Pushkin. The Germans used to do this. They would charge like ten thousand dollars for horsepower, you know, to get the big engine. You'd have to spend sometimes double the price of the car. And it was just come on, man, Americans don't do that. Like you check a box on your Chevy Nova and you get the big engine and it's fifty bucks. And to me, that seems totally Unamericanand used to tell me about those days. They predate me. But I still think that value is a really big
part of the American vehicle equation. John Vulker is the founding editor of a hybrid and electric car website, Green Car Reports. He's also a frequent contributor to Car and Draw. John has agreed to help me sort the wheat from the chaff when it comes to electric vehicles, and his thoughts on EVS are as well informed as they come. On this special season of Car Show, we're putting cars in four brackets to the test. This week it's EVS.
At the end of our series of highly subjective tests and debates, we will crown a winner, the greatest award in the history of this business, the Car Show Car of the Year. I'm your host Eddie alternate. The four cars in our EV bracket are as follows the five hundred and eighty horsepower three hundred miles of range Ford F one fifty Lightning, starting at fifty four thousand dollars
and escalating steeply from there. Then there's the BMWi four, specifically in the five hundred and thirty six horsepower sixty eight thousand dollars and fifty high performance trim with an EPA range rating of two hundred and twenty seven miles. Third up the Hyundai Ionic five, starting at forty three thousand dollars and giving up to three hundred and twenty horse power or three hundred and three miles of EPA
rated range. Finally, and this one's less expensive than you'd guess from looking at it, the sixty three thousand dollars Cadillac Lyric with its three hundred and forty horsepower and three hundred and twelve miles of range in single motor guys, and at the end of the episode will take you for a drive in the winter, So stay tuned. Okay, let's accelerate quickly. No sound, But first, a definition of terms that are important for EV owners and even would
be ev owners. Well, probably the first one is kilowat hours. A kilowatt hour is just a measure of energy, and you can say a gallon of gasoline has roughly thirty kilowat hours of energy in it. The car battery in an electric car, a modern one, not a high end one, but a modern electric car of VWID four or one of the ones from Hyundai or Kia, etc. Has sixty
to seventy kilowat hours of energy. And my rule of thumb has always been that on average, and of course this depends on how you drive, how fast you drive, what the temperature is, and so forth. You're looking at about three miles of range per kilowat hour plus or minus. So you may see the statistic in the brochure or online that says, okay, this car has sixty five kilo one hours of usable energy in its battery. Well, what
does that mean? Basically multiplied by three and you get to that car having two hundred or more miles of range. So the next one is EPA range. Like gasoline cars, the EPA has effectively an efficiency rating for these cars, and it's the same metrics as a gasoline car. It's roughly half and half urban and highway now on electric car because there's so much more efficient. Highway miles takes
a bigger hit on range because you're pushing airside. So driving around town the range is much higher the EPA range driving on the highways. If you do nothing but seventy five miles an hour on the highway for the whole battery, you won't get that range. The EPA range is an average, and so you know a conventional internal combustion car is going to get better highway mileage than it does in the city. A battery electric will get
better mileage in the city, and it does on the highway. Well, what I like to point out is that part of it with a gasoline car is that they're enormously inefficient, so they waste about three quarters of all that energy in your gasoline. If you took the energy in a twelve gallon tank of gasoline, which is about average, and put it in an electric car, because battery cars are so much more efficient, you'd have over a thousand miles
of range. You get three hundred in that gas car because seventy five percent of that energy gets wasted as heat or noise. Gotcha, And let's talk about charging for a second. The new sort of buzzword is eight hundred volt architecture. What does an eight hundred volt architecture mean
and why is it important? In one sentence, it means that your battery pack can charge at twice the voltage of the four hundred vold architecture that's been standard pretty much for all high voltage packs since the first Toyota Prius plus or minus. So you get reduced charging time in part because of reduced internal resistance. However, the reason that not everybody has done this is because it was
a brand new concept five years ago. There isn't the parts infrastructure out there that automakers can go to and say I need an electric air conditioner and so on, and you have to have more powerful charging stations to take advantage of that. So it's really the kil awot rate that is the speed at which you can charge that shoppers buyers should pay attention into. So what's sort of the state of our charging time? Like how long should it take to get from twenty percent charge to
eighty or ninety percent charge? Like what are the fastest charging cars doing on the hottest rigs? Well, we have the Porsche Taikon, and then a couple of new evis from Hundai and Kia and Genesis. And note to shoppers, you will see carmakers quote times for ten to eighty percent or fifteen to eighty percent. They are under optimal circumstances, the right temperature, a battery pack that's already warmed up
