighs 5100 lbs, I think that's about the same weight as a Ram 1500, so it has this strange feeling that it's fast, agile, and instant acceleration. but it's also very heavy, there are no downshifts, it's hard to explain, it's something unique to these electric vehicles and then you combine it with the all-wheel drive system and this thing just plows through the snow and handles it without a problem So overall, I really love driving this vehicle more than I ever thought and you know I'm kind of a car enthusiast.

I'm like an old V8 manual transmission guy and this has changed my mind about the things I like. Okay, let's talk about the B things on this car specifically or just Eevee in general that I referenced earlier, but the cargo net, right, is kind of an unknown, let's try it today, but if you're not. the type of person who plans his things andSam's Club, we got some clothes there, so we did a little tour and, uh, we went from I think we were like 30 something up to 83.% at the time, the loading rate on this was like 135 Kow per hour.

The charging rate compared to the charging points I was on before was 60 Kow per hour, so it doubled the speed rate, so we got a lot of range quickly. What it's telling me now is that I'll barely be able to get to Ryan's house if I and I have to charge before we get there, but I'll have to charge one more time for about 15 minutes to get home. So I'm going to fit all of this in at the end because because of the cost of charging and the amount of time I spent on chargers, I have all of those logs and I'll summarize them at the end to show you what it is. this is really about but until then it's coffee time I'm going to have someStarbucks wait a second uh because we're as basic as those electric vehicles and Starbucks you know what I can't.

I keep trying to Vlog and the car knows I'm watching you and keeps telling me to pay attention to the road, but I'll tell you this, I added a little comment while we're driving down the road here, the blue cruiser is super nice when it's running so For the first half hour of our trip it was like being kicked out of the system. I don't really know why but for the rest of the trip it has been working very very well and I am only cruising at 994 hands of the wheel, I have the cruise set to 75 M hour.

I'm just relaxing. I feel like I'm a passenger and it's so much fun, it's really good, also while we were driving I added up our total time on the charger so far, I have one more charging stop, probably for about 15 minutes. or take, but so far we've been on the charger for 2 hours and 26 minutes total, and what I'm curious about is adding up that cost and then doing the mileage and how it costs by miles and then it equates to If you had a hybrid or a car normal or even my diesel truck that I used to have, how much better it would have been if it hadn't been like that.

I have some conclusions in mind so far and I want to save them. Until the end of the journey to get some data to share with you, so stay until the end. I will share it with you. Let's finish the trip. I'm going to leave it. I'm going to leave it. guy next to me um make one last charging stop and I'll see you in just a minute so here's the deal um I walked into a GM dealership you guys see you can't see it I walked into a GM dealership and there's this EV how is this thing called?

EV docking station, so I used the charging point, no problem at all, just opened the app. The only problem I had was that I had to have a credit card file in the app, you touch the thing. against the charging port no problem and then I used an Electrify America, same thing there. I just put my credit card against the thing, no problem, it started working, no big deal, this thing behind me, this thing here, this thing that doesn't give you anything. any instructions you're just like okay so hurry up and put the thing on the charger and keep kicking it.

I'm wondering what the hell is going on and then I got in my car and I saw that I had to activate the car charger so it's like the plug didn't communicate with the car but I had to activate it and I think what it does is use the account on file with my car to charge and pay the charge I am entitled to. Now it's a fast charger, it's cruising, it's super fast, and this will be the last charge I need to leave Ryan and get home, but the thing is, they're all a little different, so you had a charging point. to have a credit card file on the Electrify America app you just use your credit card like your Apple Pay or whatever you tap to pay and on this one I had to plug the plug into the car and then get in the car and press activate because use the card registered through the Ford pass or the Ford Connect app whatever it's called, so a little bit different experience for each of these different types of stations, something you don't know until you do it, so anyway, This should be the last graph, uh, to take me home.

I hope it's okay everyone what's up it's the next day so I've had a chance to think about the whole experience and my camera is out of curvature I don't care about that um and I'm actually collecting my thoughts on the whole thing the experience and I also think about the overall cost and all that, so they didn't tell me everything. I'll put everything on the screen. I'm looking at it right here so I had 1 2 3 4 five charging stops for a total of 180 minutes of time on the charger that's 3 hours on the charger that part sucks the cost in order the first one was 7 minutes for $348, the second was 43 minutes for $11.70 and the third was 63 minutes for $494.

I'll talk about that in a second, it's an outlier and worrying case. I'll tell you why the next one, the one at Sam's Club, was 33 minutes on charge for $21.3 and then the Chevy at La Fontaine was $4 minutes at $1.38 total. $97. 37 in total charges now I'll stop there because the charge at Toyota is interesting. I didn't have a choice to stop there, so it's a real life situation where I was, I think, five or 6% at the time and I didn't have any. choice and I had to stay on that charger for a decent amount of time because my next stop was a decent distance away from Sam's Club, which had the Electrify Network that charged something if I did my math right.

I don't know, like 85 cents per kilowatt hour, that's an increase, that's exorbitant. It's usually 30 35, maybe 40, maybe 45 cents per kilowatt hour to charge these things on the DC fast charging network at home, it's a lot cheaper depending on what state you're in. who's your electric company, mine is 12 to 15 cents per kilowatt hour, it's a lot cheaper, but that was really really high, that $49 charge probably should have been something else around $25, so that would have brought the cost down to over $77 right now. I'll pause for a second because this was a work trip and I was collecting mileage reimbursement.

