For quite a while, my wife and I have been intrigued by all this hollerin’ about electric cars. So we carefully considered our options and in June 2023 bought a Hyundai Ioniq 5. It’s quiet, comfortable, roomy, and goes zero to 60 faster than 4 of the 7 editions of the famed Shelby Cobra (if you’re not a gearhead, the Shelby Cobra was the most muscled up of the 1960s-era muscle cars).

We gave up a smidge of range to get all wheel drive. My anxieties are triggered less by range than the thought of dying for entirely avoidable reasons in wet or slippery conditions. Dying when you could have just pulled over always struck as me the stupidest reason to die, but I’m also notoriously stubborn and don’t like to pull over so we traded a little range for a lot of traction and handling.

And boy does Nell (named after the horse that my mother was reluctant to give up when our family left the Amish) have traction and handling. She goes where you want, when you want, and how you want. Her ears are constantly perked and there are a lot of ponies under that hood.

I will say, as a guy who enjoys car shopping for its own sake (negotiating a purchase and paying for a car are much less fun), that Hyundai is killing it right now in the car market. Their cars generally look better, are quieter, have snappier acceleration, and have more refined interior materials than their janky competitors at Honda, Toyota, and that other electric car company. If you are about to buy a car and haven’t yet test drove the Hyundai offering in the class of car that you are looking at (either gas or electric), you haven’t done your homework.

Anyway, it turns out that along with a bumper-to-bumper warranty, our Nell came with two years of free charging at the Electrify America Charging Network. Well, almost free. You get 30 minutes of free charging every time that you plug in which is often enough to get you to 100 percent charged, but sometimes means that you have to pay for a few kilowatts (Nell really slows down the charging once you get over 80 percent charge to avoid overcharging the batteries).

I’ve long wanted to do a great American road trip where I head west and follow my gewunnaknaus (that’s Amish for “curious nose”) so this is my chance to do it and let Hyundai/Electrify America pay for the gas. I’m also curious about whether we’re really ready to just give up gas engines and go electric.

We’ve had several years of building out the charger network under the Biden/Manchin Infrastructure act. Are there really enough chargers out there that you just buy an electric car and drive wherever the hell you want without running out of charge?

Well the first leg of my trip is over through Missouri and down through Oklahoma and Texas to visit my nephew D and his wife K in Austin, TX. That’s right. I’m riding Nell right into the heart of hydrocarbon and pickup country.

I’ll be posting updates here to let you know how it goes. Giddyap!