so it can take energy, and so on. But to get from ten to eighty percent of a pack, which may be as much as two hundred more miles, it could be as little as eighteen minutes as compared to say, half an hour or forty minutes for one hundred and fifty kilowat charging, maybe even more depending on Again, Watson asked Risks, gotcha, Well, let's move into the cars themselves. Now that's the short version of one hundred eight slide presentation. Well,
we'll do that way. That'll be a detours episode. The first TV we're going to discuss is the electrified version of the four f one fifty full size pickup truck. So let's start with the biggie. The biggest news probably in the category since the Tesla models, and that is the Ford F one fifty Lightning. Now, the Ford f one fifty. The truck is sort of a car company
unto itself. They sell more of these things than any other vehicle in the US, and so there's room within the f one fifty universe four things like a raptor four things like a lightning, because there's no real average flyn fifty buyer. And so I found it's sort of fascinating brand management that they decided to go into a category that's historically, you know, the average American truck buyers historically a little hostile to evs, and they like towing capability,
and they like big vas and stuff like that. So I found it really interesting to see Ford make this move. And what happened was they're getting new sorts of buyers. They're getting a lot of women buyers. They're really over indexing on women buyers because a lot of women buyers claim that they hate gas stations, they feel vulnerable there, and so they'd rather charge this thing at home. So really really interesting vehicle. What's your take on the fund
fifty Lightning. I think it's fascinating that Ford decided to go that way after introducing their first real EV, the Mustang Makie. They dived right into their crown jewel line. The F series line makes for a prodigious amount of money and they make a million ish of them every year. The fact that they were able to make an F one fifty that is both a believable F one fifty truck, and if I heard one thing in the launch over and over, it was it can't be weird. They've made
a truck that isn't weird. You look at it and you go, yep, that's an F one fifty. But it has an electric powertrain, It has range that is real and reasonable for the way Americans use. They have towing capability, but most important, it is in many ways a better F one fifty than anything else in the line. It has the is it called the power front Mega trunk? I forget they have some brand name for this. CHI
thought the front. Actually I avoid using the F word, but as you wish, but this, you know, open the hood and there's this gigantic space that's lockable so you can put tools in it that you can't leave in the bed. And it has all independent suspension, so it rides far better than any other F one fifty And people don't look at you weird because it's not a weird truck. And there are ancillaries to being a large battery pack on wheels, like you can power your house again,
a lot of asterisks there. But Ford, I think was really surprised how much people took to this notion of oh, if I have an EV, I actually have backup energy as a swap out for my Honda generator. And I know some of you in Michigan have told me fairly frequently that the power goes off there. I have the same problem up the mountain and the Catskills. And so that's a material benefit of an EV that doesn't come
from a gasoline vehicle. So they have not only made an F one fifty that is electric believable and desirable, they have gotten a bucket load of people buying them, and the new buyers some of their existing buyers. But fleets, because the lifetime cost per mile of an electric vehicle is so much lower than gasoline and especially diesel, that a lot of fleets are looking hard and saying, you know what, No, for the truck that goes from San
Francisco to New Orleans can't do electric right now. But all of our local fleets think a utility truck or something. All of those they know how long they drive. The F one fifty electric is perfect there, and Ford has been swamped with demand. Oh yeah, we're going forty five miles in a day. There's so much excess capacity in that battery, you know, and that energy cost versus gas
in that scenario or a lot a lot lower. But it must be said that if you want to buy the big battery pack in this F one fifty, it's really expensive. It's like another ten grand. We had one here to test and it was ninety four thousand dollars. And if I'm going to spend ninety about the price of a King Ranch, right, yeah, but the King Ranch
doesn't have that play school interior. You know. That's like you know, off gassing, and it's the interior on these on these vehicles is like not a ninety four thousand dollars interior. And you know, I think four interiors are a real week point. And I would be pissed if I spent ninety four grand on an F one fifty and I had that you know, like lego style interior
that they got going there. I'm curious to see overtime the knicks of truck buyers who by it for the cool points, the advanced technology, you know, first electric truck in their subdivision, that kind of thing, and how many expect luxury commends rate with the price point in a gasoline car. Tesla was able to do it. Ford arguably may be able to translate that into the truck world too.