I get 55 cents per mile, so I'm going to get $22.22 from my company versus the 97 I paid, so I'm going to get about $115 for making that trip, as opposed to a gas car which I don't have. I'm not going anywhere near changing the transmission oil, flushing any of that, there's really no maintenance on these vehicles so it's pure profit. For me, apart from the wear on my tires, which the EES wears out faster because they weigh a lot, the other thing is that the performance of my Mustang Maki GT at the time is not really a fuel efficient version of an EV, I mean. there are worse like the Hummer and the F-150 and stuff like that, but for a car it's not really that efficient, it's heavy, it's a performance oriented vehicle, it has all-wheel drive and that kind of thing, another thing to consider is that this trip was the worst of all conditions, meaning I had to get off these chargers to get to my next meeting instead of sitting on the charger and having a more, I guess, more efficient or longer charge, if you will. .

To reduce the number of stops I had, on top of that, the weather dropped from 60°F to 22° or 23°F and it was cold and windy, so my car had to work harder to maintain the cabin. It was hot and then I also had the wind in my face and it was creating a lot more drag and as I mentioned earlier in this video, drag is a big component of efficiency in these vehicles so I think this was really the worst of the cases. The only thing that could have been worse is if it was even colder outside in the middle of winter like January or February, well this February, but it's a warm February so this is the worst case scenario, now what I did was do some assumptions about the alternatives.

What would happen if you bought a regular economy car now? I won't put the price of the vehicle here because it can be everywhere and they're not really the same, but it comes into play. if I assume gas is $315 a gallon, which in Michigan it was yesterday for unused regular fuel, if I get 30m per gallon on average, some cars are better, some are worse, the fuel cost would have been around $50, half the cost per mile, which has been half now if you factor in oil changes, other things like that maybe add a penny per mile or something, but still, on average, the cost Really, of something like that for me it would have been half as much to drive a Toyota Camry, for example, or a Honda.

Okay, what if I assume I took my wife's SUV, a Yukon XL, something that costs over 18m per gallon on the highway, that cost would have been $83, still less than what I paid yesterday, now again, if I took out the Toyota charger, I probably would have? It has been a little less than the SUV, but it is something interesting, right? I guess well, let me finish the car, I thought for a second. You also have to consider something if you were to buy a Toyota Corolla Camry Honda Accord. In different trim levels, the cost of the vehicle will be about half of what it is in terms of MSRP or even final price.

Now Ford just reduced the price of these Machi GTS and regular

mach

is, so it's starting to close that gap, but still. An SUV probably similar in cost would be much cheaper, which is crazy to think about properly, so if you bought something cheaper, the monthly cost and monthly payment on your vehicle would definitely have outweighed the cost. savings uh for the EV if you think about it that way that being said, those Accords Camas cars are not the same as this this thing has a ton of technology it has autonomous driving it has all-wheel drive it's fast it's it's just a different vehicle and actually, It's not something like that, so you have to think about that, although there are times I think about what would happen if I just bought an Accord or something or I don't know a Toyota or a Ford Fusion or whatever they do.

I probably wouldn't like the experience as much, huh, but it would be a lot simpler, maybe true. I wouldn't have spent three hours on the road. What if I had bought a Toyota Fort Runner? Regarding the off-road capabilities of SUVs, you have to think about those things for sure, so I guess the bottom line of this is that there are a lot of things to like about the EV game; It is convenient to simply leave your house loaded and walk around. every day, when you do it that way, it's actually very efficient and economical, but it is if you're not the type of person who has access to a charger at home and you take long trips for work all the time.

I don't think it's a good idea, I really don't, but if 90% of the time I'm driving around the house, it ends up working. I think if you took the cost of what we just experienced yesterday and compared. I bought it and combined it with the cost of driving around the clock that I used to do in my diesel truck. I'm definitely ahead, probably several hundred a month ahead in terms of energy cost, fuel cost savings, um, but there's something else to consider. about this too and it's the learning curve and I think this is the biggest problem, the three hours with the charger is probably the biggest and has probably given me the most pause to know what this conversation is about, the other thing is that if you're Someone like my mom or my dad or someone who's not tech savvy to figure out the different charging networks that might be a little bit disconcerting and I can see that's why a Tesla has the appeal there.

I found out and didn't do it. I'm not stranded, but there are a couple of chargers. I wondered why you don't accept my payment. I didn't add a credit card or why this charger doesn't have a credit card terminal. Oh, because it communicates with my car and I have to activate it. through my car, weird things like that that you don't have to think about when you approach a gas pump. The other thing too is that you know that if you're not a planner, it won't work for you either. There had to be a stretch on that part of the trip where I had to turn off the heat.

I had planned it and due to time constraints I had to take out the charger a little earlier if that charger had not been charging at the time. If so, I would have missed my meeting or been stranded. All gas pumps pump at approximately the same rate. You do not have to worry about that. I had to turn off the heat and I was worried I wouldn't be able to do it. do it and because of that scenario I end up at that Toyota charger and they charge me double the price. There's a lot to consider here guys.

Yo, yo, give me your opinion, you know about the whole thing, but I wanted to be honest about the whole Eevee thing. what is my experience, I love it and in some ways I don't like it, it's a dichotomy and for people who don't want to go through this and learn and have to understand it then it's not necessary and probably shouldn't but I wanted to let everyone know and again I know this is not a car channel but I wanted to talk about it and share my experience with you. If you have any questions, please contact me in the comments section below, it could be. something I missed or ruined for SC, but I wanted to share this with you and just change the subject a little here on this channel, I appreciate it guys, see you next time, have a great weekend.