
In Spring 2025, I bought an electric car. The clutch in my old Ford Focus was on the verge of disintegration. The Americans, clever as always, stopped manufacturing “small” cars and now focus exclusively on suburban assault vehicles like SUVs and pickup trucks, driven by suburban owners of assault rifles and connoisseurs of freedom. A Marxo-socio-communist like me has no option other than to buy a bulbous “crossover” vehicle. These vehicles combine the impracticality of SUVs with the small footprint of a sedan car, producing a true combination of the worst of both worlds. Ah, the American auto industry, truly the most intelligent people on the planet.
Anyhow, I now drive a 2022 Hyundai Kona EV. It is very cheap to operate and has slashed our petrol spending by 88%. It has buttons, knobs, glass mirrors and is for all practical purposes, just a normal car. I repeat, it is just a car that you drive. There are, however, several niggles that I do not like.
One obvious difference is in the weight of the car. My old Ford focus weighed around one tonne. This Kona weighs around 2.2 tonnes. The difference in inertia is instantly obvious when braking. The EV takes longer to slow down and the brakes are very aggressive. Something to be aware of, but something that familiarity will fix.
I like to watch the heads of my passengers as I drive. The forward and backward movement of their heads is a reliable indicator of how much acceleration is happening and I like to minimize acceleration. This means changing speed slowly and consistently. In a combustion car, if you accelerate to highway speeds and then idle the engine, friction makes the car decelerate, but slowly. You can bring the car to a complete stop from 120 km/h in about 200 meters. This is safe and comfortable. In our Hyundai, if you stop accelerating, the car starts braking. This is the action of the regenerative brakes and I appreciate their ability to capture wasted energy. Comfortable, however, they are not. Traffic speed constantly changes and sometimes, you want to stop accelerating but not start braking. You want to coast. That is not easy to achieve in a Hyundai EV. Yes, you can disable the auto regen braking but it has an annoying tendency of turning itself back on. This means that your passengers are quite uncomfortable after a while of constantly swapping between braking and accelerating.
On the plus side, Hyundai’s adaptive cruise control is very adept at varying engine power to reduce speed and maintain a safe distance to the vehicle ahead. Varying engine power via the accelerator pedal is not as easy.
On the negative side, cruise control also enables lane detection, which, isn’t always the best. I learned to drive in the Netherlands where skidding on wet and icy roads is a risk. You learn how to drive using a racing line, not for speed, but for safety. Put simply, your car’s tires have finite grip. Changing speed or direction uses grip. In slippery or wet conditions, your aim is to keep the car moving as straight as possible, while also planning for the worst. The racing line starts on the outside curve of a lane, moves to the inside apex and then returns to the outside. You never drive beyond the lane limit. If there is ice, it tends to accumulate on the inside of a banked turn. If your car is already pointing where you want it to go, losing grip on the inside of a turn is less dangerous, you just keep moving ahead safely. Hyundai’s lane assist system will not allow this. It keeps beeping and bonging that the car is too close to the lane edge. Oh and many exits on Ontario highways do not have marked exit lanes. Instead, the right lane becomes wider, with one side becoming the exit ramp. My car keeps trying to force me to exit. You cannot disable lane assist in my car and there is no speed-only mode for the cruise control. Both are linked.
Hyundai’s “crossover” design for the Kona means that the car is higher than it should be, and so is the hood of the car. In that additional height, is a great big void so the additional height is purely for cosmetic reasons. My strong preference is to not drive into pedestrians, especially children. To maximise front visibility, I use a booster seat. My head now touches the roof of the car and I cannot adjust the rear view mirror at this height. Obviously, this is also a problem if you are tall.
Hyundai’s software for the car includes scheduled charging, allowing you to minimize your charging costs. This works well. What does not work well is Hyundai’s scheduled departure feature, which is supposed to heat or cool the cabin in anticipation of a fixed departure time. Bizarrely, the scheduled heating/cooling only works if the car is still charging when the departure time arrives. This means that if you depart at 07:00 in the morning and your car just happens to finish charging at 03:00, the departure time is meaningless because the heating/cooling will not run.
The car includes a liquid cooled battery but there is no way to turn on battery preconditioning. If you are on a road trip, you want the battery temperature to be around 20 C for peak charging speeds, which are already low on a budget car. There is no way to do this. A software update should fix it, but alas. Hyundai appear to be infected by American capitalism.
The car’s software is also full of beeps and bongs. So many that they are actively irritating and occasionally a safety hazard. Sometimes, the cruise control disengages. That’s a bong. If you use your turn signal in anticipation of a turn and there happens to be a car next to you, that’s a series of beeps. If the outdoor temperature drops to zero Celsius, that’s a bong. If the car ahead of you turns onto a side road, the car’s collision avoidance system thinks that a collision is imminent. That’s a series of bongs. Sometimes, if you brake too hard, the car chides you for dangerous driving. That’s a bong. This is a cultural thing and is evident on other Korean-designed devices like Samsung’s phones, also full of beeps and bongs. I have to try very hard to not train myself to ignore these sounds.
To be clear, I love an electric car. It does take some getting used to but, nothing time cannot fix. Hyundai have some cultural quirks and some capitalist quirks but give the state of the car market in 2025, I can live with those. I highly recommend the Hyundai Kona, especially if you can find one used.