We'll see, Yeah, there's a lot of will see and we'll see what the second buyer set is for that if they continue to really go gangbusters or if there's
just a lot of excitement about it. But you know, the interesting thing about evs is when you drive a lot of them back to back, you sort of get the feeling that the ones you're driving are essentially obsolete because the next generation of the vehicle that you're driving is going to have more range, it's going to charge more quickly, so you're still on the sort of sharp part of the curve with a lot of EV tech, I would agree with that. You know, the analogy is
where between a conventional automobile and a phone. I think how often we replace our phones. But it is my hope that some of that advance comes if and when the car industry stabilizes after the shortages resolve, and we've been saying this for three years now, that some of that advance will be used to bring the price down so that in fact, instead of sort of a I don't know, fifty thousand dollars average or something for an EV, it might be thirty five. And certainly GM has aspirations
toward that. We'll see when and how it happens. Before we get to the GM product, I want to talk about another vehicle that I found super great, super interesting, and another sort of under the radar EV if you will. That would be the BMWi four electric sedan, available in two single motor rear wheel drive trims that E Drive thirty five and the E Drive forty, and one dual motor all wheel drive trim, my favorite I four, the
M fifty. That's when we come back. The BMW I four exists within the body of the BMW four series Grand coupe, so it looks just like a sort of normal four door coupe whatever that means that BMW makes. But this thing is proof that all the great engineers of BMW have been transferred to their electric vehicles because this thing is it rides better than an M three, it's quicker than an M three in the M forty trim,
and it gets decent range. In this car I think is so well executed and so great it makes me like BMW's again. What's what's your take on the I four? Historically, BMW's interesting because their first EV was this massively complicated, highly engineered, extremely efficient car that Americans never really wanted to buy, which is a small hatchback the three, based on the bet the batteries were going to stay expensive forever.
That turned out to be absolutely not true. BMW in twenty sixteen totally corrected and said right, no more specialized cars were just going to make it as a power train. It may have a battery, but otherwise it's totally, completely, absolutely just like your gasoline car. Other makers from other places don't do that so much necessarily. I like the I four For whatever reason, I found it much more convincing as an EV in its higher end two motor trim,
the fifty, rather than the forty. Maybe it's because I've driven so many evs. The forty didn't feel significantly better than a bunch of sort of midrange evs to me, But the fifty was clearly the BMW you mentioned single
motor versus dual motor. If you want to make an EV all wheel drive, you just put a motor on an axle, right, So these ifs are rear wheel drive, rear motored vehicles in their kind of entry level forms, the thirty five and the forty, and then you make it all wheel drive by putting another motor on the
front axle. Absolutely convenient. And it actually one piece of trivia which I'll keep to one sentence, is there's an EV coming out that has a front wheel drive version, a rear oil drive version, and an all wheel drive version. You can put the motor on either both ends, and there are reasons for doing each of those things. Evs are interesting because people are rearranging the shape of the car and taking advantage of the smaller power train with
a battery under the cabin. Or some of them are BMW is not BMW has the exact same proportions as the gasoline car, but I like the I four the The German approach to evs has been interesting because they were really late to the game, so were the Americans, but there were some some expeditions on the American side, with the exception of Tesla, but that's its own show, if not its own series. Oh yeah, absolutely, But no,
it's a great driver. It does what a BMW should do and has the benefit of being really quiet, silky smooth, just all the things that you want a luxury car to do. Low noise, very very quick acceleration. You know, luxury and performance are sort of intertwined now in the public mind, I think the buying mind and the ipord
does that really really well? Agreed. Yeah, you know, you also raised a good point about the package itself, Like you don't have big engine up front with a transmission attached to it, the battery, the energy storage is really in the floor and situated between the axles, so you have this really nice low center of gravity height that's great physically for the car. It helps it handle really
really well. So the sort of packaging scenario, the envelope of the car, even though it might be the same, is really really different underneath, and that allows certain manufacturers to really play with it because if all your energy storage is in the flour and you have these two motors on the axles, you can change the interior dimensions of the vehicle. You can play with the space and the proportion of the thing. And the next vehicle I want to talk about, I think, does that really really well.
