My New Electric Car Is Really Like a Phone
Some thoughts on my first month with a Chevy Bolt
This is a post for people who might still doubt that electric drive-trains are the future for transportation. This is not a post for people who own or are just waiting to own an electric car as their primary/only vehicle.
I have never had a doubt. I was just waiting for a mid-range vehicle that could take me round trip > 100 miles consistently (the loop for me is Menlo Park / Berkeley / SF). Finally that car arrived with the Chevy Bolt and I could not be more excited. I’m so excited I wanted to share why!
Azani, as my Bolt has been named (lightning in Sanskrit, अशनि), replaces my 2012 Prius (known as “Car 8” to the Windows team). I’m all electric now.
Of course I am a huge believer in autonomous vehicles (here’s a 2014 article I wrote on that) and have high hopes that this is the last car I own that requires a human driver. I own a car because I routinely cover a lot of distance visiting with founders and companies across the Bay Area so it isn’t practical to go fully ride sharing + public transport.
I’m Not a “Car Person”
I am not a car person. Not even a little.
The first time I realized this was going with my father when he was buying a car and he was totally into looking under the hood and talking about maintaining the car. I just did not have a romantic view of Saturday afternoon oil changes or customizing cars for fun.
As much as I have studied the industry from a design, management, and corporate perspective, I’ve always held a utilitarian view of the products (fwiw, check out My Years with General Motors, Car: A Drama of the American Workplace, The Whiz Kids: The Founding Fathers of American Business — and the Legacy they Left Us, or Preston Tucker and His Battle to Build the Car of Tomorrow for some great books about the industry).
I’ve owned a range of cars and I’m the sort of person that ends up loving my car, despite what I always think of as a rough start because of the adjustment (someone should dig up that old blog post on my first experience with “Car 8”). I loved my old Saab. I really loved my bright red Jeep at the height of the first wave of SUVs (and it served me well for the cross-country trek to teach at HBS). I had the perfect 80’s Toyota Celica in high school.
I was first in line for the first generation 2001 Prius in the US, getting one sight unseen. The minute I sat in it I felt I was “driving the future”. I was completely convinced at that point that all cars would become hybrid vehicles in short order — it made so much sense. I never expected the price of oil to drop so much that no one would worry about fuel economy, nor did I expect the US car makers to so steadfastly resist hybrids and so adeptly navigate CAFE standards. My first Prius lasted 100,000 miles and 10 years flawlessly!
The allure of the Tesla has been very real but the car is way too fancy for me (yes, I did put a deposit down for the Tesla Model 3, aka Bolt “competitor”). I’ve driven them a couple of times because people I know insisted on showing me the future. The first time I sat in a driver’s seat I was as convinced then about the future of all cars being electric as I was of hybrids. This time is different though because the car makers are diving in and the government is doing even more to put the right incentives in place (the Prius had a $2,500 incentive; all up, there’s at least $10,000 incentives for the Bolt in California).
Also except for my Jeep I’ve generally been focused on high mileage cars and owning them a long time. I really don’t like to get new cars because the energy to make a car is so crazy (so even if you improve the mileage you waste it all by buying too soon). It takes between 250–300 gallon equivalents of gas to make a car. So buying a new car better save a lot.
The Bolt is everything one could hope for in a practical, electric vehicle. It is still expensive, costing much more than my second choice which was to get another Prius C. That’s a bummer. But just like the first mobile phones, the price will drop substantially (the extra battery for a Motorola flip phone used to cost $200). Most all of the cost is in batteries and also the area that will improve a ton.
Car as Phone
What is so different this car cycle is that cars really have become like phones as Benedict Evans and others have said before. In fact, everything about the Bolt makes me think more about a mobile phone than a car.
In fact as I began looking into getting the car, I realized that outright owning an electric car now is, unfortunately, not the best financial choice for two reasons. First, the rate of improvement in electric cars (range, safety, autonomy) is such that in the historic average length of ownership if 6–10 years is really meaningless (historically the designed “planned obsolescence” which has been stretched out as cars became more reliable and less of a consumer must have). The pace of change looks more like a mobile phone than it does a gas combustion car and who would want to own a 5 year old phone these days (other than POTUS)? If you check out some of the books referenced above you can read about the historic design cycle for cars of 7 years and how Japan upended that with 5 year cycles, which now seems quaint.
