Car Thoughts: Part 2 – I Dumped My EV for a 13 Year Old Gas Guzzler

Continuing along on the topic of this EV lemon….which I have no pictures of because, well, I didn’t like it so why bother?

After a short back-and-forth with Ford on my issues, they agreed to repurchase my car, and in the time that passed I came to a conspiracy theorist conclusion: Ford and other automakers making basically the same compact EV’s, don’t care about these cars. They are cars being manufactured for no other reason than to satisfy clean air regulations and CAFE standards set forth by California and/or the EPA. They are doing the bare minimum to continue operating.

Manufacture this many EV’s to satisfy our clean air vehicle requirement, and we’ll let you sell big trucks too.

So all they really need to do is SELL the car and then it doesn’t matter what happens after that. Ford could make 5,000 EV’s, and have all of them be lemons, and it would be fine, because all they had to do was sell them in the first place. And that is disappointing, but not surprising. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of R&D going into making them better and/or competitive with Tesla. The past two LA Auto Shows had Ford hiding their fuel-efficient/Hybrid/EV’s behind a wall with little-to-no fanfare, nor anything new to speak of.

The Chevy Bolt is a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t solve the main problem of infrastructure. It also takes longer to charge on a residential 240 line. Also, who knows what its range is when running the heater?

Previously in life, I had a 2003 Subaru Impreza WRX that wound up being a colossal lemon. I never imagined just how bad Subaru customer service would be. This time, I took steps to ensure that the Focus experience would be far less painful.

Once I got my money, I went out and made either a great decision, or the greatest decision.

I got a gas slurping three-ton SUV with a manufacturer’s reputation for incredibly poor reliability.

Why the heck did I do that….you ask? The reasons are complicated and justified. We’ll cover those next.