I'm talking about the Hyundai Ionic five. And there are three ways to get it. Single motor rear drive format, two motor all wheel drive trim, or with the long range single motor setup good for more than three hundred miles on a full charge. Now, if you look at it in pictures, it looks like it's the size of a VW Golf. And I think vehicles that are really really well proportioned look smaller in photos than they do
in real life. And conversely, vehicles with bad proportions, bad stylistic proportions look bigger in photos than they do in real life. So this Hyundai Ionic five, this thing has a wheelbase that's larger than the Palisade three row suv. It looks like a small compact, but it's really really interestingly packaged, and it's styled in a really really cool way. It sort of looks like if you know, the launch a Delta integrally hatchback from your it looks like a
Minecraft version of that. It's sort of like a it was sort of the future we were promised in the eighties, you know, very very cool sort of eight bits styling, really really tremendous road presence. When you see this thing in the road, like what the hell is at and it's big inside, and it's quick, and it's got that eight hundred volt charging architecture that we talked about earlier.
This thing, to me is just such a home run all the way around, even if the interior, in keeping with the eighties theme, looks like one of those cubical firms. You know, I don't think the interior is quite that bad, but you drive a lot more high end cars than I do. Let's got that like, you know, that grayish fabric and it just sort of looks like you're you're
working for IBM. Well, there is there is this trope that, oh, you're driving electric car, it has no emission, so you have to use all sustainable materials, and a lot of a lot of vehicles, regardless of electric or gasoline, do actually use sustainable materials? Gotcha? Now you hear a lot of EV skeptics say, well, yeah, the cars themselves are zero emissions, but the round trip on the energy is pretty dirty because in this country, two thirds of our
electricity is produced from coal or natural gas. So if you're driving the EV, you're driving a coal or natural gas powered car two thirds of the time. We call this the coal tailpipe argument. It is categorically false. And here's why. In the US, with the latest data from the Department of Energy, coal is only twenty percent of our generation mix, and it is being replaced by a mix of renewables or far far, far more efficient and lower carbon natural gas generation. Even on the dirtiest grid
in North America. An electric car has the carbon footprint of a forty mile per gallon passenger car, and you will notice that we sell very few of those these days. Yeah, that's true, but that's not exactly apples to apples, because the well to wheel on an EV includes the mining energy, which is significant and done properly. Those wells to wheels comparisons include not only the energy, but also the manufacturing
burden of the car. So an EV definitely has more what they call embedded carbon to build it, but that is fairly quickly offset depending on the vehicle, how big its battery is and so forth. It's from fifteen to forty thousand miles where you cross, and because it's using so much less energy per mile, everything after that is great, and so we're drying the dirtiness down. Yeah, exactly. So no question that battery electric cars have more carbon embedded.
But as the grids that they are charging decarbonize, an electric car gets cleaner per miyath. And you can't say that about gasoline. Grids all over the world are moving to more renewables. They're swapping out coal for natural gas, and so electric cars over their lifetime get continually cleaner.