This is clearly disruptive and the whole supply, manufacturing, and finance chain of autos will need to deal with it.
Second, while I could imagine just trading in the car in a few years I suspect the economics are such that no one will even want it. I bet the range will be twice what it is today, for example. So because of that I did the same thing I do with mobile phones which is to lease the car — 3 years/36,000 miles — or as I computed at the dealership about 11,000 kW/h or 7 hours a week or so of charging, or about $1,300 which is almost exactly half as much as the gas to take my Prius C the same distance). I average 10K miles a year on gas so this should not be a problem at all.
In purchasing the car three main “phone-like” attributes really jumped out at me.
- Just Works
- Sealed Case
- Features Through Software and Sensors
1. Just Works
What has amazed me over the past couple of years with the rise of electric drive-trains has been the die-hard insistence by the old Detroit guard that people will not get electric cars because “range anxiety”. It seems to me almost a comical expression of “innovator’s dilemma” or simply a refusal to accept change.
I’ve repeatedly seen Bob Lutz the legendary former CEO of General Motors (and father of Chevy Volt!) talk about consumer “range anxiety” when it comes to electric cars. Lutz has continued to believe in range extended electric vehicles (a small gas motor that charges a battery, unlike hybrids which are small batteries that boost the primarily gas drive train).
There are still so many doubters and no matter how many stats one can compile around average commute, time to charge, and more consumers to like to “over-buy” or said another way if one is going to invest a lot of money then the marginal cost for added capability is well worth it. In fact, much of the software industry relies on the “Pro” or “Top Tier” version of services knowing (literally knowing) that people will never use all that storage, listen to all that music, or execute that many transactions. For generations, the upsell to more options in car was based on the “just in case” or “maybe you’ll need it”.
The US DOT says the average US commute is 15 miles with 8% of people traveling more than 30 miles (by any means). If everyone drove, plus also made some other trips, the EPA range of the Bolt easily covers 2 to 3 days of commuting.
So how do you charge it? That was the big question and one easily answered.
First, you do need a home charger high amp (“Level 2”). While some brave or determined people will own an electric car without a charger at home, it is tricky. This will and is changing rapidly. It is not hard to envision more and more parking spaces having chargers handy. Right now available public stations are at capacity (just try to charge your car at the SOMA garage, Palo Alto Garage, Facebook, or Google). If you don’t have parking where you live and don’t have access to parking (but still want to own a car) then electric really isn’t going to work for you. Of course if you regularly haul a trailer or 4x8 sheets of drywall there is not yet a car to even buy.
But an hour with an electrician (via Thumbtack) and a quick Amazon purchase and my industry standard UL “JuiceBox” charger arrived and I just plugged it in to the heavy duty outlet (“RV outlet”) and I’m ready to go. Every couple of days I just charge overnight. That’s actually even better than my mobile phone!
In keeping with the software driven features, both the charger and the car have configurable settings to charge mostly from 11:00PM to 6:00AM when local electric rates are cheap.
As much as I want to be sympathetic to range anxiety or to believe this will be a problem, in the 99% case I am no longer spending time at gas stations at the most inopportune times (does anyone ever need to get gas at a good time?). I do not worry even a little about range, ever.
Everyone has asked me about long trips. I used to drive from upstate New York to Florida and do love to drive to LA (for CodeCon) and doing that practically now is unreasonable. But I do this so infrequently it is non-sense to optimize around the 1% case — I recognize this runs counter to normal consumer purchasing but poor web browsing on a phone didn’t cause me to give up either.
There’s absolutely no doubt that once you experience the convenience and ease (and cleanliness) of charging then you won’t go back.
2. Sealed Case
As any readers know, I am a huge fan of the idea that sealed case electronics and futz-free software platforms are massive contributing factors to the rise of the modern mobile platform (you know, in addition to being mobile and connected!) The thing about owning an electric car is that it completely upends both the ownership experience and the after market profit stream of car makers.
Here’s the maintenance schedule for the Bolt:
Yep you read that correctly, during my entire three year lease (36,000 miles) there’s nothing for me to do. I never have to go to the dealer (ok, rotate tires, but really…). That’s a massive amount of time saved and of course money. There’s $300 of oil changes plus the maintenance (often included in purchase or lease prices) that are part of a gas engine. Toyota recommends scheduled maintenance every 5000 miles or 6 times over three years — that’s a full day without the car, using courtesy van or Lyft, and paying real dollars.