But what I will say is I think Hyundai has hit a good balance between completely duplicating a conventional interior set of controls and going off on the far end, as Tesla has done with the Model three and Model Y and some of the other startups have where in fact, to do very simple, basic quick things you have to go into menus and screens and sort of expand or drop down or find an option, which I think is
not only annoying and adiotic, but dangerous. I think Hunday hit the right balance in terms of it's got knobs for the thing you expect knobs for. My grumble about the Rivian is that you can't adjust the air events without going which I just ridiculous, idiotic. So you can adjust the air events on the hunday and so on. But it has a lot of the features that you will use less or you will need to find in
a decent menu structure to my way of things. Yeah, it does have great user interface and Hyundai Kia Genesis products. If you want to get to the map, there's a button for the map. If you want to get to the radio, there's a button for the radio. There's a volume knob, there's a seek button. And one of the coolest adaptations from a convention no internal combustion car to the Ionic five are the so called shift panels on
the steering wheel. Now in Antic five they don't control any gear set, but what they do is increase the amount increase or decrease the amount of regenerative braking. And there's a term maybe we want to define. Let's sidebar for a second, what exactly is regenerative braking? John In a conventional gasoline car, when you lift off the accelerator these days, to improve fuel economy, you pretty much glide, but there is drag and so over time you slow
down with the engine on you're still burning gasoline. You're still essentially wasting energy even as you slow down, and then when you hit the brakes, more wasted energy because generated by heat. In an electric car, the bulk of the braking in day to day driving is done by instantaneously turning an electric motor into a generator that puts energy back into the battery. And there are various ways
to tune the generation. And if you said what we call regenerative breaking at a higher level, the car slows faster and puts more energy back into the battery. The average is about thirty percent of the energy you use to move the car comes back in through regenerative braking. People have different preferences on how their EV drives. Some want it to drive just like a conventional automatic car,
lift off and it just rolls. Others and often more experienced EV drivers like a higher degree of regeneration up to what we call one pedal driving, which means you mostly don't even touch the brake pedal. It's one of those things that you've got to do it to understand it, yeah, and it takes a little skill, but once you master it, I think you don't want to go back to moving
your foot between the accelerator and a brake pedal. And also I think it's a boon too aggressive driving, because it slows you down sort of automatically, very quickly for a turn before you turn. And I find that I use the highest regenerative setting on those paddles almost exclusively. I don't want to be sailing around and coasting around. I want to, like if I want to accelerate and I want to stop, and never the twain shall meet, as do why I consider one pedal driving to be
a benefit once you learn it. And one of the great ironies I think about this Ionic five is is probably the funkiest looking, but it's sort of the most conventional driving, and you know, it really is satisfying and it's terrific. When we come back another entry from Detroit. I want to move on now to the last vehicle in our set, and that is the Cadillac Lyric. The Lyric is Cadillac's first all electric vehicle, but certainly not
its last. On the heels of the Lyric, Caddy just announced its flagship, a customizable three hundred thousand dollars EV called the Celestic. The thing that I love about the lyric is it looks like a Barcelona chair turned into a car. It is so amazingly beautiful when you see them on the road, maybe not in a photo, but when you see it from the chair height of another car. You see these things on the road, they're just endlessly fascinating and I think they're going to look good for
a very very long time. You know, they are pretty utre in terms of their styling, but they also seem pretty timeless too, and I think an ev like that that is very highly styled, timelessly styled, but also isn't going to set any land speed records. It's not super fast. It's just quiet, luxurious, beautiful, great to be in, and really kind of affordable. I mean, that's that's like the
Cadillac sweet spot. That's what that brand should be. And I think the lyric is a great execution, a great representation of what a modern Cadillac could and should be. What's your take on the lyric? The lyric is interesting. I'm going to defer my decision on the styling for a couple of decades, and here's why I'm now pretty much convinced that the Tesla models is going to be one of the defining designs like the Citron Das or you know, the those handfuls. Even though it's totally boring,
I would say classic. Okay, you couldn't say boring because it set the mold. People thought it was a Jaguar before people knew what a Tesla was. Everybody said, essentially, God, that's beautiful, that's a Jaguar. And the models I'll I'm gonna let you finish. But the model, as to me, I always looked like one of those cars that they would have in like a Chevron ad. There was like an amalgamation of different cars that you couldn't You couldn't.
It didn't have like a recognizable grill, but you could see, oh, maybe they're trying to make it look like a Benz or a Jag or something. It was just like a mishmash of a bunch of styling ques that yeah, it said a little bit lower, but like, come on, man,
like go for it a little bit. Well. I think I understand why it trended toward the Classic because Tesla did the traditional way of launching new technology at the top of the market, and they made a car that was desirable and also had electric power or put more cynically desirable despite being electric. But desirable is the most important things, quick and desirable, right. Tesla built them on less, Nissan built the Leaf. Which one do you want to own? Yeah?
But the Lyric I want to wait and see. I've heard really mixed reviews on its styling. Many people, I think yourself stunned by it, and others really disliked the back end, the front. No one seemed to have a trouble with the back end, that sort of slightly curved hatch. Remember the first Art and Science Cadillacs two thousand and three four. I thought that was a stunning design at the time. It was it was blocky, it was aggressive,
it was the new direction for Cadillac. I saw one recently and I thought, God, that looks old and dated, right, And so I want to see if that happens with the Lyric, And I think great styling needs to lead the market a little bit. The former BMW designer very controversial Chris Bengal. He said, our cars are going to be on the road for thirty forty years. They need to look good in thirty and forty years, and they can't be too trendy. And I think that the lyric
just absolutely hits that long term style. I think it's going to age very very well. And I think, you know, it drives like an SUV should. It's quiet, it's easy, it doesn't snap your neck bank, but you know, come on, it's comfortable and soothing. It doesn't necessarily have all those ev advantages. But GM has really good regent. I didn't have to think twice about how the lyric would behave getting into it fresh. Here's my question, though, You and I and this continent are not who matters as to
whether or not that car is a success. Cadillac has sold more vehicles in China for five years now. The gap is growing and the Celestic there are three hundred thousand dollars super low production luxury car. That's the halo for over there. It doesn't matter whether Americans want it
or not. Yeah, agreed, the duomotor lyric is coming. And yes, there is that connection between performance and luxury that we've come to expect that the you know, the European cars have taught us to expect, like the Bmdwes and Mercedes mgs. And I believe the Cadillac has done certain cars that we're going to talk about also in this series. That beat the Germans at their own game, but here like this one is unapologetically American and I sort of love it for that. And now John and I will rank
all four cars to pick our top choice. I would put the lyric last on our list of best EV's most interesting evs of the year, because, Yeah, at the end of the day, it's an SCUV that gets pretty good range, it's pretty comfortable. There's kind of a lot of those The styling sets it apart, but not as interesting to me as the Flin fifty or the BMW or the Ionic. So that's my fourth pick. I don't
know if you agree or not. I would actually put the BMW in fourth because, given how far BMW took the I three some of the interesting facets of that, the I four feels to me like an over correction. They got scared. It drives beautifully. It is a predictable BMW. Where's the specialness of being an EV? Besides accelerated responds, quietness,
and weight distribution. The significance to me of the BMWi four is that they were able to impart the BMW values and traits onto an EV and actually exceed some of those of their gas powered cars. And to me, that's what's significant about it is that BMW offers it's buyers the choice. You can get this with the gas motor,
you can get it with an EV. And I think ultimately that's where we're going to be, Like, you know, the electric motors might replace like the V six version, and I kind of like that world where we've got a bunch of different takes on sort of the same overall envelope, the same styling statement, the same aggressive sports dan kind of vibe. And so I'm going Lyric four BMW I four in the third spot, even though I really I'd swamp the Lyrica into three. Okay, but let's
talk about runner up in this bracket. For me, it's the flyn fifty. I can make a convincing case for either the Ionic or the F one fifty. I think the Ionic is more significant globally, and I think it's technology is more advanced. And it shows how deadly serious Hyundai Kia are about electric cars, about setting themselves up for the long run in evs and aggressively ramping up their production. They may well be the first global car company to introduce a three row, battery electric three hundred
mile suv, which thus far only Tesla has done. And you know, we'll see where GM comes in on that. The F one fifty, to me, because I'm an American, is equally significant just because it was so unexpected and quite frankly, I think it's so good at doing the truck things that buyers of that segment and that vehicle expect. I don't think anyone expected the F one fifty to be quite as well thought through as I found it
to be. And I agree with all that, and I think it is such a huge gamble and so well played, so well executed, and a significant, significant entry because they are going right for the heart of the market with a technology that people still haven't embraced. And let's be honest, even though you know EV sales have doubled during the pandemic, there's still only six percent of the market. So for four to push its chips in this way and make