Even more entertaining is opening up the car’s hood and seeing basically nothing compared to a gas engine. Gone is the “violence” of a contained explosion and basically you just see some parts and wires. The only engine fluid I can see is some coolant for the battery which needs to be replaced at 100,000 miles they say. The iFixIt score for an electric drive-train is pretty low since as far as I can tell there’s not much to fix that isn’t a sealed up component like a SoC.
It is sort of crazy for me to think about a car that requires no “systems management”. It is exactly why I value my tablet way more than my PC. Not many were ever fans of “PCs as trucks” but the right analogy is “PC + OS is a gas combustion engine” to the “ARM + Mobile OS is an electric drive train”.
3. Features Through Software and Sensors
The reason I ultimately love every new car I’m lucky enough to get is because it is a new car. I get to experience the slow but continuous evolution of driving. For most of my adult life the march of progress has been about safety and convenience. The Bolt changes this for me.
My first car had roll up windows, AM/FM radio with knobs, manual seats, no cruise control, and so on. Typical of the era unless you owned a fancy Cadillac or something. The 2001 Prius was the first car I owned that had screen, but it was oddly redundant with many functions and had a horrible resistive touch panel that almost never worked. But I did get to watch the energy consumption and regeneration visualization. It also had airbags and anti-lock brakes.
But by and large every car I had from age 16 had the same features only “electronic” or “automated” (like a thermostat to control the A/C rather than me just adjusting the temperature with a dial). The Prius C had an integrated navigation system, but it was always out of date and was my first car with keyless entry and a push button starter.
The car is a wonder of features provided by the mobile revolution — sensors, cameras, LTE radios (Wifi access point?), and software now drive the features of the car. Many modern gas cars have had these for years — the first parking sensors appeared a decade ago, the rear facing cameras a little later. But now these all come in a modern package, which for the most part has been reinvented to have these by default so there’s not backup analog buttons like many cars still have.
The Bolt carries with it GM’s OnStar which is now caught up with my phone and appears to be part of the org chart shipping with the car (you can hit a button and speak to a human who will type in your destination and then the car will get turn by turn directions, for example). OnStar was ahead of its time but the phone blew past it. I love the safety side of OnStar but there’s little reason for all the buttons and overlay for other services.
My favorite example of all these coming together is the augmented reality parking display. Yes I know this is common for giant SUVs but given all the tight parking I do in SF this is a huge win.
The key for all of this is that the feature set for the car and what is interesting as a buyer has moved up from horsepower, airbags, automating to providing whole new features around the driving experience. Just as with Tesla owners, I am hoping for some software upgrades that find new uses for all the sensors and radios. This will be a real test of GM transitioning to this new model of product development so we shall see.
Some Fun Learnings
When I first got in the Prius in 2001 the dealership kept me there for 4 hours “teaching” me how to drive and own the car as though it was some exotic device. It came with a plastic reference card to use if I valet parked the car. I had to watch video tapes. It was pretty crazy since by and large other than regenerative braking it was just a car.
The Bolt is totally different but they just send you off. I loved that. (OK, it is a Detroit car maker so I spent like 3 hours in the finance cave dealing with that, but I digress).
There are about 5 screens detailing energy usage. The biggest learning (and sort of a less than positive surprise) is that climate control is almost 15% of energy usage. So you sit in the car in traffic having Apollo 13 moments by turning off features and seeing the car range go up or down. On a full charge I drop from a high of 238 to 216 by turning on the climate system and radio. This all reminds me of the first Prius owners that talked about driving without shoes so you could feel if the car was on battery or combustion. This craziness will pass as it did with Hybrids.
Another favorite oddball feature is what I call “golf cart mode”. When you put the car in low you can drive the car with one pedal — push the gas and the car moves, remove your foot and the car brakes. You actually get better regeneration this way they say, it is just fun and weird (and I am confused about whether the brake lights come on).
In any event, I realize it is rather indulgent to share a post about getting a new car. But I am completely convinced now as an owner of the future of electric vehicles.