this huge bet really really impressive and significant. But look at the demand. They expected to sell forty thousand of them a year, and they cut it off at two hundred thousand orders before a single one had been built. And sold. Yeah, I hear that. I don't know if that's the tsunami of initial demand and if that's going to continue, we'll see about that. The thing that keeps it in the number two spot for me is just the The price is so ridiculous, man, Like to get
the Germans used to do this. They would charge like ten thousand dollars for horsepower, you know, to get the big engine. You'd have to spend sometimes double the price of the car. And it was just come on, man, Americans don't do that. Like you check a box on your Chevy Nova and you get the big engine and it's fifty bucks. And to be that seems totally Unamerican. Train man used to tell me about those they predate me. But I still think that value is a really big
part of the American vehicle equation. And the people who do value better than anybody else right now because they're vertically integrated, because they have such an eye toward the future is Hondai Kia Genesis. And look for the price of the average car. The transaction price for the average car now is forty eight grand, and it's inflated because of part shortages and supply chain issues. But for around
that price. For fifty grand, you can get this incredibly stylish, well realized, state of the art charging infrastructure, great to drive, great to be, an really really huge interesting package. You can get really a concept car for the road, if I'm going to say it, in the Ionic five for fifty grand, and to me, that's just like bring it on. I take your price argument. On the other hand, you can get a perfectly serve sabol F one fifty Lightning
for that same sixty grand. It won't be the top trim, and yeah, they just jacked the base price, so I think that has some headway yet, but I do take your price argument. I think in the end I go for the Ionic for two reasons, one sort of industry analysis and one purely selfish. The industry analysis is that that's a globally important car. They are selling them in
all the major markets. They're selling them here, they're selling them in Europe, they're selling them in Asia, and it has been well reviewed accepted all of those places, So that makes it more significant than the F one fifty versus say the Maki, which is in fact being sold in other markets. The other, frankly, is that I and we would prefer to drive an Eye five N one fifty. Now that may or may not be at all relevant to the people, is totally I mean, um yeah, I
would be happy to own an Ionic five. I'm really don't see any need to drive an F one fifty Lightning. It's overkill, man, it is. I mean, for the three days a year that you're gonna buy a huge TV for the Super Bowl or take some wood around, I mean, you don't need an you don't need a pickup truck. They're gargantulan. And that's one of the kind of hilarious things about the FUND fifty to me is how performatively oversized it is, like, oh, yeah, it's a big old truck,
but it's really good for the environment. So can you have your cake and eat it too? Maybe, so we go lyric BMW F one fifty Ionic five makes it to the next round. Here we are in the Ionic five to give you a sense of what it's like to drive. Really doesn't have a ton of grip, but it hustles. It really moves like olivs. You know. The acceleration is just instantaneous, but the brakes are decent, even
if they're a little. They're not maybe aggressive enough. You have to be intentional about your breaking in this vehicle. One of the great and really intuitive things about this Ionic five is you can adjust the level of regenerative breaking via little paddles mounted to the steering wheel. You know, in a normal internal combustion vehicle, those might be paddle shifters that control the transmission. Here it adjusts how much the car automatically slows down based on regenerative rather than
friction breaking in the system. And that is one of the great advantages of evs to drive with one pedal, and it's great for lazy people. You can just lift off the throttle and come to a complete stop. You don't have to go through the anguish and agony of moving your right foot from the gas pedal to the brake pedal. It doesn't for you. Okay, let's accelerate quickly,
no sound. I went started with a range of one hundred and eighty five miles, ending with a range of one hundred and sixty one miles, But I did not go twenty four miles. I only went about fifteen, so a high degree of inaccuracy from the projection in the computer. But I was also driving like a complete maniac and
sapping as much juice as humanly possible. But I was also using full regenerative breaking and here I am at a complete stop using the intelligent pedal setting on the region Next time on Car Show, The Best SUVs of the Year with Ezra Dyer. Car Show is written and hosted by me Eddie Alterman. It's produced by Emily Rosstek and Jacob Smith. Our editor is Karen Shakerjee. Original music and mastering by Ben Tolliday. Our executive producer is Mia Loebell.
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